* “Stories like the Osiris myth,” says Mr. Lang, “spring from no pure religious source, but embody the delusions and fantastic dreams of the lowest and least developed human fancy and human speculation.” This sentence enforces precisely the same idea that I have previously expressed in chapter ii. as to the real relations of religion and mythology. The myth nowhere explains the cult; it casts no light upon its origin or history; on the contrary, it only obscures and overshadows the underlying kernel of genuine fact.
In like manner, I believe, Ptah was originally a local mummy-god of Memphis, and Khem of Ap, afterwards known as Chemmis.
This gradual growth of a dead and mummified village chief, however, into a pantheistic god, strange as it may seem, is not in any way more remarkable than the gradual growth { 172}of a Galilean peasant into the second person of an eternal and omnipotent Godhead. Nor does the myth of the death and resurrection of Osiris (to be considered hereafter in a later chapter) militate against the reality of his human existence any more than the history of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ militates against the human existence of Jesus of Nazareth. “Gross and crude euphemerism” may be bad; but airy and fantastic Max-mullerism appears to me just as unphilosophical.
The difficulty of the evolution, indeed, is not at all great, if we consider the further fact that even after the concept of godship had been fully developed, the king still remained of like nature with the gods, their son and descendant, a divine personage himself, differing from them only in not having yet received eternal life, the symbol of which they are often shown in sculpture as presenting with gracious expressions to their favoured scion. “The ruling sovereign of Egypt,” says Mr. Le Page Renouf, “was the living image of and vicegerent of the sun-god. He was invested with the attributes of divinity, and that in the earliest times of which we possess monumental evidence.” And quite naturally, for in antique times gods had ruled in Egypt, whose successor the king was: and the kings before Menes were significantly known as “the successors of Horus.” As late as the times of the Ptolemies, we saw, there were priests of Menes and other Pharaohs of the most ancient dynasties. The pyramid kings took the title of the Golden Horus, afterwards copied by their descendants; and from Chafra onward the reigning monarch was known as the Son of Ra and the Great God. Amenophis IL, during his own lifetime, is “a god good like Ra, the sacred seed of Amen, the son whom he begot.” And on all the monuments the king is represented of the same superhuman stature as the gods themselves: he converses with them on equal terms; they lead him by the hand into their inmost sanctuaries, or present him with the symbols of royal rule and of eternal life, like friends of the family.