THE MYTH OF EGYPT
Egypt in antiquity existed not only in actuality, in the north-eastern quadrant of Africa at the point where the forces which were to mould civilisation meet and intersect, but also in the borderlands between myth and reality. The collective unconscious of the population of the Valley in the seventh and sixth millennia, when it was first permanently settled, was in a state of readiness to make a quantum leap in social and intellectual development which, in a very short space of time, would lead to the creation of one of the first and most diverse of complex societies.
When such concepts developed further, in the particular circumstances of the Nile Valley in the late fourth millennium BC, they became set in entirely Egyptian forms. Though their practical expression, their translation into forms which would survive exposure to reality, must have been problematical, survive they did, as peculiarly Egyptian institutions; thus
they became forever fixed. It is in this sense that Egypt may be said to be the pristine society, its people living under a system wholly different (though not entirely out of touch with) the neolithic community and its more distant predecessors.
It is this outward flow of archetypal, primordial forms in early Egypt which gives it so particular and enduring a power to move and to fill those who contemplate even its ruins, and the destruction of its grandeur, with wonder. Because its forms are archetypal Egypt is instantly recognisable and familiar: because its institutions give rise to instant recognition, they may in turn be recognised as archetypal.
There is no agency at work in the creation of Egyptian civilisation other than the receptive responses of the minds of men. As men can conceive of ods, and give them form and substance as exemplified by Egyptian scribes and craftsmen, so gods, or demi-gods, or creatures with more than human apabilities and perceptions, become the symbols which men erect to explain what they do not understand. But all of ancient Egypt, in all its splendour, with all its marvels of creation and invention and with all the power of its intellectual processes, lay within the minds of men (and of women) living in the Valley of the Nile at this point in human history
So far as we are able to judge, the Egyptians did not greatly concern themselves with the invention of stories to explain the inexplicable. There are Egyptian myths, of course, but they are nothing like as many or as rich as, say, the myths of the Mesopotamians or of the Semitic-speaking peoples of the Near East (who were unquenchably given to the production f myth) or of the Greeks, who really did sustain a degree of childlike wonder at the world which myth helped to express.
Egyptian myths are rather matter-of-fact and, in any case, are probably rather late in their invention; many of the finest stories from Egypt in their recorded form date from the Middle Kingdom and later.
The Egyptians, certainly in the time of the Old Kingdom, did not need the support of myth for they had the archetypes to sustain them, in an immediate, physical and institutional form around them, everywhere they looked. It was only when the pressures of the combination of political circumstances and unforeseen environmental factors became intolerable that the pristine Egyptian society began to disintegrate, though, so powerful was its essential structure that its form survived for another two thousand years, for half of that period as a dominant force in the world of its time.
For most of its history Egypt existed on the borderline of the mythic and the real. Its achievements were real enough, none, perhaps, more so, but the myth which it released into the world was even more enduring.
The Egyptians in the early periods of their history, down to the end of the Middle Kingdom, radiate a sort of sublime assurance, a sense that, truly for those living in the Nile Valley, all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The stories which they told were concerned more with the relationships of men in society, their connections with authority or
their response to misfortune or injustice.
But in the beginning, in the time when the expression of the archetypes was new and Egyptian society was unfolding like the lotus flower under the rays of the sun (one of the potent
symbols beloved by the people) only the Kingship needed definition, tracking the course by which Egypt, and hence the known world, was to be ruled in truth.
First the gods had themselves governed Egypt (and thus the world), then the demi-gods, the Followers of Horus. Finally the Kingship was transmuted into a human institution but with the qualification that its holder, rising from the seat of his coronation, was god.
The king embraced in his superhuman person all the archetypes which flowed into the Valley just as he towered above all mortals who attended him. There is no moral teaching, no promptings of right over wrong, no concern with the revelation of a divine will. If the king lives for ever, then Egypt lives for ever and men, ‘the cattle of god’, take their place before him, so that he may drive them forward.
The gods of Egypt are not really to be compared with the other colleges of divinities who generally plagued the lives of ancient Near Eastern societies, just as, it might be said, their successors have continued to do today. In their early form they are abstractions, though aspects of their often elusive natures will provide the key to their later appearances. Horus
is the youthful god soaring into the sky, to become the ever reborn son, who occupies the throne of Egypt; eventually Osiris will be named his father. Ma’at is truth, in whose name the king must rule, Ptah is the sublime creator.
The world of appearances was not of the first importance to the Egyptians, when contemplating the management of the Universe or the prospects of the survival of life after death. As highly intelligent men who created the most august of all human societies, they did not need to be told that life ended at death but they believed that it was possible to arrest the
process or rather to transform it into another state, not necessarily for all eternity, but certainly for ‘millions of years’.
Much of the world which surrounded the Egyptians was expressed in symbols; indeed, they rarely expressed a concept directly, in absolute terms. It was part of the Egyptians’ psychological equipment that this should be so. As Jung wrote: ‘The symbol mediates the passage of psychic energy from the unconscious in order that it may be applied consciously
and turned to practical account.’1
All meanings are shaded; even the hieroglyphs convey meanings at one level which may be confirmed or revoked at another level of appearance or comprehension. Patterns and colours shift; just as is often the case in the white light of an Egyptian midday, things are not always as they seem. Later, when Egypt was already in decline, this tendency towards the veiled meaning, the equivocal appearance, became a sort of game which Egypt played with the world outside its frontiers when foreigners came into the Valley to gaze with awe at a civilisation whose antiquity and splendour they could barely comprehend. Then, no doubt, the priests provided wonderful shows to impress or terrify the simple.
Thus the legend of Egypt grew as, with the immense advantage of two millennia and more of high culture behind them, the reputation for magic and the presence of the gods
gained currency. Though such demonstrations of Egypt’s wonders were merely plays, they contained, even at the end of Egyptian history, a nub of ancient truth. All of those who have come in contact with the truth of Egypt will recognise this reality and the ancient archetypal power which it radiates.
The antiquity of Egypt focused the archetypal promptings of men living in societies around the Mediterranean and, ultimately, far beyond it. Over the centuries following the end of Egypt’s dominance its myth grew, to become an essential part of the intellectual stock of the Western world. The myth of Egypt was released into the modern world largely as a
consequence of the invasion of Egypt undertaken by the young Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798.2
Not a man much given to exaggeration or bombast, for indeed he had little need for either, Napoleon described Egypt as ‘the most important country in the world’. Yet to speak thus of a country whose habitable land surface is approximately equal to that of Belgium may, at first sight, seem something of an overstatement.
After all, even in Napoleon’s day, Egypt was not only a relatively small country, it was hopelessly backward, a disregarded province of the Ottoman Empire which, though its rule was a good deal more creditable than is usually admitted, particularly by the successors of those states which eventually dismembered it, was not notable for concerning itself greatly with the advancement or aspirations of its diverse subject peoples.
The Turkish élite lived in conditions of agreeable and indulgent degeneracy, indulging in every vice at whim, often with an ingenuity which would have impressed Tiberius. The Mamluks, that very strange selfperpetuating body of noble slave warriors whose addiction to homosexuality was apparently one of the criteria for advancement in their order, were still at large in the land, ruling it with caprice and, sometimes, with extraordinary elegance. Life for the native Egyptians, if not intolerable, was not greatly to be envied, subject to the depredations of the tax-gatherers and the threat of the bastinado or worse.
But one knows what Napoleon means. Even in his day the writings of the ancients, especially the Greek and Roman historians and geographers, had given a sense of Egypt’s occult, seemingly impenetrable mystery. The Greeks wrote of Egypt with wonder; the Romans pillaged it and in doing so first introduced its great treasury of sculpture to Europe.
Two of the most influential writers on matters Egyptian in late antiquity were Diodorus and Plutarch. The former, writing in the lifetime of Julius Caesar, described Egypt at length in Biblioteca Historica. He was an enthusiast for the god Osiris who, leading his army east and west, brought civilisation to all peoples that he encountered, an amalgam, as it were, of the legendary Senwosret and the benign god Dionysos. Much of what he wrote is accurate reporting; he saw and described the monuments and he tried to understand something of the nature of the Egyptian world. He was of great influence in transmitting the image of Egypt as a land of marvels to Europe.
Somewhat earlier Plutarch, a priest of Delphi in the second century BC, provided much of the learned information on which the mystical image of Egypt was based. In particular he was responsible for the transmission of the myths of Isis and Osiris into the European consciousness. The importance of the Isis archetype, in particular, to the acceptance of
Christian imagery in Europe can hardly be exaggerated.
In late medieval times both these authors, and other writers like Strabo and Pliny who approached Egypt from more specialised interests, were translated and keenly studied. Other texts, of more doubtful provenance like the supposed writings of Hermes Trismegistus, who was believed to be a contemporary of Moses, added considerably to the myth of Egypt if they
did not add materially to the store of factual knowledge about the Nile civilisation.3
From time to time adventurous travellers entered Egypt and returned to Europe, full of marvellous tales. The primacy of Egypt, though still veiled, could yet be discerned among the nations, however dimly. The Crusaders had done something to accustom Europe to the fact of Egypt. The king of France had contrived to have himself captured on Egyptian territory; earlier, to the fury of the Church, the Hohenstauffen Emperor Frederick II had negotiated a treaty with the Shia Caliph in Cairo and, in the process, recovered Jerusalem, an outcome which all the armies of the West, the ecclesiastics and everyone else had absolutely failed to do.4
Frederick, in consequence, was never forgiven, especially not by the Papacy which, incidentally, had appropriated some of the trappings of kings of Egypt— the portable throne, the ostrich feather fans, the seven-stepped platform on which the throne itself stood—to supplement their own state. Napoleon knew that Egypt lay at a point which, judged from the
Eurocentric view of the world which had prevailed for long before and was to prevail for long after his time, seemed plumb centre between the eastern and western hemispheres, and between north and south.
To the Arabs, Cairo was the ‘Mother of the World’, but Cairo was a city-come-lately, a mere eight hundred years old in Napoleon’s time. Egyppt, very definitely, could be seen as the world’s mother, and Napoleon, though speaking undoubtedly of the country’s strategic importance, seems to have apprehended this admittedly rather mystical point.
Napoleon invaded Egyppt principally with the objective of containing the imperial pretensions of England, which he rightly saw as the enemy of French expansionism in Europe and beyond. Where Napoleon’s conduct was so remarkable was that in his preparations for the capture of Egypt he included the recruitment of a band of France’s most distinguished scholars, scientists, writers and artists of the day, to accompany the Army which he had assembled. Their brief was to study and record the antiquities of Egyppt and to publish their findings to the world.
Napoleon lost Egyppt but the world gained an immeasurable treasure. The immediate result of the work of the savants whom he carried with him was the massive and majestic Description de l’Egypte published in fifteen elephant volumes between 1809 and 1829.
The Description had a profound effect on scholarly awareness of the riches which Egyppt held. It was not of course the first such survey— one thinks of Norden, of the Antiquities, Natural History,
Ruins and other Curiosities of Egypt, Nubia and Thebes, first published in 1755, of Montfaucon’s massive Antiquité expliquée et representée en figures (1719–1724), and many, many more—but the Description was incomparably the most comprehensive, replete with wonderful drawings of the Egypptian countryside, monuments, people, costume, architecture, wildlife, plants and flowers. It was followed, throughout the nineteenth century, by a river of publications on all aspects of life in the Nile Valley which, if they did not match the splendour of the Description added substantially to the fields of knowledge which it had first defined.
Not the least of these, published also in France, was the work of Baron Denon, who had accompanied Napoleon.
Voyages en Haute et Basse Egypte contains some of the finest drawings of sites in Egypt before the depredations either of the archaeologists or the modern world had harmed them. ~Michael Rice, Egypt’s Legacy The Archetypes of Western
Civilization 3000–30BC, Page 198-203
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