They were always recited with the same rhythm, according to a system of chaunting in which every tone had its virtue, combined with movements which confirmed the sense and worked with irresistible effect: one false note, a single discord between the succession of gestures and the utterance of the sacramental words, any hesitation, any awkwardness in the accomplishment of a rite, and the sacrifice was vain.

Worship as thus conceived became a legal transaction, in the course of which the god gave up his liberty in exchange for certain compensations whose kind and value were fixed by law. By a solemn deed of transfer the worshipper handed over to the legal representatives of the contracting divinity such personal or real property as seemed to him fitting payment for the favour which he asked, or suitable atonement for the wrong which he had done. If man scrupulously observed the innumerable conditions with which the transfer was surrounded, the god could not escape the obligation of fulfilling his petition;[*] but should he omit the least of them, the offering remained with the temple and went to increase the endowments in mortmain, while the god was pledged to nothing in exchange.

Hence the officiating priest assumed a formidable responsibility as regarded his fellows: a slip of memory, the slightest accidental impurity, made him a bad priest, injurious to himself and harmful to those worshippers who had entrusted him with their interests before the gods. Since it was vain to expect ritualistic perfections from a prince constantly troubled with affairs of state, the custom was established of associating professional priests with him, personages who devoted all their lives to the study and practice of the thousand formalities whose sum constituted the local religion. Each temple had its service of priests, independent of those belonging to neighbouring temples, whose members, bound to keep their hands always clean and their voices true, were ranked according to the degrees of a learned hierarchy. At their head was a sovereign pontiff to direct them in the exercise of their functions. In some places he was called the first prophet, or rather the first servant of the god—hon-nûtir topi; at Thebes he was the first prophet of Amon, at Thinis he was the first prophet of Anhûri.[*]

But generally he bore a title appropriate to the nature of the god whose servant he was. The chief priest of Râ at Heliopolis, and in all the cities which adopted the Heliopolitan form of worship, was called Oîrû maû, the master of visions, and he alone besides the sovereign of the nome, or of Egypt, enjoyed the privilege of penetrating into the sanctuary, of "entering into heaven and there beholding the god" face to face. In the same way, the high priest of Anhûri at Sebennytos was entitled the wise and pure warrior—ahûîti saû uîbu—because his god went armed with a pike, and a soldier god required for his service a pontiff who should be a soldier like himself.

These great personages did not always strictly seclude themselves within the limits of the religious domain. The gods accepted, and even sometimes solicited, from their worshippers, houses, fields, vineyards, orchards, slaves, and fishponds, the produce of which assured their livelihood and the support of their temples. There was no Egyptian who did not cherish the ambition of leaving some such legacy to the patron god of his city, "for a monument to himself," and as an endowment for the priests to institute prayers and perpetual sacrifices on his behalf.[*] In course of time these accumulated gifts at length formed real sacred fiefs—hotpû-nûtir—analogous to the wakfs of Mussulman Egypt.[**] They were administered by the high priest, who, if necessary, defended them by force against the greed of princes or kings. Two, three, or even four classes of prophets or heiroduli under his orders assisted him in performing the offices of worship, in giving religious instruction, and in the conduct of affairs. Women did not hold equal rank with men in the temples of male deities; they there formed a kind of harem whence the god took his mystic spouses, his concubines, his maidservants, the female musicians and dancing women whose duty it was to divert him and to enliven his feasts. But in temples of goddesses they held the chief rank, and were called hierodules, or priestesses, hierodules of Nit, hierodules of Hâthor, hierodules of Pakhît.[***]

The lower offices in the households of the gods, as in princely households, were held by a troop of servants and artisans: butchers to cut the throats of the victims, cooks and pastrycooks, confectioners, weavers, shoemakers, florists, cellarers, water-carriers and milk-carriers. In fact, it was a state within a state, and the prince took care to keep its government in his own hands, either by investing one of his children with the titles and functions of chief pontiff', or by arrogating them to himself. In that case, he provided against mistakes which would have annulled the sacrifice by associating with himself several masters of the ceremonies, who directed him in the orthodox evolutions before the god and about the victim, indicated the due order of gestures and the necessary changes of costume, and prompted him with the words of each invocation from a book or tablet which they held in their hands.[*]

In addition to its rites and special hierarchy, each of the sacerdotal colleges thus constituted had a theology in accordance with the nature and attributes of its god. Its fundamental dogma affirmed the unity of the nome god, his greatness, his supremacy over all the gods of Egypt and of foreign lands[*]—whose existence was nevertheless admitted, and none dreamed of denying their reality or contesting their power.

The latter also boasted of their unity, their greatness, their supremacy; but whatever they were, the god of the nome was master of them all—their prince, their ruler, their king. It was he alone who governed the world, he alone kept it in good order, he alone had created it. Not that he had evoked it out of nothing; there was as yet no concept of nothingness, and even to the most subtle and refined of primitive theologians creation was only a bringing of pre-existent elements into play.

The latent germs of things had always existed, but they had slept for ages and ages in the bosom of the Nû, of the dark waters. In fulness of time the god of each nome drew them forth, classified them, marshalled them according to the bent of his particular nature, and made his universe out of them by methods peculiarly his own. Nît of Saïs, who was a weaver, had made the world of warp and woof, as the mother of a family weaves her children's linen.

Khnûmû, the Nile-God of the cataracts, had gathered up the mud of his waters and therewith moulded his creatures upon a potter's table. In the eastern cities of the Delta these procedures were not so simple. There it was admitted that in the beginning earth and sky were two lovers lost in the Nû, fast locked in each other's embrace, the god lying beneath the goddess. On the day of creation a new god, Shu, came forth from the primaeval waters, slipped between the two, and seizing Nûît with both hands, lifted her above his head with outstretched arms.[*]

Though the starry body of the goddess extended in space—her head being to the west and her loins to the east—her feet and hands hung down to the earth. These were the four pillars of the firmament under another form, and four gods of four adjacent principalities were in charge of them. Osiris, or Horus the sparrow-hawk, presided over the southern, and Sit over the northern pillar; Thot over that of the west, and Sapdi, the author of the zodiacal light, over that of the east. They had divided the world among themselves into four regions, or rather into four "houses," bounded by those mountains which surround it, and by the diameters intersecting between the pillars. Each of these houses belonged to one, and to one only; none of the other three, nor even the sun himself, might enter it, dwell there, or even pass through it without having obtained its master's permission. Sibu had not been satisfied to meet the irruption of Shû by mere passive resistance. He had tried to struggle, and he is drawn in the posture of a man who has just awakened out of sleep, and is half turning on his couch before getting up. One of his legs is stretched out, the other is bent and partly drawn up as in the act of rising. The lower part of the body is still unmoved, but he is raising himself with difficulty on his left elbow, while his head droops and his right arm is lifted towards the sky. His effort was suddenly arrested. Rendered powerless by a stroke of the creator, Sibû remained as if petrified in this position, the obvious irregularities of the earth's surface being due to the painful attitude in which he was stricken. His sides have since been clothed with verdure, generations of men and animals have succeeded each other upon his back, but without bringing any relief to his pain; he suffers evermore from the violent separation of which he was the victim when Nûît was torn from him, and his complaint continues to rise to heaven night and day.

The aspect of the inundated plains of the Delta, of the river by which they are furrowed and fertilized, and of the desert sands by which they are threatened, had suggested to the theologians of Mendes and Bûto an explanation of the mystery of creation, in which the feudal divinities of these cities and of several others in their neighbourhood, Osiris, Sit, and Isis, played the principal parts. Osiris first represented the wild and fickle Nile of primitive times; afterwards, as those who dwelt upon his banks learned to regulate his course, they emphasized the kindlier side of his character and soon transformed him into a benefactor of humanity, the supremely good being, Ûnnofriû, Onnophris.[*] He was lord of the principality of Didû, which lay along the Sebennytic branch of the river between the coast marshes and the entrance to the Wâdy Tûmilât, but his domain had been divided; and the two nomes thus formed, namely, the ninth and sixteenth nomes of the Delta in the Pharaonic lists, remained faithful to him, and here he reigned without rival, at Busiris as at Mendes. His most famous idol-form was the Didû, whether naked or clothed, the fetish, formed of four superimposed columns, which had given its name to the principality.[**]

They ascribed life to this Didû, and represented it with a somewhat grotesque face, big cheeks, thick lips, a necklace round its throat, a long flowing dress which hid the base of the columns beneath its folds, and two arms bent across the breast, the hands grasping one a whip and the other a crook, symbols of sovereign authority. This, perhaps, was the most ancient form of Osiris; but they also represented him as a man, and supposed him to assume the shapes of rams and bulls,[*] or even those of water-birds, such as lapwings, herons, and cranes, which disported themselves about the lakes of that district.[**]

The goddess whom we are accustomed to regard as inseparable from him, Isis the cow, or woman with cow's horns, had not always belonged to him. Originally she was an independent deity, dwelling at Bûto in the midst of the ponds of Adhû. She had neither husband nor lover, but had spontaneously conceived and given birth to a son, whom she suckled among the reeds—a lesser Horus who was called Harsiîsît, Horus the son of Isis, to distinguish him from Haroêris. At an early period she was married to her neighbour Osiris, and no marriage could have been better suited to her nature. For she personified the earth—not the earth in general, like Sibu, with its unequal distribution of seas and mountains, deserts and cultivated land; but the black and luxuriant plain of the Delta, where races of men, plants, and animals increase and multiply in ever-succeeding generations. To whom did she owe this inexhaustible productive energy if not to her neighbour Osiris, to the Nile? The Nile rises, overflows, lingers upon the soil; every year it is wedded to the earth, and the earth comes forth green and fruitful from its embraces.

The marriage of the two elements suggested that of the two divinities; Osiris wedded Isis and adopted the young Horus. But this prolific and gentle pair were not representative of all the phenomena of nature. The eastern part of the Delta borders upon the solitudes of Arabia, and although it contains several rich and fertile provinces, yet most of these owe their existence to the arduous labour of the inhabitants, their fertility being dependent on the daily care of man, and on his regular distribution of the water. The moment he suspends the straggle or relaxes his watchfulness, the desert reclaims them and overwhelms them with sterility. Sit was the spirit of the mountain, stone and sand, the red and arid ground as distinguished from the moist black soil of the valley. On the body of a lion or of a dog he bore a fantastic head with a slender curved snout, upright and square-cut ears; his cloven tail rose stiffly behind him, springing from his loins like a fork. He also assumed a human form, or retained the animal head only upon a man's shoulders. He was felt to be cruel and treacherous, always ready to shrivel up the harvest with his burning breath, and to smother Egypt beneath a shroud of shifting sand. The contrast between this evil being and the beneficent couple, Osiris and Isis, was striking. Nevertheless, the theologians of the Delta soon assigned a common origin to these rival divinities of Nile and desert, red land and black. Sibû had begotten them, Nûît had given birth to them one after another when the demiurge had separated her from her husband; and the days of their birth were the days of creation.[*]

At first each of them had kept to his own half of the world. Moreover Sit, who had begun by living alone, had married, in order that he might be inferior to Osiris in nothing.

As a matter of fact, his companion, Nephthys, did not manifest any great activity, and was scarcely more than an artificial counterpart of the wife of Osiris, a second Isis who bore no children to her husband;[*] for the sterile desert brought barrenness to her as to all that it touched.

Yet she had lost neither the wish nor the power to bring forth, and sought fertilization from another source. Tradition had it that she had made Osiris drunken, drawn him to her arms without his knowledge, and borne him a son; the child of this furtive union was the jackal Anubis. Thus when a higher Nile overflows lands not usually covered by the inundation, and lying unproductive for lack of moisture, the soil eagerly absorbs the water, and the germs which lay concealed in the ground burst forth into life. The gradual invasion of the domain of Sît by Osiris marks the beginning of the strife. Sit rebels against the wrong of which he is the victim, involuntary though it was; he surprises and treacherously slays his brother, drives Isis into temporary banishment among her marshes, and reigns over the kingdom of Osiris as well as over his own. But his triumph is short-lived. Horus, having grown up, takes arms against him, defeats him in many encounters, and banishes him in his turn. The creation of the world had brought the destroying and the life-sustaining gods face to face: the history of the world is but the story of their rivalries and warfare.

None of these conceptions alone sufficed to explain the whole mechanism of creation, nor the part which the various gods took in it. The priests of Heliopolis appropriated them all, modified some of their details and eliminated others, added several new personages, and thus finally constructed a complete cosmogony, the elements of which were learnedly combined so as to correspond severally with the different operations by which the world had been evoked out of chaos and gradually brought to its present state. Heliopolis was never directly involved in the great revolutions of political history; but no city ever originated so many mystic ideas and consequently exercised so great an influence upon the development of civilization.[*]

It was a small town built on the plain not far from the Nile at the apex of the Delta, and surrounded by a high wall of mud bricks whose remains could still be seen at the beginning of the century, but which have now almost completely disappeared.

One obelisk standing in the midst of the open plain, a few waste mounds of débris, scattered blocks, and two or three lengths of crumbling wall, alone mark the place where once the city stood. Ka was worshipped there, and the Greek name of Heliopolis is but the translation of that which was given to it by the priests—Pi-ra, City of the Sun. Its principal temple, the "Mansion of the Prince," rose from about the middle of the enclosure, and sheltered, together with the god himself, those animals in which he became incarnate: the bull Mnevis, and sometimes the Phoenix. According to an old legend, this wondrous bird appeared in Egypt only once in five hundred years. It is born and lives in the depths of Arabia, but when its father dies it covers the body with a layer of myrrh, and flies at utmost speed to the temple of Helio-polis, there to bury it.[*]

In the beginning, Râ was the sun itself, whose fires appear to be lighted every morning in the east and to be extinguished at evening in the west; and to the people such he always remained. Among the theologians there was considerable difference of opinion on the point. Some held the disk of the sun to be the body which the god assumes when presenting himself for the adoration of his worshippers. Others affirmed that it rather represented his active and radiant soul. Finally, there were many who defined it as one of his forms of being—khopriû—one of his self-manifestations, without presuming to decide whether it was his body or his soul which he deigned to reveal to human eyes; but whether soul or body, all agreed that the sun's disk had existed in the Nû before creation. But how could it have lain beneath the primordial ocean without either drying up the waters or being extinguished by them? At this stage the identification of Râ with Horus and his right eye served the purpose of the theologians admirably: the god needed only to have closed his eyelid in order to prevent his fires from coming in contact with the water.[*]

He was also said to have shut up his disk within a lotus-bud, whose folded petals had safely protected it. The flower had opened on the morning of the first day, and from it the god had sprung suddenly as a child wearing the solar disk upon his head. But all theories led the theologians to distinguish two periods, and as it were two beings in the existence of supreme deity: a pre-mundane sun lying inert within the bosom of the dark waters, and our living and life-giving sun.

One division of the Heliopolitan school retained the use of traditional terms and images in reference to these Sun-gods. To the first it left the human form, and the title of Râ, with the abstract sense of creator, deriving the name from the verb râ, which means to give. For the second it kept the form of the sparrow-hawk and the name of Harma-khûîti—Horus in the two horizons—which clearly denoted his function;[*] and it summed up the idea of the sun as a whole in the single name of Râ-Harmakhûîti, and in a single image in which the hawk-head of Horus was grafted upon the human body of Râ. The other divisions of the school invented new names for new conceptions. The sun existing before the world they called Creator—Tûmû, Atûmû [**]—and our earthly sun they called Khopri—He who is.

Tûmû was a man crowned and clothed with the insignia of supreme power, a true king of gods, majestic and impassive as the Pharaohs who succeeded each other upon the throne of Egypt. The conception of Khopri as a disk enclosing a scarabæus, or a man with a scarabous upon his head, or a scarabus-headed mummy, was suggested by the accidental alliteration of his name and that of Khopirrû, the scarabæus. The difference between the possible forms of the god was so slight as to be eventually lost altogether. His names were grouped by twos and threes in every conceivable way, and the scarabæus of Khopri took its place upon the head of Râ, while the hawk headpiece was transferred from the shoulders of Harmakhûîti to those of Tûmû. The complex beings resulting from these combinations, Râ-Tûmû, Atûmû-Râ, Râ-Tûmû-Khopri, Râ-Harmakhûîti-Tûmû, Tûm-Harmakhûîti-Khopri, never attained to any pronounced individuality.

They were as a rule simple duplicates of the feudal god, names rather than persons, and though hardly taken for one another indiscriminately, the distinctions between them had reference to mere details of their functions and attributes. Hence arose the idea of making these gods into embodiments of the main phases in the life of the sun during the day and throughout the year. Râ symbolized the sun of springtime and before sunrise, Harmakhûîti the summer and the morning sun, Atûmû the sun of autumn and of afternoon, Khopri that of winter and of night. The people of Heliopolis accepted the new names and the new forms presented for their worship, but always subordinated them to their beloved Râ. For them Râ never ceased to be the god of the nome; while Atûmû remained the god of the theologians, and was invoked by them, the people preferred Râ. At Thinis and at Sebennytos Anhûri incurred the same fate as befell Râ at Heliopolis. After he had been identified with the sun, the similar identification of Shû inevitably followed. Of old, Anhûri and Shû were twin gods, incarnations of sky and earth. They were soon but one god in two persons—the god Anhûri-Shû, of which the one half under the title of Auhûri represented, like Atûmû, the primordial being; and Shû, the other half, became, as his name indicates, the creative sun-god who upholds (shû) the sky.

Tûrnû then, rather than Râ, was placed by the Heliopolitan priests at the head of their cosmogony as supreme creator and governor. Several versions were current as to how he had passed from inertia into action, from the personage of Tûmû into that of Râ. According to the version most widely received, he had suddenly cried across the waters, "Come unto me!"[*] and immediately the mysterious lotus had unfolded its petals, and Râ had appeared at the edge of its open cup as a disk, a newborn child, or a disk-crowned sparrow-hawk; this was probably a refined form of a ruder and earlier tradition, according to which it was upon Râ himself that the office had devolved of separating Sibû from Nûît, for the purpose of constructing the heavens and the earth.

But it was doubtless felt that so unseemly an act of intervention was beneath the dignity even of an inferior form of the suzerain god; Shû was therefore borrowed for the purpose from the kindred cult of Anhûri, and at Heliopolis, as at Sebennytos, the office was entrusted to him of seizing the sky-goddess and raising her with outstretched arms. The violence suffered by Nûît at the hands of Shû led to a connexion of the Osirian dogma of Mendes with the solar dogma of Sebennytos, and thus the tradition describing the creation of the world was completed by another, explaining its division into deserts and fertile lands. Sîbû, hitherto concealed beneath the body of his wife, was now exposed to the sun; Osiris and Sit, Isis and Nephthys, were born, and, falling from the sky, their mother, on to the earth, their father, they shared the surface of the latter among themselves. Thus the Heliopolitan doctrine recognized three principal events in the creation of the universe: the dualization of the supreme god and the breaking forth of light, the raising of the sky and the laying bare of the earth, the birth of the Nile and the allotment of the soil of Egypt, all expressed as the manifestations of successive deities. Of these deities, the latter ones already constituted a family of father, mother, and children, like human families. Learned theologians availed themselves of this example to effect analogous relationships between the rest of the gods, combining them all into one line of descent. As Atûmû-Râ could have no fellow, he stood apart in the first rank, and it was decided that Shû should be his son, whom he had formed out of himself alone, on the first day of creation, by the simple intensity of his own virile energy. Shû, reduced to the position of divine son, had in his turn begotten Sibû and Nûît, the two deities which he separated. Until then he had not been supposed to have any wife, and he also might have himself brought his own progeny into being; but lest a power of spontaneous generation equal to that of the demiurge should be ascribed to him, he was married, and the wife found for him was Tafnûît, his twin sister, born in the same way as he was born. This goddess, invented for the occasion, was never fully alive, and remained, like Nephthys, a theological entity rather than a real person. The texts describe her as the pale reflex of her husband.

Together with him she upholds the sky, and every morning receives the newborn sun as it emerges from the mountain of the east; she is a lioness when Shû is a lion, a woman when he is a man, a lioness-headed woman if he is a lion-headed man; she is angry when he is angry, appeased when he is appeased; she has no sanctuary wherein he is not worshipped. In short, the pair made one being in two bodies, or, to use the Egyptian expression, "one soul in its two twin bodies."

Hence we see that the Heliopolitans proclaimed the creation to be the work of the sun-god, Atûmû-Râ, and of the four pairs of deities who were descended from him. It was really a learned variant of the old doctrine that the universe was composed of a sky-god, Horus, supported by his four children and their four pillars: in fact, the four sons of the Heliopolitan cosmogony, Shû and Sibû, Osiris and Sit, were occasionally substituted for the four older gods of the "houses" of the world. This being premised, attention must be given to the important differences between the two systems. At the outset, instead of appearing contemporaneously upon the scene, like the four children of Horus, the four Heliopolitan gods were deduced one from another, and succeeded each other in the order of their birth. They had not that uniform attribute of supporter, associating them always with one definite function, but each of them felt himself endowed with faculties and armed with special powers required by his condition. Ultimately they took to themselves goddesses, and thus the total number of beings working in different ways at the organization of the universe was brought up to nine. Hence they were called by the collective name of the Ennead, the Nine gods—paûit nûtîrû,[*]—and the god at their head was entitled Paûîti, the god of the Ennead.

When creation was completed, its continued existence was ensured by countless agencies with whose operation the persons of the Ennead were not at leisure to concern themselves, but had ordained auxiliaries to preside over each of the functions essential to the regular and continued working of all things. The theologians of Heliopolis selected eighteen from among the innumerable divinities of the feudal cults of Egypt, and of these they formed two secondary Enneads, who were regarded as the offspring of the Ennead of the creation. The first of the two secondary Enneads, generally known as the Minor Ennead, recognized as chief Harsiesis, the son of Osiris. Harsiesis was originally an earth-god who had avenged the assassination of his father and the banishment of his mother by Sit; that is, he had restored fulness to the Nile and fertility to the Delta. When Harsiesis was incorporated into the solar religions of Heliopolis, his filiation was left undisturbed as being a natural link between the two Enneads, but his personality was brought into conformity with the new surroundings into which he was transplanted. He was identified with Râ through the intervention of the older Horus, Haroêris-Harmakhis, and the Minor Ennead, like the Great Ennead, began with a sun-god. This assimilation was not pushed so far as to invest the younger Horus with the same powers as his fictitious ancestor: he was the sun of earth, the everyday sun, while Atûmû-Râ was still the sun pre-mundane and eternal. Our knowledge of the eight other deities of the Minor Ennead is very imperfect.