(6) The Abstract Religion. The forms of re ligion that we have already noticed are compara tively free from abstract ideas. The utmost that can be said of the animal worship is that it may have originated in the animals being adorned as embodying or exemplifying certain attributes. Of Osiris it may be that he was a god of vegetation; and Horns and Set are looked on as the principles of good and evil. The whole cosmogony is es sentially concrete, with hardly any abstraction traceable.
But another class of gods, which stand quite apart from all the others, are essentially abstract.
ports her body on his upraised arms. Seb, the earth, symbolized as a man, lies on the ground be low. Ra was an entirely human god, and this name is maintained for the sun throughout the whole day and night. Harakhti, or Hants on the hori zon, a compounding of Ra with Horns, is a hawk headed god, who specially is the rising and morn ing sun. Another form, --itmu or is the afternoon sun ; and Khepra is the night sun. Alum is the god who is theologically said to have created everything by the word of his power. Heliopolis, in the Delta, just below Cairo, was the special center of this worship; and the story of creation as told there was in three scenes: First, the separation of Ra and Atmu, Ra being the sun Ptah, the god of Memphis, is the creator; he is not like the creator Abuse, identified with the sun; nor like the creator Khnumu, a potter; but he is the Divine architect who ordains. And his com
panion goddess is even more abstract; Moat is law and orderly regulation, justice and principle, expressed in sign by the cubit measuring-rod.
Such is one great abstract conception, the creator working by law and measure.
Another pair of abstractions was that of the Divine Father, and of universal Mother Nature. The great father god was Min (otherwise ren dered as Klietn), represented by images furnished with a in whom all the beauty and life and vigor of nature rejoiced. And parallel to him was liathor, the great mother, who was worshiped in every capital of the country, and identified in turn with all the other goddesses. In some places she was the sky, being identified with Nut, from whom sprang everything. In other places she was Psis, the principal Divine mother of the earlier mythologies. In the early times, before 2000 B. C., she seems to have received a quarter of the whole devotion of the land, but in later periods her importance diminished.
There are some other gods of importance which do not form part of the main groups here repre sented, and which were strictly local in origin.