ABSTRACT
The Egyptian system of uranographic representation has been outlined and many of its details have been identified in the chapters on the astronomical mythology. It has now to be shown that the so-called “ legends of creation “ chiefly known as Semitic are the detritus of the Egyptian wisdom. These legends did not wait for their beginning until the Mosaic Pentateuch had been carried round the wide circumference of the world either by the scattered Jewish people or the Christian missionaries. As we have seen, the Semitic theologians did not know enough of the ancient sign-language to distinguish the evil serpent from the good, the great Earth-mother from the chimerical dragon of the deep, or the beneficent spirits of elemental nature from the Sebau, the Sami or fiendish forces of external phenomena. The Semitic versions of the legends, Babylonian, Assyrian, or Hebrew, mainly reproduce the debris of the astronomical mythology, which has so often been reduced to the status of the nursery-tale. It is their fatal defect that they are not the original documents, and have no firsthand authority. In these the primitive wisdom of old Egypt has been perverted, and the mythical beginnings, which had their own meaning, have been transmogrified into what is herein termed a cosmogonical creation. For example, the mythical abyss or deep was not the mother of all things. That was the Mother-earth in the abyss, the nun, or firmamental water. As the Mother-earth she brought forth her elemental progeny in and from the abyss. Hence she was the wateress, or wet-nurse who suckled her young within the earth, as it is said of the monster Tiamat, because, as primordial bringer-forth, she was the Mother-earth. In the Babylonian legends of creation the seven associate-gods, who are the creators in the Egyptian mythos, have been converted into the seven evil spirits of a later theology. And on one of the tablets (W.A.I.4.I.1.36, 37) it is said of these seven evil spirits, “ The woman from the loins of the man they bring forth.” Thus the creation of woman is made to be the work of seven evil spirits, who, as the Kamite wisdom witnesses, did not originate as wicked spirits or as powers of evil. (Sayce, H. L., p. 395.) The legends of creation are known, more or less, as Hebrew, Phœnician, Babylonian, and Assyrian, but as Kamite they have not been known. And when the mythical representations of natural phenomena first, portrayed by the Egyptians were turned into cosmographical creations by the Semites, they had no verifiable meaning either as history or mythology. Even Lenormant held that the Chaldaic and Hebrew versions had one common origin and were not derived from each other, but he made no attempt to trace that origin to the Egyptian astronomical mythology, which was to him a sealed and secret book. Egypt's knowledge of beginnings was laboriously derived by the long, unceasing verification of scientific naturalists. Their ancient wisdom did not fall from heaven ready-made, nor had it any claims to a miraculous birth. It was dug for and quarried out from the rock of reality. It was smelted, shaped, stamped, and warranted for current coin as perpetual symbol of the truth, however primitive. It was and is, to-day and for ever, a coinage genuinely golden, though the figures on it may be sometimes difficult to decipher. The ancient wisdom in the Hebrew books has been converted into a spurious specie, and passed off on the ignorant and unsuspecting as a brand-new issue from the mint of God. According to Egyptian thought, “ creation “ was mainly limited to the bringing forth of life—the life of water, fish and fowl, animal, reptile, and other forms from the meskhen or creatory of earth, when this was represented by the womb of Apt the pregnant water-cow. This idea of birth from the womb is portrayed in Apt the first Great Mother (fig., p. 124). Next the idea of birth from the womb is repeated in the making of Amenta with the Tuat as the creatory or the place of rebirth for the manes. And thirdly, in the astronomical mythology the meskhen, womb or place of birth, was constellated in the “ thigh” of the cow as the sign of rebirth in the celestial rebirthplace. We have now to formulate the Egyptian origins of the creation legends that have come to us in a Semitic guise or disguise.
