Gods and Demigods of Ancient Egypt

By Pietro Testa

Ancient Egypt has left tangible and incisive signs of its religion through monuments and writings. Temples abound with bas-relief and all-round images, painted in bright colors, complete with captions and inscriptions. The royal and noble tombs are no less and they are the ones that have handed down to us figures and texts of great craftsmanship finesse. Funerary and magical writings are unique examples of miniaturistic graphics of divine entities and descriptions of the afterlife. From the observation of these testimonies, an infinite number of divinities emerge, principal, secondary, demons and demigods. This crowd of anthropomorphic entities, but often zoomorphic or a mixture of various human and animal parts, left the first Egyptologists disoriented, giving rise to a conglomeration of hypotheses, sometimes distorted interpretations, and literary duels of various kinds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harmakis Edizioni
• Release date: May 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9788831427319

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PIETRO TESTA

Gods and demigods of ancient Egypt

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The facts and opinions reported in this book only bind the author.

Various information may be published in the Work, however in the public domain, unless otherwise specified.

ISBN: 9788831427319

© 2020

© Layout: Leonardo Paolo Lovari

Sometimes there is more wisdom in the

dreams that in the reality of awakening.

Black deer (Hehaka Sapa-1853-1950; Tribe degli Oglala).

PREFACE

Ancient Egypt has left tangible and incisive signs of its ‘religion’ through monuments and writings. Temples abound with bas-relief and all-round images, painted in bright colors, complete with captions and inscriptions. The royal and noble tombs are no less and they are the ones that have handed down to us figures and texts of great craftsmanship finesse. Funerary and magical writings are unique examples of miniaturistic graphics of divine entities and descriptions of the afterlife.

From the observation of these testimonies, an infinite number of divinities emerge, main, secondary, demons, and demigods. This crowd of anthropomorphic entities, but often zoomorphic or a mixture of various human and animal parts, left the first Egyptologists disoriented, giving rise to a conglomeration of hypotheses, sometimes distorted interpretations, and literary duels of various kinds.

There is no denying the exorbitant number of divinities that appears in the eyes of the spectator who can still remain disoriented today. However, this crowd of entities is not the result of unbridled or obtuse imagination, but the result of logical reasoning that has its basis in prehistory. Through the intellectual path of the Egyptian civilization, the memory has become myth and has acquired a complete organization in the arrangement and arrangement of the manifestations of the creator god.

Here we enter a delicate domain that has some points in common with our way of thinking, but which is different from it: speculative thinking.

Speculation is an intuitive way of knowing that transcends experience by trying to explain, unify and coordinate it, thus distinguishing itself from mere idle speculation.

In ancient Egypt, and generally in the peoples of the ancient Middle East, speculation found unlimited possibilities for development, not being restricted to the search for a truth of a scientific nature, and therefore disciplined. There was no clear distinction between nature and human being. The so-called primitive peoples and the ancients considered the human being as a piece belonging to the kingdom of nature: two worlds not opposed and which did not require distinct ways of knowledge. If for us the phenomenal world is above all a ‘what?’, For the ancient it is a ‘You’.

To the primitive, the surrounding world does not appear inanimate, but full of life sparkling from the human being, from the animal, from the plant, from the thunder, from the sun: in short, by the constituents of the kingdom of nature. Faced with a phenomenon, ancient man does not say ‘what is it?’ But says ‘You’: the ‘You’ reveals the individuality, qualities and will of the phenomenon. In this perspective, the phenomenon becomes an experience of one life compared to another, engaging man’s faculties in a mutual relationship.

It happens that each experience of a ‘You’ becomes individual, and these experiences are actions that are configured in narration: this becomes a myth in place of analysis and conclusions. The myth was not used to amuse or explain certain phenomena, but to expose certain events in which the very existence of man was engaged, his direct experience of a conflict of hostile and beneficial forces.

The images of the myth are not metaphor but a veil carefully chosen to cover an abstract thought. The images are not separated from thought, since they represent the form in which the experience has become self-conscious.

The ancients, therefore, expressed their emotional thinking in terms of cause and effect, explaining the phenomena in a temporal, spatial and numerical context. The ancients, mind you, knew how to reason logically, otherwise we would not have the great civilizations we know: simply often a purely intellectual attitude was badly suited to the experiences of reality, certainly more significant.

For ancient man, the contrast between reality and appearance had no meaning. This is the case of dreams, held in high regard, and of hybrid and non-hybrid entities, inspired by the doubt of the unknown physical. The same happened for a lack of distinction between the world of the living and the dead, since the dead entered the human reality of anguish, hope and resentment.

There are several dictionaries on the divinities of ancient Egypt (most of them in a foreign language) from the most detailed to the generic ones. My intent would be to give the reader an average detailed picture of the important, secondary deities, demigods and ‘demons’ who populated the fourth dimension of ancient Egypt: all in our Italian language, still (semi) unknown in the field of Egyptology.

I thought it appropriate to report the hieroglyphic names of the deities, inserting the most effective illustrations into the text, with explanatory and bibliographical notes where necessary. Of course, I found it useful to precede the list of entities by a brief introduction on the Egyptian ‘religion’ and some of its phenomena which should help the reader to better understand everything.

Pietro Testa

Naples 2017

CHAPTER 1

NOTES ON THE EGYPTIAN RELIGION

1.1. Generality

The ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who is supposed to have visited Egypt in the fifth century BC, describes the Egyptians as religious to excess more than any other human race. Most of us have the same impression.

Apart from the tombs, the most striking and immanent manifestation of Egyptian architecture is represented by the temples; Egyptian art is dominated by the figures of the gods; the names of many Egyptians honor the gods; and it is difficult to find an Egyptian text that does not mention one or more gods.

However, Herodotus’ statement reflects a particular western notion of religion which (starting from the Greeks) has distinct religions for the various spheres of human existence, such as government, social behavior, intellectual research and science. In ancient Egypt there was no such distinction.

What we call the Egyptian religion is nothing but the way the ancient Egyptians understood their world and related to it. Whether or not they believe in the existence of a god (or gods), many societies today view the world objectively as a set of impersonal elements and forces. We understand, for example, that the wind arises from the difference in high and low pressure areas; people get sick from germs or viruses; things grow and change due to chemical and biological processes. This knowledge is the legacy of centuries of scientific experiments and thoughts. Today it provides us with a detailed understanding of how the world is going and how we must behave in relation to it in order to live better and more comfortably.

The ancient Egyptians faced our own physical universe and, like us, tried to understand it and behave in relation to it. But, without the benefit of our centuries-old experience, they had to seek an explanation of natural phenomena and the means to behave accordingly. The answers they gave are what we call religion.

Where we see impersonal elements and forces acting in the world, the Egyptians saw the will and actions of beings greater than themselves: the gods. For example, not knowing the scientific origin of a disease, they could only imagine that some evil force was in it. Although they could, and did, develop practical remedies for fighting ailments, they also believed that it was necessary first to ward off or pacify the force that had caused the disease. The Egyptian medical texts therefore contain not only detailed descriptions of physical diseases and pharmaceutical prescriptions, but also magic formulas to be used to combat evil forces. What we distinguish between the science of medicine and the religion of magic was the same for the Egyptians,

The gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt are neither more nor less than the elements and forces of the universe. The gods did not control these phenomena, like the Greek god Zeus with lightning: they were the elements and forces of the world.

We express this peculiarity by saying that the gods were immanent in the phenomena of nature. For example, the wind was the god Shu; when an Egyptian felt the wind in his face, he felt that Shu touched him.

As there are hundreds of elements and forces in nature, so there were hundreds of Egyptian gods. The most important, logically, were the major natural phenomena. They included Atum, the original source of all substances, and its offspring: Geb and Nut, the earth and the sky; Shu, the atmosphere; Ra, the sun; Osiris, the male generating power; Isis, the female principle of motherhood. What we would consider abstract principles of human behavior were also gods and goddesses: for example, order and harmony (Maat), disorder and chaos (Seth), creation (Ptah), reason (Thoth) , anger (Sekhmet), love (Hathor).

The power of royalty was also a god (Horus), personified not only by the sun as the dominant force of nature, but also in the person of Pharaoh as the dominant force of human society. Our distinction between religion and government would have been incomprehensible to an ancient Egyptian, for whom royalty was a divine force. As far as the ancient Egyptians could, and did, rebel against kings and even assassinate them, they never replaced the pharaonic system with another method of government. It would have been like replacing the sun with something else.

The Egyptians saw the will and actions of their gods in action in the phenomena of everyday life: Ra, in the daily return of light and heat; Osiris and Isis, in the miracle of birth; Maat or Seth, in the harmony or disorder of human relationships; Ptah and Thoth, in the creation of buildings, art and literature; Horus, in the king whose government was life.

In many cases they saw the presence of the gods even in some species of animals: for example, Horus in the hawk that flies above all living creatures, or Sekhmet in the ferocity and determination of the lion. This association is the key to understanding numerous images of animal-headed gods in Egyptian art. For an Egyptian, the image of a leontocephalous woman, for example, made two