Is Ancient Egyptian Religion Completely Misunderstood?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I think this may be a Great Debates kind of topic, but my ideas are all so vague and shakey and I’m guessing at things and pulling on rumors that I got from sources I don’t trust at all. In other words, I’m citeless.

Growing up as a young teen in upstate NY, there was a large community of Afrocentrics (I really hope this doesn’t turn into a discussion bashing Afrocentrists). A subgroup of AC had some very interesting ideas about Ancient Egypt. In addition to believing that white folks had lied about Ancient Egypt’s blackness, they also wrote a lot of books about Ancient Egypt’s ideas about religion.

As I was taught by these Afrocentrists…Ancient Egyptians didn’t really believe in all those gods the way we think they did. Those gods were actually representations of different aspects of a man. So the devil wasn’t a devil like in the bible, but rather, a representation of the wicked and weaker parts of a man.

In other words, they believed that Ancient Egyptians were pretty much atheists. Any ‘gods’ that they truly believed in were just humans. Once a human reached a certain level of understanding, they became a god. And of course, Pharaohs where gods.

Now, if you point out to these folks that there is evidence that the Ancient Egyptians did indeed believe in a ‘higher power’ they would say that white scientists misinterpreted that because they didn’t have the understanding to realize what the Ancients were really all about.

There are two kinds of ACs out there. There are those who are highy educated and there are those who aren’t. I admit that most of my conversations on this topic have been with the uneducated kind of AC. But I wonder if they are on to something. Anyone?

2

While I find it perhaps plausible that modern understanding of ancient Egypt, backed up by the research of many years of scientific archeology, may be incomplete or incorrect, I find it much less plausible that some random group of people in upstate New York has somehow happened to come up with a fuller, more complete, and more correct understanding by, what? Pulling stuff out of their ass?

3

No, I think I told the story incorrectly. I was just trying to create an atmosphere of the basis of my crazy theory. The Afrocentric movement is actually not an ‘upstate NY’ thing. But that’s where I was raised so…that’s where they got me.

4

Well, it’s hard to judge their claims without some understanding of what they have to back them up.

5

That’s true. I think I was hoping that someone had already considered this topic and had some insight to offer. But I will try to remember some particular books I have read and then return to the thread with more info.

6

When approaching the topic, it pays to remember that we have a fragmentary knowledge of a religion that existed for several thousand years. Across the time that we think of as “Ancient Egypt” that religion changed. Old Kingdom Egyptians didn’t necessarily have the same beliefs as Roman-era Egyptians.

7

I don’t have any experience at all with this topic as it pertains to Afrocentrists, but we did discuss this a fair amount in my art history classes in college. The overall idea many of my professors seemed to embrace is that, as in many other historic eras, there were some people who believed literally everything the religion dictated, like there really is a goddess who has a cow’s head, and others who thought it was more of a metaphor, and still others who thought the whole thing was a fairy tale but that it was valuable because of cultural traditions … and then some guys who thought it was all bunk. The key thing to remember about the ancient Egyptians is that they had a LONG history and the ones living toward the end definitely viewed the ones toward the beginning as more primitive people.

Going a little off-topic, I think this theory has the most evidence when it comes to the Greeks … early on, most of the religious art seems to have been viewed as literal, then as the culture ages, you get more people who see it as metaphor, and then a backlash of people who are like fundamentalist worshipers of the cult of Zeus or whatever.

8

The ancient egyptians didn’t have a “devil” or anything similar.

To my knowledge, and letting aside the case of the Pharaohs, the only man who has been eventually divinized in Egypt is Imhotep.
More generally, and still to my knowledge, the ancient Egyptians didn’t leave any hint that they were atheists, but tons of written statements to the contrary.

9

Right. For instance, I’ve read about Akhenaten establishing a monotheistic religion by forcing the Egyptians to abondon other gods to worship Aten exclusively.

But I am curious…is it possible that the Ancient Egyptians were basically atheists who only believed in gods symbolically?
To Smeghead: I think I am failing at communicating the kind of discussion I was hoping for. I am not trying to confirm or dispute any specific claims by any specific group. I was really just hoping someone other than Afrocentrists had heard of this theory and could discuss it with me. I’m not here to advocate for the theory. But I will try to find some books that discuss it and post the titles here.

10

It’s certainly possible that some of them did; particularly among the more educated in the later eras. My gut feeling is that the average Egyptian commoner, busily grubbing a living out of the fields and/or laboring on state projects probably had a literal faith in his gods.

11

It is very difficult to apply modern sensibilities to ancient cultures.
It may well be that to the ancient Egyptians the difference we make between symbolic reality and ‘real’ reality was not as profound as it is in our modern world-view.

I don’t think that a culture that spent a great deal of time building temples and necropoli, and had a powerful priestly caste could properly be called ‘atheist’.

12

Not true.

Apep was the original Evil God, personification of Chaos and Darkness.

Set was sometimes the big baddie too.

13

Yeah, I was thinking of Set. Afrocentrists teach that he was the god of Chaos, so in effect, the opposite of order, and therefore, the devil. The myths of him fighting with Horus were often used to set him up as the bad guy.

But technically, I guss it’s true, he wasn’t a devil. I was just trying to make a point and it was kind of a sloppy point.

14

Not wanting to derail this great tread, but some modern Satanists split from Anton LaVey back in 1975 to form the Temple of Set. But, my guess is that the ancient worshipers of Set would be quite wroth with the modern worshipers.

15

So…pretty much like now, then. (Substituting Old Dude With a Beard for goddess who has a cow’s head, of course.)

I suspect this is probably the closest to the truth, although I don’t have a cite, just a working understanding of human behavior. Those peasants in the fields are probably working a bit too low on Maslow’s Hierarchy to give it much thought one way or the other, but interested enough in eating and staying alive to pray to whomever the people with the spears tell them to, people in power tend to use religion to stay in power whether they believe in it literally or not, and young hotheaded young men like to piss off those people in power by telling them that what they believe is stupid and full of lies. Somewhere in there are mixed in some actual believers, of course, and when they get hold of the spears, things get ugly for a few centuries…

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard this claim from other “Ancient Egyptian” worshipers (ie., not Afrocentrists), some of whom claim not to be Recreationists, but actually have “the real information” and practice as it was in the day. To which my first question is always, “What day in which century?” and I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer. The Recreationists, on the other hand, almost always see the Egyptian gods and goddesses as either metaphor or many facets of one Divine, of which humans have a piece as well, but they tend not to claim they’re following the Original Ancient Egyptian Path (though they may claim to have recreated it, hence the name).

16

I don’t see too much shocking or surprising about this idea. If you look at any religion, you’ll find different levels of understanding or interpretation. Hinduism is a easy one to look at like this, but with some imagination you can see how it’s true for stuff like Christianity as well.

On the first level, you have the old, village level animist beliefs that basically amount to hoping for good luck and trying to ward off bad luck. At it’s most basic, this level doesn’t really have a coherent set of beliefs or literal interpretation- it’s a lot like avoiding black cats or feeling like it’s a good day when you see a rainbow. It’s more about the ritual that the belief, and nobody ever thought too hard about interpreting it literally. This is the guy who prays when he hits turbulence on the plan, or the girl who habitually lights some incense at the shrine.

Also on this level you find “religion as culture.” where rituals exist outside of any coherent belief and are considered to have value on their own right without needing any specific beliefs (like you see with many modern Shinto practitioners.)

As this gets more organized (or is specifically co-opted into the larger state religion for the sake of control of building identity) you may see a fixation on one or more entities. This is where your “praying to saints” or specific gods or whatever comes in. This is the level where literal interpretations start to come out. This is the point where literal interpretations come in.

Next, we get to full-on organized religion as understood by the priests and other religious authorities. I think on this level, people tend to search for something more coherent, and begin to understand (or rediscover) that their religion has metaphoric, rather than literal value. That said, they are part of a power structure that pays them to serve those operating on a more literal level, and they are likely to continue purveying the literal interpretation to the masses.

Finally, you have the heaviest thinkers and philosophers. They can remove religion completely from any literal interpretation, and seek a deeper understanding of the world using the metaphors of religion.

If you look at Hinduism, you can find everything from a superstitious animist religion, a non-theistic set of rituals, a popular polytheism, a deeply philosophical monotheistic religion, and a really heavy atheistic way of looking at the world. I’m sure Ancient Egyptian religions where pretty much the same.

17

I actually never really thought about this before. Somehow, I naively thought that they all were in agreement about the interpretations of the religion. Obviously, like others have pointed out, the civilization was around for thousands of years. Of course there were many who had many different ideas about what and who, if anything, they were worshipping.

18

Personally, I doubt there were many atheists in the ancient world. If you don’t believe in the gods, how do you explain the sun rising each morning? How do you explain rain, or plants growing from seeds? Religion was the only science they had.

They couldn’t think of the universe as clockwork, because they had no clocks; it couldn’t be automatic because the concept of automatic didn’t exist. The idea that something could happen without someone or something deciding that it should happen was alien to their way of thinking.

19

This is probably true. But, wouldn’t it be great if they had more of an understanding than we realized? I mean, they had some grasp of some serious astronomy, right? And they must have understood some higher math in order to erect the monuments that they erected.

And I do believe there are cultures, untouched by modern man, that are basically atheist. They don’t need a god to understand the sun rising. They simply accept that it does.

20

The most likely reason is indifference. Who cares why the sun rises or sets when you’ve got barley to harvest and are busy thinking about that cute girl who sells figs at the market? In the modern world, there is plenty we can’t really explain with science, and most of us don’t spend our lives freaking out about it. A lot of us are willing to accept the first plausible explanation, without really thinking about it, and get on with our lives.

Agnosticism, solipsism and nihilism know no age. It doesn’t take any special technology to realize “Hey, the nature of the universe is ultimately unknowable/an illusion/meaningless.”