It would be interesting to know why these beliefs were so curiously tenacious of life in Egypt; perhaps the reason is to be found in the prodigious antiquity of Egyptian civilization. That civilization was the oldest which the world has seen, the least remote from the day of man's first appearance upon the earth. It may therefore be supposed to have received more deeply, and maintained more obstinately, those impressions which characterize the infancy of men as well as of mankind. Add to this, that other races in their efforts to emerge from barbarism, were aided and incited by the example of races which had preceded them on the same road. The inhabitants of the Nile Valley, on the other hand, were alone in the world for many centuries; they had to depend entirely upon their own internal forces for the accomplishment of their emancipation; it is, therefore, hardly surprising that they should have remained longer than their successors in that fetish worship which we have asserted to be the first stage of religious development.[1]
This stage must never be forgotten, if we wish to understand the part which art played in the figuring of the Egyptian gods.
- ↑ This was perceived by the President de Brasses, a savant with few advantages but a bold and inquiring spirit, to whom the language is indebted for the use of the term fetishism as a name for a definite state of religious conception. We can still read with interest the book which he published anonymously in 1760, under the title: Du Culte des Dieux fétiches; ou, Parallèle de l'Ancienne Religion de l'Égypte avec la Religion actuelle de Nigritie (12mo). The study of the fetish elements of the Egyptian religion has been resumed lately with competent knowledge and talent by a German egyptologist, Herr Pietschmann, in an essay which appeared in 1878 in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, which is published in Berlin under the direction of M. Virchow. It is called Der Ægyptische Fetischdienst und Götterglaube—Prolegomena zur Ægyptischen Mythologie (28 pp. 8vo). A great many judicious observations and curious facts are to be found in it; the realistic and materialistic character of the Egyptian conceptions are very well grasped; it is perhaps to be regretted that the author has not endeavoured to make the creeds to which he gives this name of fétichisme somewhat clearer, and to show by what workings of the mind they were adopted and abandoned. With regard to the Egyptian religion, we shall find treated, in the excellent Manuel de l'Histoire des Religions, by Tiele, which M. Maurice Vernes has just translated from the Dutch (1 vol. 12mo, Ernest Leroux, 1880), views much the same as those which we have just described. The author denominates the religious state which we call fetishism animism, but he points out the fact that this class of conceptions had a perennial influence over the Egyptian mind. "The Egyptian religion," he says, "like the Chinese, was nothing to begin with but an organised animism." He finds traces of this animism in the worship of the dead, the deification of the kings, and the adoration of animals. From his point of view the custom of placing a symbol of the divinity rather than an image in the temple, must be traced to fetishism (pp. 44 and 45 of the French version).
