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By Root 2522 0

in guaranteeing ma’at. Like the Nile, everything about his life was ordered and symbolic. Diodorus Siculus, a Greco-Roman writer of the first century CE, painted a picture of the king of Egypt as the actor of a lifelong symbolic drama, in which rituals controlled the King’s every hour and every act. Like Le Roi Soleil of eighteenth century France, the hours of his day and night were laid out according to the strictest plan. The king was directed by law and tradition to do what was politically and ritually required. Diodorus goes on to state that these regulations covered not only the king’s administrative actions but also his personal freedom to take a walk, bath, or even enjoy his wives and concubines. He was allowed no personal initiative in his governmental actions but was required to act in conformity with established laws. There is good evidence that this was not always so. But Diodorus insists that the pharaohs of his time were quite happy in this obsessive schedule because they believed that those who followed their natural emotions fell into error, whereas pharaohs, by compulsively following the ancient laws, were personally freed from responsibility for wrongdoing and thus guaranteed a beatific afterlife.5

The ritual drama was a national representation of the forces that made Egypt possible: The king’s person was thought divine, united with the sun in various ways. The pharaoh was reborn, as it were, with every new generation just as the sun was reborn every day and the Nile renewed agriculture every year. Thus, the king of Egypt issued out of the body of the sun god and, on death, returned to him, or, just as frequently, was seen as the falcon-headed sun god Horus of Upper Egypt and became Horus’ father Osiris, the god of embalming, upon his death.

The same might have been said of any king, in various ways, from the beginning of Egyptian history to the end. As long as the dynasty was secure and prospering, so was the country. The converse was just as true. The relationship between geography and religion begins with cosmology, the study of creation, moves through the order of the state, and ends with the famous Egyptian views about the afterlife. As their geography is unique, so too the Egyptians were virtually unique in depicting the sky as a goddess, the earth a god. In almost all nations, it is the sky god, with his warlike thunder and his fertilizing rain who naturally becomes the masculine principle in the sexual drama of cosmic creation. However Egypt’s rainfall is too sparse to support agriculture. For the Egyptians, the sky, Nut, was a woman, while Earth, Geb, was a man, since the earth carried the Nile flood. The mud that came in the flood brought fertility to the land. Hence some Egyptian myths picture the first creation as an act of male masturbation. Corresponding to this solitary sexual act, the Nile itself appears to bring fertility by a surge of creative fluid, without the help of anyone or anything else but itself.6

But myth is never content to symbolize a process only once. Whether or not the myths that we have are combinations of countless local myths, the end effect is that the crucial aspects of life are symbolized again and again, in various related ways, as if, in Levi-Strauss’s words, two people were trying to communicate across a raging waterfall. The message is repeated and repeated in many different ways and with many different symbols because, in Levi-Strauss’s estimation, the interference level in cultural communication is very high.

The complexity of Egypt’s religion is sometimes dizzying. The various gods of the Nile had their own animal emblems and could be depicted in animal, human, or mixed animal-human form, seemingly related to the local fauna. In fact, depictions of gods varied widely across the country. Possible contradictions between local versions of stories did not seem to bother the Egyptians overly much. Animals animated the Egyptian pantheon. For instance the lion was associated with Ra at Heliopolis. The dog and jackal were animals of Anubis, whose cult was centered