Chapter II: The Alexandrian Divinities (1)

When Alexander’s marshals began immediately after his death to divide his Empire among them, and Ptolemy the son of Lagos claimed and received for his share the province of Egypt, his more ambitious fellows must have smiled at his moderation. Egypt was an acquisition that had never been properly assimilated by the Persians, and although subjugated by Cambyses very early in their history, had more than once broken out into successful rebellion. Its inhabitants, then as now, were a race separated from the rest of the world by peculiarities of climate, devotedly attached to their own traditional institutions, and bitterly and obstinately hostile to the foreigner. Moreover, the enormous resources of the country were undeveloped, the importance of its new capital of Alexandria as the natural entrepôt of trade between East and West[103] had not then been made manifest, and the agricultural wealth which was afterwards to make Egypt the granary of Europe had been ruined by civil commotions and foreign invasions. Although Alexander was hailed by the Egyptians as a deliverer, and, like other conquerors before and after him, found little difficulty in coming to terms with the colleges of greedy and unpatriotic priests who were ready to welcome any foreign master so long as their own position was assured[104], he seems to have felt less interest in the unwarlike and servile _fellahin_ than in the free warriors of Bactria and India who had fought so gallantly against him. Hence, he paid little attention to their government, and Cleomenes, the ruler he had set over Egypt, thus found himself free to practise extortion on a scale which would certainly have brought down upon him the condign vengeance of his master had it taken place further east[105]. Or perhaps the Great Conqueror, among whose gifts the habit of attending to everything in its turn must certainly be reckoned, thought it well to let all things grow together till the harvest, in the consciousness that the campaign in Arabia, on which he was bent when struck down by the fatal fever, would bring him close to the confines of Egypt and therefore in a position to investigate on the spot the complaints against Cleomenes which had already come to his ears. Be this as it may, one of Ptolemy’s first acts on reaching his satrapy was to seize Cleomenes and to put him to death, a proceeding which had, we learn, the full approval of his new subjects. This was but the earliest of a long list of benefits which his rule was to confer upon them, and which under his successors were to raise Egypt to a greater height of prosperity than she had ever enjoyed under her native Pharaohs.

It soon became evident also, that in choosing Egypt for his portion Ptolemy knew very well what he was about. While its western frontier was the Libyan desert and its southern was guarded by the cataracts, its northern coast was so badly off for harbours as to make it difficult to attack by sea, and it was practically unassailable from the east save at the Pelusiac or Port Said mouth of the Nile, and then only by an enemy marching through Syria[106]. Ptolemy, therefore, had ample time to consolidate his power by annexing Cyrene, making friends in his turn with the Egyptian priesthoods, and spending the money raised by Cleomenes’ exactions in the enlistment of an army of mercenaries[107]. He also waylaid the body of Alexander on its way to the tombs of the Macedonian kings at Aegae, and installed it in a splendid sepulchre called the Sema at Alexandria, thereby securing to himself, in the opinion of the time, a talisman of great power[108]. It was not long before the wisdom of these preparations was put to the proof; for, two years after Alexander’s death, Perdiccas, the Regent of the Empire, had the new satrap tried in his absence for treason, and led a great army out of Asia Minor by way of Damascus to attack him. He found Ptolemy waiting for him in force at Pelusium, and after some of the royal troops had gone over to the enemy, and those under Perdiccas in person had suffered a severe repulse near Bubastis, Perdiccas was deposed and murdered[109]. The new settlement of the Empire which followed at Triparadeisos confirmed Ptolemy in the possession of Egypt, and left him in comparative peace to organize a kingdom which only ended three centuries later with Cleopatra[110].

Of the able and statesmanlike measures which Ptolemy took towards this end, only one need concern us here. The plan may have been Alexander’s own, for no one was more likely to know Alexander’s later mind than Ptolemy, who had been his master’s companion from his youth, had shared his exile when banished by Philip, and had distinguished himself in India as one of his most trusted lieutenants. It is not impossible that among Alexander’s plans for the government of his Empire, a religion common to both Greek and barbarian may have been included; for it is difficult otherwise to explain the active part that he took in the different religious observances of all his subjects, while the constant inquisitiveness concerning them which he showed can hardly have been merely archaeological[111]. At all events, soon after Ptolemy found himself secure in the possession of Egypt, he set himself to work to found a religion that should unite both his Greek and his Egyptian subjects in the bonds of a common faith. At first sight, no two things can seem more dissimilar than the religions of the two nations; but there was one point where they drew very near to each other, and it was to this that Ptolemy addressed himself.

Now religion in Egypt had always been very much in the hands of a professional priesthood who here, as elsewhere in Africa, formed organized corporations greedy for political sway, and sometimes proved more powerful than the king himself[112]. So far as the monuments show, the first of these corporations in point of time was that of the worshippers of the sun-god Ra, the chief seat of whose worship was Annu, On, or Heliopolis in the Delta. Its members were apparently the religious advisers of the Vth or Pyramid-building Dynasty, and to them must be attributed the earliest or Heliopolitan recension of the _Book of the Dead_ engraved on the walls of the chambers in the Saqqarah Pyramids. This corporation seems to have flourished unchecked until the Hyksos conquest, but was succeeded, when the invaders were cast out, by that of the priests of Amen of Thebes who, after crushing the “heresy” or religious revolt of King Amenhotep IV, gradually became the supreme power in the state, and established the theocracy or rule of the priest-kings, under which Egypt went rapidly down the hill. The decadence was stayed for a time by an uprising of the Libyan mercenaries, who placed their leader Sheshonq or Shishak, Solomon’s suzerain, upon the throne, and thus founded the XXIInd Dynasty. The deposed corporation of Amen thereupon transferred themselves to Ethiopia or Nubia, where they established a theocracy on the model of that at Thebes, and whence they returned later with an army of Sudanese to again enslave their native country. But Piankhi and his Ethiopians found themselves unable to rule Egypt from Napata, and when they finally retired behind the Cataracts, there was a brief but brilliant revival of old Egyptian ideas under the Saite or Philhellene kings of the Delta, who called in Greek and Carian mercenaries to the support of their throne. It was in their time that Herodotus visited the country, and Egypt began again to play its part in the stirring events then fast coming upon Western Asia. It seems probable also that under them, the religious corporations, among whom the priests of Ptah of Memphis, one of the oldest of the gods of Egypt, for the first time take a prominent place, regained the influence which they had never wholly lost. Then came the Persian invasion, and although Egypt made more than one successful attempt to shake off the yoke of the foreigners, it was at last riveted firmly on her neck. After the flight of Nectanebo, the last king of the XXXth Dynasty, she was never again ruled by a prince of Egyptian blood[113].

During this long period—which is often quoted, not without reason, as the classic instance of the evils attending the Priest in Power—the mass of the Egyptian people had clung firmly to the worship of one god whose vogue goes back to very early times. While the rich and powerful were raising temples to Ra and Amen and showering wealth upon their priesthoods, the poorer classes remained faithful to Osiris and the gods of his cycle with such effect that most of the other divinities found it necessary to include him in their own cults. In the very earliest recension of the _Book of the Dead_, we find Osiris invoked together with Ra in a way that gives no hint that one has any superiority over the other[114]; in the great recension of the XVIIIth Dynasty, Osiris and Ra, already made into the “king of the gods” by his union with Amen, are said to have “joined souls” and become one[115]; and in the Saitic period, Osiris became united with Ptah and a very ancient divinity called Seker, in a triune deity called Ptah-Seker-Osiris to whom everyone looked for happiness after death[116]. So, when the bull Apis came to be adored, he was said to be the “life of Osiris,” meaning probably his earthly incarnation[117], and there is fairly good evidence that Osiris had long before absorbed into himself the personality of several older deities, such as Khent-Amentit “Lord of Amenti,” and Apuat “the opener of the ways[118].” It is plain, therefore, that the practice of _theocrasia_ which we have seen rife among the Greeks was known to the Egyptians from the very earliest times[119]. Yet, all this was effected without there ever having been a special priesthood or college of priests of Osiris such as undoubtedly existed in the case of Ra, Amen, and probably Ptah. It seems really a case of the survival of the fittest, or, in other words, of the choice by the Egyptian people of the worship of the god best suited to their wants, in spite of the well-meant attempts of their rulers to draw their attention to other deities.

The reason for this obstinacy of choice is perhaps to be found in the legend or myth of Osiris, which was at once more consistent and more direct in its appeal to human sympathies than those handed down concerning the other gods of Egypt. We are told that Osiris was the first-born of Nut the sky-goddess by Geb the earth-god, that he appeared upon earth as a man among men, and became king of Egypt, which he ruled wisely and well, teaching the Egyptians the art of agriculture, giving them just laws, and instructing them in the proper worship of the gods. Later, he travelled over the whole earth, civilizing and subduing the nations not by force of arms but by persuasion and especially by the art of music which he took with him. On his return, he was entrapped and murdered by his jealous brother Set or Typhon who, with the aid of seventy-two conspirators and an Ethiopian queen called Aso, shut him up in a coffin and threw him into the Nile, by which his body was carried out to sea. We further learn that his sister-wife Isis, who had reigned in his stead during his absence, mourned greatly for his loss and wandered far and wide seeking and lamenting him, until she heard from some children that the coffin containing his remains had been carried away by the Tanitic mouth of the Nile. Following this, she found that it had been washed ashore at Byblus in Phoenicia and had been overgrown by a magnificent tamarisk, which the king of the country had had cut down and made into the roof-tree or pillar supporting his house. Then Isis disguised herself as a servant and became the nurse of the king’s son, whom she would have made immortal but for the timidity of his mother, who cried out when she saw the child surrounded by the flames which were to burn away his mortality. On this, the goddess revealed herself, took away the pillar containing the coffin, and attempted to revive the corpse that it contained by her embrace. Afterwards, she gave birth to her son Horus, whom she destined from his cradle to be the avenger of his father. Meanwhile, the murderer Set had seized the throne of Egypt, and while hunting by moonlight came across the corpse of Osiris, which he tore into fourteen pieces, and scattered them throughout the land. Consequently Isis, who was at the time visiting Horus at nurse in her city of Buto, had to begin again her wanderings, sailing over the swamps in a boat of papyrus, and burying the fragments of the body of Osiris wherever she found them. One part, however, she could not find, this having been thrown into the Nile and devoured by fishes; and henceforth Osiris became king of the Underworld, where he rules for ever over the dead, welcoming those who successfully win through the ordeal of the judgment that all must undergo, and providing for them a happy life like that which the rich live on earth, in which agriculture plays a prominent part. Then Horus grew up to man’s estate, and having provided himself with horse, fought three desperate battles with Set, many of whose followers came over to him. But, although he defeated his foe, he did not put an end to his existence, and Set still lives, haunting the deserts and wild places, and even, according to one variant of the story, ruling for a time over the south of Egypt (or perhaps only a part of it), while the sway of Horus over the north remained unchallenged. As for the other gods of the cycle, Nephthys, the twin sister and reflection of Isis, was the wife of Set, but preferred to throw in her lot with Osiris, by whom she had a son, Anubis the jackal, the messenger of Osiris, who possessed many of the attributes of the Greek Hermes. So, too, Thoth, the ibis, was the judge who pronounced, or perhaps merely recorded, the final partition or arrangement between Horus and Set, and most of the other members of the Egyptian Pantheon were brought into the cycle one way or the other.

This is the legend of Osiris, as we find it in the tract _de Iside et Osiride_, which is generally attributed to Plutarch and was certainly written in the first century A.D. It has not been met with earlier in a connected form; but its main incidents are sufficiently corroborated by the monuments of the time to convince us that it fairly represents the popular belief of the Egyptians during the Ptolemaic period[120]. Plutarch, or the writer who assumed his name, gives us more than one explanation of it coupled with analogies drawn from other mythologies, which exhibit considerable archaeological knowledge and show us how far the comparative study of religions had proceeded even in his time. When he fails, it is generally from lack of acquaintance with the earlier forms of the religions of Egypt, which had evidently become in those days as much a mystery to the priests as to their flocks, and which the labours of modern Egyptologists have but recently begun to recover for us. Looked at by their light, and stripped of its many transparent inconsistencies and anachronisms, it seems plain that the story is not simple but compound, and represents an attempt to fuse together the religious ideas either of different peoples or of the same people at different stages of culture[121]. In the first place, we see in it the animal gods of Egypt—Horus the falcon, Set the unknown animal or _scha_ sacred to him, Anubis the jackal, and Thoth the ibis—whom we now know to have been the totems or rallying-signs of the different tribes who invaded Egypt, probably from other parts of Africa, in predynastic times. The _Sches-Hor_ or Followers of Horus are so often alluded to in early dynastic texts that there can be no doubt that the tribe who had the falcon for their banner were originally the royal or leading tribe of these invaders. The memory of this fact was preserved in the custom, going back to the beginning of the Ist Dynasty, which assigned to the ruler of Egypt on his coronation a special name differing from that by which he was usually known, and borne in a rectangle representing the façade or front of a palace surmounted by a hawk[122]. Recent excavations at Abydos in Upper Egypt have shown that this custom was only once broken in the long course of Egyptian history, when a king of the IInd or IIIrd Dynasty, whose name is read Perabsen, cast out the falcon from above the _srekh_ or rectangle containing his “hawk” or Horus name, and crowned it instead with the animal representing Set. This breach of conventional usage—whether significant of a political or a religious revolution or of some predominating foreign influence cannot be exactly determined—was healed by his immediate successor Khasekhmui, who bore both the falcon and the Set-animal above his _srekh_ with an inscription proclaiming himself “He who has caused the two gods to be at peace”; after which the rulers of Egypt returned to the hawk-crowned _srekh_, which was never again abandoned down to the last-known example under the Roman emperors. We may assume then that the fundamental stratum of the Osiris legend was a tradition more or less historical which preserved the memory of a struggle for supremacy occurring in the earliest historical times between the tribes represented by Horus and Set respectively. As the horse was a late comer into Egypt, and seems to have been introduced there by the Bedouins of the Sinaitic peninsula, where Perabsen’s predecessors left their inscriptions, we may even read into it the statement that, while the Horus or falcon tribe were helped in the war by Bedouin cavalry, the followers of Set sought aid from the Nubian or “Ethiopian” tribes above the Cataracts[123].

To this foundation, however, there must have been added a myth conceived by a race in possession of a much higher degree of culture and greater imaginative powers than any with which the predynastic or protodynastic Egyptians can be credited. The earliest gods of Egypt of whom we have any record were, as we have seen, either animals or inanimate objects, a fact which is sufficiently explained by their totemic origin[124]. But spread throughout the basin of the Mediterranean, we find from the earliest times the worship of a god who was from his birth never anything but a man and a man who suffered a veritable death and passion before his resurrection and deification. Thus, in Crete we have the legend of the infant Zagreus, son of Zeus and Persephone, who was treacherously seized by the earth-born Titans, torn in pieces, and devoured, but was afterwards reborn as Dionysos to reign over gods and men[125]. So, too, in Cyprus, Syria, and Phoenicia, we hear of Adonis, the lover of Aphrodite, done to death by the boar’s tusk, but returning yearly from the shades to spend part of the year with his mistress. In Asia Minor, again, was told the story of Atys, lover of Cybele, mother of the gods, who fatally mutilated himself in a fit of madness, but after death was resuscitated, and thereafter reigned with Cybele over all Nature. All these three legends bear too close a resemblance to that of Osiris for the four to have grown up independently, and although the point is not free from doubt, it is improbable that Egypt was the source from which the others were derived[126]. No direct connection in ancient times can be traced between Egypt and the inland country of Phrygia, which seems to be the birthplace of the majority of these legends; while it is of great importance to remember that Isis, Osiris’ queen and sister, is represented in the early Egyptian myths as merely a magician or witch cunning in spells[127], whereas in the Phrygian and Syrian legends the consort of the dying god is the “mother of all living” or in other words Nature herself. It seems therefore probable that the legend of Osiris, like so many other things in Egypt, was African as to its body, but Asiatic or European as to its head.

It was therefore natural that in this legend of Osiris, Ptolemy should find the desired point of contact between the religions of the Egyptians and the Greeks. The religious institution which commanded the most respect among the Greeks of his time was undoubtedly the Mysteries of Eleusis[128], which were yearly celebrated with a circumstance that drew upon them the attention of the whole Hellenic world. Messengers went forth every year from Eleusis to all countries where Athenians could be found, to proclaim the Sacred Truce that was to ensure peace during the celebration of the Mysteries. Then on the appointed day in September, enormous numbers of Greeks from all parts of the world gathered together in Athens for a festival that lasted for nearly two weeks. First came the assembly of the worshippers and the proclamation of the hierophant that none but those unpolluted by crime and of intelligible speech (_i.e._ not barbarians) might take part in the Mysteries. Then followed the solemn procession when the sacred objects, upon which none but the initiated might look, were brought from Eleusis under strong guard and lodged in the Eleusinion at the foot of the Acropolis, their arrival being formally notified to the priestess of Athena, the tutelary deity of the city. Next was made the proclamation of “To the sea, the initiates!” when all who were to take part in the ceremonies descended to the harbour of Phalerum[129] to wash themselves and the animals intended for sacrifice in the salt water, in the belief that, as Euripides said, “Sea-waves wash away all sin.” After a time spent in sacrificing and austerities very proper for bringing the worshippers into a receptive state of mind, there was formed the long procession which paced the Sacred Way, twelve miles long, from Athens to Eleusis, beguiling the road with hymns and choruses addressed to Iacchos, the infant Dionysos[130], who was supposed to lead the procession from his Athenian temple, the Iaccheion, with a pause at the bridge over the Cephisus, where the crowd exchanged coarse jokes and sarcasms in a manner peculiarly Attic. Then came the arrival by night of the procession at the Telesterion or Hall of Initiations at Eleusis, the sky above which was made light by the glare of the torches[131]. There, after more sacrifices, a sacred banquet, in which it is not impossible that the mystic _cyceon_ or consecrated drink was partaken of, and sacrifices in the temples of Demeter, of Hades, and of Persephone with which the Hall was surrounded, the initiates were shown a sacred drama, like the mystery-plays of the Middle Ages, acted by the priests of the cult, whose office, contrary to the custom of Greek cults generally, was confined to two families in which it was hereditary and highly paid. This drama, the details of which were kept strictly secret and can only be gathered from hints appearing in writers of a comparatively late date, seems to have set forth the Rape of Persephone, daughter of Demeter the earth-goddess, who was known and worshipped throughout Greece and her colonies as the teacher of agriculture and giver of laws to mortals. The initiates saw “with their own eyes” the capture of Persephone, when playing with her companions in the sunny fields of Eleusis[132], by Hades or Pluto the king of the dead, who takes her to his own gloomy abode beneath the earth, and the wanderings of Demeter in search of her lost child. Then they were shown how Demeter came to the house of Celeus, king of Eleusis, how she became nurse to the king’s child Demophoon, and was detected by his mother attempting to burn away his mortal part in the way which the Egyptian legend attributed to Isis[133]. The next act, probably reserved for epopts or initiates of the second year only, exhibited the union of Zeus with Demeter[134], and the birth from the latter of a mysterious child in whom some see the Iacchos who conducted the procession from Athens to Eleusis, but who was certainly Dionysos in one or other of his forms[135]. We know also that the initiates took part in wanderings in dark passages and over obstacles and difficulties, which were supposed to give them an idea of the sufferings of the uninitiated dead in the next world, and that they were then restored to upper air in a blaze of brilliant light, were shown the mysterious objects brought with such care from Eleusis to Athens and back again, were given a glimpse of the beatitudes awaiting the dead who had been initiated in their lifetime, and were at the same time instructed in certain mysterious phrases or formulas which it seems fair to conclude they were to treasure as passwords through the realms of Hades[136]. It seems probable from this that the initiates were supposed to accompany Hermes the Psychopomp or “leader of souls” as the messenger of Zeus to the underworld, there to accomplish the deliverance of Persephone and to witness her restoration to the heavenly regions where she was again united to her sorrowing mother. Finally, there appeared Triptolemus, Celeus’ son and Demeter’s pupil, setting out in his car drawn by serpents to spread the knowledge of agriculture throughout the world, “an ear of corn reaped in silence” being, as we learn from a Christian writer, the “mighty and wonderful and most perfect mystery” exhibited to the highest degree of initiates[137].

It will be noticed that we have spoken hitherto of initiates; for none might enter the Telesterion unless they had previously been initiated, and two young Acarnanians who unwittingly did so were formally tried for sacrilege and put to death[138]. This initiation, or entry into the ranks of those privileged to behold these wonderful sights, began at the Little Mysteries, which were celebrated six or seven months before the Great or Eleusinian Mysteries properly so called, at Agra on the left bank of the Ilissus. These mysteries of Agra were under the control of the same sacred families as the Mysteries of Eleusis, for which they formed a necessary preparation. They were kept, if possible, even more strictly secret than the Great Mysteries, and the only direct evidence that has come down to us as to their nature tells us that they also took the form of a sacred drama, and that the scenes there enacted were taken from the legend of Dionysos[139]. This Dionysos, however, was not in the first instance the Theban god of wine born from Semele and celebrated by the poets, but his Cretan namesake Dionysos Zagreus or “the hunter,” who was said to have been begotten by Zeus in the form of a serpent upon his own daughter Persephone, and while still a child was, as has been mentioned above, torn in pieces by the earth-born Titans from jealousy at hearing that the child was to be made the ruler of the world. It was also said that the scattered members of the baby-god were collected by Demeter, put together and revivified, a myth which late researches seem to show was alluded to in the Anthesteria, a festival celebrated in the Dionysion at Athens in the same Anthesterion or “flower month” as the Little Mysteries. There is much reason to think that the Anthesteria showed forth in a manner unintelligible to the beholders unless otherwise acquainted with the details of the legend, the putting-together of the different members—said to be fourteen in number—of the infant Dionysos, his subsequent resurrection, and his marriage with a priestess called “the Queen” who doubtless represented Demeter or Persephone. The inference seems unavoidable that it was some part of this legend that was acted in a manner impossible to misunderstand or mistake before the eyes of those admitted to the Little Mysteries[140].

We see then that between the legend of Osiris as told by Plutarch and the legend of Eleusis as set forth in the Mysteries there were resemblances so close as to make it almost impossible that one should not be derived from the other, unless we are prepared to consider them as having a common origin. As Osiris was torn into fourteen pieces, so was Dionysos, the difference in the agents of this “diaspasm,” as it was called, being due to the exigencies of Egyptian traditional history. The wanderings of Isis, again, find an exact parallel in those of Demeter, the object of the search differing slightly in the two cases, while the mysterious birth of Horus, the successor of Osiris, corresponds point for point with that of Dionysos in his second form of Iacchos. That both stories may have had their source in the folk-lore explaining the phenomena of the annual decay and rebirth of vegetation, Dr Frazer has shown with great attention to detail in _The Golden Bough_ and elsewhere[141] to be possible; but this was too philosophical an idea for the sixth century B.C., when the Mysteries of Eleusis were founded or reduced to order[142]. Herodotus, a century later, no doubt expressed the views of the learned of his day when he asserted that the worship of Dionysos was brought into Greece from Egypt[143], and among modern scholars M. Foucart, who has done more than anyone to collate the few relics that remain to us of the Eleusinian worship, fully supports him in this. It is therefore plain that the resemblances between the Dionysiae and the Egyptian worship were many and salient. Hence Ptolemy found his way clear when he invited Timotheos the Eumolpid, a member of one of the sacred families in which the Eleusinian priesthood was, as has been said, hereditary, and associated with him the Egyptian priest Manetho in the task of founding a religion which should be common to Egyptians and Greeks alike[144].

In framing this new religion, the first care of the king and his advisers was evidently to avoid shocking the religious and artistic feelings of the Greeks. Ptolemy Soter’s position seems to have been much like that of a modern Governor-General of India; for, while he was not only tolerant but careful of the religious susceptibilities of the native Egyptians, his own Court remained in everything predominantly or exclusively Greek. In Alexandria, the site of which under the native Pharaohs had been the small fishing village of Rhacotis, he had practically virgin soil, in which it is doubtful whether any Egyptian temple existed, and it was consequently, as Alexander intended it should be, in all respects a Greek city. Greek was the language there spoken, and it was to the care taken by Alexandrian scholars to preserve the language and literature of Hellas in its native purity, that we are indebted for most of what we know of the classic tongue at its best. Its large garrison consisted almost entirely of Greek soldiers drilled and armed in the Macedonian fashion, and to the great University or Museum, which Ptolemy’s munificence founded for the sustentation of scholars, there flocked learned men from every part of the Hellenic world[145]. Here, indeed, was the first instance of the endowment of research; and the experiment had important results for most of the modern sciences, not excluding that transmutation of metals which made such wild work among some of the best brains of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, but which Sir William Ramsay has lately shown to be more capable of accomplishment than could have been expected from an alchemist’s dream. At the Museum, Eratosthenes, “the Inspector of the Earth,” first set on foot the serious study of geography, Hipparchus laid the sure foundations of the modern science of astronomy, and Hero invented the first steam engine. The investigation of those secondary laws by which their insight perceived nature to be governed was indeed the constant occupation of King Ptolemy’s “stuffed capons,” as Timon of Phlya contemptuously called them[146]. But these philosophers would have been the first to receive with scorn the proposition that anyone should be asked to worship the “brutish gods” of Egypt under those animal forms in which they had long been known to the more simple minded Egyptians. Osiris, the “bull of Amenti,” as he is called in the early texts, was worshipped under the actual form of the bull Apis at Memphis and as a ram or goat at Mendes. Isis was often portrayed with the cow’s head which commemorated one of the incidents of her myth as set forth by Plutarch. Horus, who was in fact an older god than either of them, was, as the totem of the royal tribe of the first invaders, worshipped at Edfu and elsewhere as a hawk, and although the Egyptian priests kept up as long as possible the distinction between this “Horus the elder” and Horus the son of Isis, it is certain that their Greek worshippers saw no difference between the two. While Timotheos was doubtless willing to recognize the Eleusinian deities, of whose worship his family were the traditional guardians, in the Egyptian triad of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, he must have been sure that he could not ask his art-loving countrymen to do them homage in the guise of beasts or birds.

The difficulty was got over in a way that was characteristic enough. The _theocrasia_ or fusion of one god with another which we have seen playing such a prominent part in the religion of both Egyptians and Greeks, was of the very essence of the religion of Eleusis. At no time from the earliest mention of the Eleusinian worship onwards, is it possible to draw any sharp dividing line between Demeter and her daughter Persephone, or as Mr Louis Dyer rather flamboyantly puts it, Demeter and Persephone were at Eleusis “regarded as one, being so filled with mutual love that all barriers between them melted away[147].” “Excepting,” he says again, “in her days of thoughtless youth, Demeter’s Persephone is Demeter’s self twice told,” and the same dogma seems to have been prematurely revealed by Xenophanes of Colophon, who was exiled for his declaration that all the gods of his fellow-countrymen were but varying forms of the one deity. This identity of the goddesses of Eleusis must have been constantly present to the mind of the Greeks, who hardly ever spoke of Demeter and Persephone save as “the Goddesses Twain” or as the Mother-and-Daughter. But this was only the first step in what was called without circumlocution the “mystic _theocrasia_[148],” which went so far as to include in the persons of the Eleusinian deities nearly all the gods of the Hellenic pantheon. In the original Cretan legend, the infant Dionysos is the son of Zeus, whom he is destined to succeed upon his throne, as Zeus had succeeded in the Homeric myths his father Kronos, and this last, _his_ father Ouranos. But the Zeus of Eleusis was by no means the Zeus of Olympos whom Homer hails as “father of gods and men,” but who had to yield the empire of the seas to his brother Poseidon and that of the netherworld to his brother Hades. Originally known at Eleusis as “the God” only, as Demeter with or without her daughter was called “the Goddess,” the Eleusinian god was also invoked as Zeus Chthonios or the infernal Zeus, called by euphemism Zeus Eubuleus (Zeus of Good Counsel), Pluto (Bringer of Riches) and other similar names[149]. But by whatever name he was called, he was always the king of the dead, and was thus again brought near to Dionysos, whom Heraclitus of Ephesus, two centuries before Alexander, had declared to be the same god as Hades, lord of the netherworld[150]. In this double capacity, Dionysos was therefore the brother, father, and spouse of his consort Demeter, of whom he was also the child. He might therefore be considered one of the first instances known in the history of religions as a god who was, according to the way in which he was regarded, either father or son[151]. Nor did the _theocrasia_ stop here. The Asiatic forms of Dionysos, whether we call them Atys, Adonis or by any other name, were often represented as of both sexes, a doctrine which is also denoted by Dionysos’ Orphic epithet of Mise, and led to his being portrayed in effeminate shape[152]. Hence, Dionysos and Demeter or Persephone might be regarded as the God under both the male and female aspect. Moreover, Zeus was said to have ordered the corpse of Dionysos to be buried at Delphi, where secret ceremonies were celebrated in connection with it by five priests called Hosioi; and this seems to have led to the idea common to the classic poets Pindar, Aeschylus, and Euripides, that Dionysos and Apollo were different forms of the same god, a theory which is expressly confirmed by Plutarch[153]. But Apollo “the Far-Darter” was always to the Greeks a sun-god, and Horus from the first had the same character among the Egyptians, the emblem of the sun-disk being often added to the Horus-hawk of their protocol by the Pharaohs of the New Empire. Thus the identification of the gods of the Osiris cycle with their Greek analogues was complete. It was agreed that Osiris was to be represented as the Greek Hades, Isis as Demeter, and the child Horus as Apollo. Herodotus and probably other Greek writers had long before made the same identifications[154].

This settled, the question of the material forms under which the triad was to be worshipped by Ptolemy’s new subjects became easy. A convenient dream, so runs the story told in Roman times, revealed to the king the existence of a statue of Hades or Pluto at Sinope in Pontus that was exactly fitted to his purpose[155]. It is said to have been of colossal size, the work of Bryaxis, the fellow-worker of Scopas, and to have been composed of a mixture of the most precious metals with fragments of gems, the whole being coloured with a dark varnish. This statue was given up by—or according to another version was stolen from—the city of Sinope, and was installed with great pomp in the magnificent temple or Serapeum built for it at Alexandria, which for centuries formed one of the wonders of the Hellenistic world. It doubtless formed the model for all the later representations of the new god called henceforth Serapis (in Egyptian, Asar-hapi or Osiris in his manifestation as Apis), which resemble each other in all important particulars. They show a bearded man of mature age, whose features have much of the majesty and dignity of the Phidian Zeus. On his head he wears the _modius_, a crown of basket-work on which are sometimes represented olive trees and which is said to be a reproduction of the _calathos_ or consecrated basket carried in the sacred procession to Eleusis, and doubtless possessed for the initiated some mystical or symbolical meaning[156]. He is generally represented with an eagle at his feet, and by the side of him appears a triple monster which may perhaps represent the classical Cerberus with a serpent twisted round its body and equipped with the heads of a lion, a dog, and a wolf. It seems, therefore, that in choosing this statue the founders of the Alexandrian religion had quite turned their backs on the lighter and more joyous aspects of the mystic Dionysos, and intended to regard him as the god of the dead merely[157]. The same was not the case with his consort Isis, who is generally represented as a young matron of stately appearance having sometimes the crescent moon on her head, and sometimes a crown of lotus flowers interspersed with ears of corn. She is dressed in a fringed tunic reaching to her feet, having over her shoulders a mantle tied by its ends between the breasts in a peculiar knot. In one hand she bears the _sistrum_ or rattle used in her worship, and in the other a horn of abundance or other emblem, while the head is frequently covered by a long veil. Both the attitude and the dress are always of the strictest modesty, and the features wear an expression of gentle benevolence, in which it is possible to see a trace of melancholy. The Alexandrian Horus is seldom represented otherwise than in child form, the type being taken from the Egyptian Horus known as Har-pa-khrat (Horus the Child) of which the Alexandrians made Harpocrates. In this form he was represented with his finger in his mouth in accordance with the usual Egyptian ideogram for childhood, and this gave rise to the story among the Greeks that he was the god of silence. Sometimes he is shown with wings like the classical Eros, frequently seated on the lotus or with the lotus flower on his head, and very often with the hawk which formed his proper emblem[158]. He was seldom represented in a group containing Serapis, although bas-reliefs and statues showing Serapis and Isis together are common; but groups representing Isis suckling Horus have been found in some numbers. Generally it may be said that the _modius_ on the head is the distinguishing mark of the figure of Serapis, the peculiar breast-knot that of Isis, while Horus can seldom be recognized with certainty save by the gesture of the forefinger in the mouth or, as the Greek artists preferred to represent it, on the lips. From this time forward, the Alexandrian Greeks could worship the chief deities of their native fellow-citizens under forms which they felt to be worthy of the Divine.

Thus, the worship of the great Egyptian triad under their Greek forms was inaugurated, as was our own English Reformation in the sixteenth century, as a measure of statecraft, by a king who hardly cared to conceal that in doing so he had only his own interest to serve. Yet it may be said at once, that so far as its political purpose was concerned, the Alexandrian religion was from the outset foredoomed to failure. The Egyptians of Philhellenic times were of all the nations of the earth at once the most superstitious and the most fanatically attached to their traditional modes of worship. Although until the rise of the theocracy, the importation of foreign gods was not unknown, under the Ethiopians, the Persians, and Alexander, the Egyptians had not scrupled to sacrifice their nationality to their religion, and to accept a foreign governor so long as the worship of their native gods under types that had been observed by them for more than four millennia remained untouched. How then could they be expected to recognize their native deities in forms beautified and dignified by Greek art indeed, but so foreign to all their traditional ideas that nothing distinctly Egyptian about them remained?

To this question there could be but one answer, and it is not extraordinary that the native Egyptians proved as recalcitrant to their new king’s endeavour to unite them in a common worship with their Greek masters as the Jews did under the somewhat similar attempt of Antiochus Epiphanes. The Egyptian priests allowed Ptolemy to set up at Memphis, which had become since the ruin of Thebes the religious capital of the country, a Serapeum, doubtless modelled on that of Alexandria, by the side of the native temple established for the delectation of the living Apis and for the solemn burial of his predecessors: but they took care that it should be separated from the Egyptian Serapeum by a long avenue of sphinxes, and that no Greek prayers should ever be allowed to defile the purity of the native Egyptian sanctuary[159]. Moreover, Egypt, resembling in this perhaps all countries with strongly marked geographical characteristics, has exhibited through all ages a wonderful power of conquering her conquerors, or, in other words, of forcing her foreign rulers to accept the ideas that they found there, instead of adopting at their instance innovations on customs consecrated by centuries of usage. Hence the Ptolemies, as time went on, found it necessary to pay ever more and more attention to the native Egyptian religion, and Ptolemy V Epiphanes was crowned at Memphis, as is recorded on the Rosetta Stone, with all the religious ceremonies that made him in the eyes of the Egyptians the living Horus, son of the sun-god, the beloved of Ptah and the rest, as fully as any of the ancient Pharaohs[160]. All the Ptolemies, too, seem to have spent very considerable sums on the restoration and keeping-up of the temples in Egypt dedicated to such thoroughly native gods as Amon of Thebes and Horus of Edfu, besides those at Philae and elsewhere raised not to the Alexandrian but to the Egyptian Osiris and his cycle. What truth there is in the statement of Macrobius that Ptolemy Soter compelled by “tyranny” the Egyptians to take Serapis into their temples, it is impossible to say; but as his image in Greek form has never been found in any of them, it is plain that the priests must have found some way of evading the royal order, if it were really given[161].

Ptolemy, however, was building better than he knew, and the hybrid cult which the provident old soldier had fashioned as an instrument of government turned out to be the first, and not the least successful, of the world-religions for which Alexander’s conquests left clear the way. During the wars of the Diadochi, all the powers who at any time found themselves Ptolemy’s pawns in the mighty war game then played on a board stretching from India to Thrace, thought to curry favour with their rich ally by giving countenance to his new religion. An association of Sarapiasts or worshippers of Serapis held their meetings in the Piraeus not long after the institution of the Alexandrian cult[162]; and before the death of Ptolemy Soter, a Serapeum was built in Athens over against the Acropolis itself[163]. Cyprus, Rhodes, Antioch, Smyrna, and Halicarnassus were not long in following suit, and before the end of the century several of the islands of the Ægean together with Boeotia, which was said by some to be the native country of Dionysos, had adopted the new worship. In the second century B.C., the temples of the Alexandrian gods were to be found in Delos, Tenedos, Thessaly, Macedonia and the Thracian Bosphorus in Europe, and in Ephesus, Cyzicus and Termessus among other places in Asia Minor[164]. But their greatest triumph was awaiting them further west. Invited by Hiero II into Sicily, they were not long in working their way up the coast, and a hundred years before our era a temple to Serapis was in existence at Puteoli[165]. It was evidently no new foundation and had probably been built some fifty years earlier, at which date perhaps the first Isium at Pompeii was also in existence[166]. Somewhere about 80 B.C., the Alexandrian worship was introduced into Rome itself, and thereafter no action of the authorities was able to expel it[167]. Its temples were more than once thrown down by order of the consuls; but they were always rebuilt, and in 43 B.C., the aedile Marcus Volusius, who had been proscribed by the triumvirs, found the linen robe and the dog’s head mask of a priest of Isis the most efficient disguise in which to escape Sulla’s bravos[168]. Under the Empire, the temple of Isis in the Campus Martius became one of the fashionable resorts of the Roman youth; and, although Tiberius seized the occasion of a real or pretended scandal in connection with it to exile a large number of the faithful to Sardinia, his successors were themselves initiated into the faith; while under Nero the worship of the Alexandrian gods was formally recognized by the state[169]. From that time, it followed the Roman arms into every quarter of the ancient world, and its monuments have been found in Morocco, Spain, France, Great Britain, Germany, and the Danube provinces. Ridicule was as powerless to stop its march as persecution, and the satire of Juvenal and Martial had no more effect on it than the banter of the New Comedy, which was quick to observe that even in Menander’s day the gilded youth of Athens swore “by Isis” or “by Horus[170].” Under the Antonines, it probably reached its apogee, when the Emperor Commodus appeared in the processions of the cult among the bearers of the sacred images, and few Romans seem to have been aware that the Alexandrian gods were not Roman from the beginning. Like Ptolemy’s master, Ptolemy’s gods might have boasted that they commanded the allegiance of the whole civilized world[171].

The causes of this astonishing success must be looked for within the religion itself. No name has come down to us of any prophet or priest of the Alexandrian religion possessing a commanding personality like St Paul, Mohammed, Luther, or Calvin; and we must therefore conclude that it was its own intrinsic merits which thus commended it to so many widely-differing peoples[172]. Foremost among these was, it would seem, its extraordinary timeliness. Alexander’s conquests had broken down the barriers that speech and race had set up between neighbouring peoples, and had at the same time united many hundreds of jealous and discordant states under a single head. In the many royal courts which had been set up as a result of the partition of Alexander’s Empire, philosophers of every school were chanting the political advantages of an enlightened monarchy over the greedy scramble for place and power inseparable from democracy, and the doctrine was bound sooner or later to be applied to religion[173]. We have seen how far both Egyptians and Greeks had before then carried the practice of _theocrasia_, but the founders of the Alexandrian religion were not slow in pushing it to its only legitimate conclusion. Serapis, unlike the Greek Zeus, from the first declined to brook any partition of his empire over nature. “Wouldst thou know what god I am,” said his oracle at the Alexandrian Serapeum to Nicocreon, the Cypriote king. “I myself will tell thee. The heavenly cosmos is my head; the sea my belly. My feet are the earth; my ears are in the aether. My far-beaming eye is the radiant light of the sun[174].” In other words, Serapis is himself the universe, which is probably the meaning to be attached to the name given to Osiris in the _Book of the Dead_ which Egyptologists translate “Lord of Totality.” But Aeschylus had already said the same thing about Zeus[175], and as the gods of the Greeks were never anything else than the powers of nature, Serapis thus comprised in his single person the whole Greek pantheon. Hence “Serapis alone is Zeus” came to be a sort of watchword in the Alexandrian religion to be endlessly repeated on statues, gems, and all the other material relics of the cult[176]. A little later and we find Serapis drawing to himself the worship of all the Mediterranean gods who had a common origin with Osiris and Dionysos. Adonis, as appears from the beautiful idyll of Theocritus, in the reign of Ptolemy Soter’s successor was worshipped as another form of Osiris in the royal palace itself[177]. Atys, Cybele’s lover, was also identified with him[178]; and, as the Stoic philosophy, which taught that all the gods were but different forms of the one Divine energy, came into fashion, Serapis was equated with the numerous sun-gods whose worship poured in from the Semitic east. “The eternal sun” came to be one of his most-used epithets, and he is often invoked as the equivalent of the Greek Helios and of the Persian sun-god Mithras[179]. Nor did his consort long remain behind him. “I, the parent of the works of nature” is the style in which Isis announces herself to her votary Lucius in Apuleius’ romance,

“queen of all the elements, earliest offspring of the ages, highest
of godheads, sovereign of the Manes, first of the heavenly ones,
one-formed type of gods and goddesses. The luminous heights of
heaven, the health-giving breezes of the sea, the sad silences of
the lower world, I govern by my nod. I am she whose godhead, single
in essence, but of many forms, with varied rites and under many
names, the whole earth reveres. Hence the Phrygians, first born of
men, call me Pessinuntica, Mother of the Gods; here the first
inhabitants of Attica, Cecropian Minerva, there the wave-rocked
Cypriotes, Paphian Venus; the arrow-bearing Cretans, Diana Dictynna;
the three-tongued Sicilians, Stygian Proserpine; the Eleusinians,
the ancient goddess Ceres;—others Juno, others Bellona, these
Hecate, those Rhamnusia; and they who are lighted by the first rays
of the sun-god on his rising, the Ethiopians, the Africans, and the
Egyptians skilled in the ancient teaching, worshipping me with
ceremonies peculiarly my own, call me by my true name, Queen
Isis[180].”

As we shall see later (p. 64, _infra_) her spouse Osiris claimed also to be the highest of godheads; and the final unity of the Divine essence to which the μυστικὴ θεοκρασία was logically bound to lead could hardly be stated in clearer language[181].