I. SIGN-LANGUAGE AND MYTHOLOGY AS PRIMITIVE PAGE I II. TOTEMISM, TATTOO AND FETISHISM AS FORMS OF SIGN-LANGUAGE 46 Fetishism III III. ELEMENTAL AND ANCESTRAL SPIRITS, OR THE GODS 120 IV. EGYPTIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD AND THE MYSTERIES 186 V. THE SIGN-LANGUAGE OF ASTRONOMICAL MYTH- ERRATA. Page 2, line 17, for "let us have the Sculptors" read "let us be the Sculptors." Page 123, line 38, for "Knammu " read "Knemmu." 237, 22, for "musculine" read "masculine." 1 ANCIENT EGYPT THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD SIGN-LANGUAGE AND MYTHOLOGY AS PRIMITIVE MODES OF REPRESENTATION BOOK I THE other day a lad from London who had been taken to the sea-side for the first time in his life was standing with his mother looking at the rolling breakers tossing and tumbling in upon the sands, when he was heard to exclaim, "Oh, mother, who is it chucking them heaps o' water about?" This expression showed the boy's ability to think of the power that was "doing it" in the human likeness. But, then, ignorant as he might be, he was more or less the heir to human faculty as it is manifested in all its triumphs over external nature at the present time. Now, it has been and still is a prevalent and practically universal assumption that the same mental standpoint might have been occupied by Primitive Man, and a like question asked in presence of the same or similar phenomena of physical nature. Nothing is more common or more unquestioned than the inference that Primitive Man would or could have asked, "Who is doing it?" and that the Who could have been personified in the human likeness. Indeed, it has become an axiom with modern metaphysicians and a postulate of the Anthropologists that, from the beginning, man imposed his own human image upon external nature; that he personified its elemental energies and fierce physical forces after his own likeness; also that this was in accordance with the fundamental character and constitution of the human mind. Το adduce a few examples taken almost at random :-David Hume declares that "there is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves." In support of which he instances the seeing of human faces in the moon. Reid on the Active Powers (4th Essay) says our first thoughts are that "the objects in which we perceive motion have understanding and power as we have." Francis Bacon had long before remarked that we human beings "set stamps and seals of our own images upon God's creatures and works." (Exp. History.) Herbert Spencer argued that human personality applied to the powers of nature was the primary mode of representation, and that the identification of this with some natural force or object is due to identity of name. (Data of Sociology, ch. xxiv, 184.) "In early philosophy throughout the world," says Mr. Tylor, “the B sun and moon are alive and as it were human in their nature." Professor Max Müller, who taught that Mythology was a disease of language, and that the Myths have been made out of words which had lost their senses, asserts that "the whole animal world has been conceived as a copy of our own. And not only the animal world, but the whole of nature was liable to be conceived and named by an assimilation to human nature." (Science of Thought, p. 503.) And "such was the propensity in the earliest men of whom we have any authentic record to see personal agency in everything," that it could not be otherwise, for "there was really no way of conceiving or naming anything objective except after the similitude of the subjective, or of ourselves." (Ib., p. 495.) Illustrations of this modern position might be indefinitely multiplied. The assumption has been supported by a consensus of assertion, and here, as elsewhere, the present writer is compelled to doubt, deny, and disprove the popular postulate of the accepted orthodox authorities. be That, said the lion, is your version of the story: let us have the sculptor's, and for one lion under the feet of a man you shall see a dozen men beneath the pad of one lion. "Myth-making Man" did not create the Gods in his own image. The primary divinities of Egypt, such as Sut, Sebek, and Shu, three of the earliest, were represented in the likeness of the Hippopotamus, the Crocodile, and the Lion; whilst Hapi was imaged as an Ape, Anup as a Jackal, Ptah as a Beetle, Taht as an Ibis, Seb as a Goose. So was it with the Goddesses. They are the likenesses of powers that were super-human, not human. Hence Apt was imaged as a Watercow, Hekat as a Frog, Tefnut as a Lioness, Serkh as a Scorpion, Rannut as a Serpent, Hathor as a Fruit-tree. A huge mistake has hitherto been made in assuming that the Myth-Makers began by fashioning the Nature-Powers in their own human likeness. Totemism. was formulated by myth-making man with types that were the very opposite of human, and in mythology the Anthropomorphic representation was preceded by the whole menagerie of Totemic Zootypes. The idea of Force, for instance, was not derived from the thews and muscles of a Man. As the Kamite Sign-Language shows, the Force that was "chucking them heaps of water about" was perceived to be the wind; the Spirit that moved upon the face of the waters from the beginning. This power was divinised in Shu, the God of breathing Force, whose zootype is the Lion as a fitting figure of this panting Power of the Air. The element audible in the howling wind, but dimly apprehended otherwise, was given shape and substance as the roaring Lion in this substitution of similars. The Force of the element was equated by the power of the Animal; and no human thews and sinews could compare with those of the Lion as a figure of Force. Thus the Lion speaks for itself, in the language of Ideographic Signs. And in this way the Gods and Goddesses of ancient Egypt were at first portrayed as Superhuman Powers by means of living Superhuman types. If primitive man had projected the shadow of himself upon external nature, to shape its elemental forces in his own image, or if the unfeatured Vast had unveiled to him any likeness of the human face, |