Despite the importance of temples
and their architectural dominance, the evidence for cult does not point to mass
participation in temple religion.
The archaeological material may be misleading because in addition to major
temples there were many local sanctuaries that may have responded more directly
to the concerns and needs of those who lived around them. From some periods
numerous votive offerings are preserved from a few temples. Among these are
Early Dynastic and Old Kingdom provincial temples, but the fullest evidence is
from New Kingdom temples of Hathor at Thebes and several frontier sites and
from the Late and Ptolemaic periods (664–30 BCE).
Although votive offerings show
that significant numbers of people took gifts to temples, it is difficult to
gauge the social
status of donors, whose intentions are seldom indicated, probably in
part for reasons of decorum. Two
likely motives are a disinterested pious donation for the deity and offering in
the hope of obtaining a specific benefit. Many New Kingdom offerings to Hathor
relate to human fertility and thus belong to the second of these categories.
Late period bronze statuettes are often inscribed with a formula requesting
that the deity represented should “give life” to the donor, without stating a
specific need. These may be more generally pious donations, among which can
also be counted nonroyal dedications of small parcels of land to temples. These
donations are recorded on stelae from the New Kingdom onward. They parallel the
massive royal endowments to temples of land and other resources, which resulted
in their becoming very powerful economic and political institutions.
Apart from the donation of offerings to
conventional cult temples, there was a vast Late period expansion in animal cults.
These might be more or less closely related to major deities. They involved a
variety of practices centering on the mummification and burial
of animals. The principal bull cults, which gave important oracles, focused on
a single animal kept in a special shrine. The burial of an Apis bull
was a major occasion involving vast expenditure. Some animals, such as
the sacred ibis (connected
with Thoth), were kept, and buried, in millions. The dedication of burial
seems to have counted as a pious act. The best-known area for these cults and
associated practices is the necropolis of northern Ṣaqqārah, which served the
city of Memphis.
Numerous species were buried there, and people visited the area to
consult oracles and
to spend the night in a temple area and receive healing dreams. A few people
resided permanently in the animal necropolis in a state akin to monastic
seclusion.
There are two further important groups of
evidence for pious and reciprocal relations
between people and gods. One is proper names of all periods, the majority of
which are meaningful utterances with religious content. For example, names
state that deities “show favor” to or “love” a child or its parents. From the
end of the New Kingdom (c. 1100 BCE), names commonly refer to the consultation
of oracles during pregnancy, alluding to
a different mode of human-divine relations. A second source is a group of
late New Kingdom inscriptions recounting episodes of affliction that
led to people perceiving that they had wronged a god. These texts, which
provide evidence of direct pious relations, are often thought to show a
transformation of religious attitudes in that period, but allusions to
similar relations in Middle Kingdom texts suggest that the change was as much
in what was written down as in basic attitudes.Piety was one of many modes of religious
action and relations. Much of religion concerned with attempts to comprehend and
respond to the unpredictable and the unfortunate. The activities involved often
took place away from temples and are little known. In later periods, there was
an increasing concentration of religious practice around temples; for earlier
times evidence is sparse. The essential questions people asked, as in many
religious traditions, were why something had happened and why it had happened
to them, what would be an appropriate response, what agency they should turn
to, and what might happen in the future. To obtain answers to these questions, people
turned to oracles and to other forms of divination, such as consulting seers or
calendars of lucky and unlucky days. From the New Kingdom and later, questions
to oracles are preserved, often on such mundane matters
as whether someone should cultivate a
particular field in a given year. These cannot have been presented only at
festivals, and priests must have addressed oracular questions to gods within
their sanctuaries. Oracles of gods also played an important part in dispute
settlement and litigation in some communities.
A vital focus of questioning was the world
of the dead. The recently deceased might exert influence on the living for good
or for bad. Offerings to the dead, which were required by custom, were
intended, among other purposes, to make them well disposed. People occasionally
deposited with their offerings a letter telling the deceased of their problems
and asking for assistance. A few of these letters are complaints to the
deceased person, alleging that he or she is afflicting the writer. This written
communication with the dead was confined to the very few literate members of
the population, but it was probably part of a more widespread oral practice.
Some tombs of prominent people acquired minor cults that may have originated in
frequent successful recourse to them for assistance.
Offerings to the dead generally did not
continue long after burial, and most tombs were robbed within a generation or
so. Thus, relations with dead kin probably focused on the recently deceased.
Nonetheless, the dead were respected and feared more widely. The attitudes
attested are almost uniformly negative. The dead were held accountable for much
misfortune, both on a local and domestic level and in the broader context of
the state. People were also concerned that, when they died, those in the next
world would oppose their entry to it as newcomers who might oust the less
recently dead. These attitudes show that among many possible modes of
existence after death, an important conception was
one in which the dead remained near the living and could return and disturb
them. Such beliefs are rare in the official mortuary literature.
A prominent aspect of practical religion was magic.
There is no meaningful distinction between Egyptian religion and magic. Magic
was a force present in the world from the beginning of creation and was
personified as the god Heka,
who received a cult in some regions. Magic could be invoked by using
appropriate means and was generally positive, being valuable for counteracting
misfortune and in seeking to achieve ends for which unseen help was necessary.
Magic also formed part of the official cult. It could, however, be used for
antisocial purposes as well as benign ones.
There is a vast range of evidence for magical practice, from amulets to
elaborate texts. Much magic from the Greco-Roman period mixed Egyptian and
foreign materials and invoked new and exotic beings. Preserved magical texts
record elite magic rather than general practice.
Prominent among magical practitioners, both in folklore and,
probably, in real life, were “lector priests,” the officiants in temple cults
who had privileged access to written texts. Most of the vast corpus of funerary
texts was magical in character
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