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The gods of agriculture bow their heads by degrees before the sun-gods who tend to draw to themselves all Egyptian worship; rude country representations connected with the idea of fertility being discredited before the religion of the royal temples which was directed mainly to the god of light. Was the Earliest Religion Monotheistic?
All Egypt worships the sun under the names of Ra and Horus. In honor of Ra, the lofty obelisks, or symbols of the sun's rays, are erected, each of which has its own name and priests. With the sun-gods are joined the goddesses of the heavens, Nut, Hather, Isis, and others. But Osiris became the most famous sun-god. His worship was originally at Abydos and Busiris.
Ra, the solar disc, was enthroned at Heliopolis; and sun-gods were numerous among the home deities. Horus the sun, and Ra the sun-god of Heliopolis, so permeated each other that none could say where the one began and the other ended. Each of the feudal gods representing the sun cherished pretensions to universal dominion. The goddesses shared in supreme power.
Let us choose first the greatest name: a sunward-gazing spirit, and, it may be, one of the very Sun-Gods. The pilgrim to Concord who stops for a moment in the village library to study French's statue of Emerson will notice the asymmetrical face. On one side it is the face of a keen Yankee farmer, but seen from the other side it is the countenance of a seer, a world's man.
Many of them are sun-gods, or gods of the morning and evening, and their stories cannot differ very widely from each other, but they belong to different districts of the country; that is what constitutes their difference from each other, and keeps them separate. The Great Gods also are Local.
When we find certain gods invested with solar functions it does not follow that they were originally sun-gods such functions may be a necessary result of their preëminence. Out of the great mass of Babylonian and Assyrian deities we may select a few whose cults illustrate the method of development of the religious conceptions. +756+. Babylonia.
Some perhaps did, but he was certain that nothing not even time could dim the picture that was now in his mind: the hill in the flat, the girl sitting upon the rock beside him, her eyes illuminated with a soft, tender light; her breeze-blown hair which he had kissed; which the Sun-Gods had kissed as, coming down from the mountains, they had bathed the hill with the golden light of the evening.
THE HEBREW RELIGION Such, in brief, were the beginnings of a religion as unique as it was elevated in its character, a religion which stood from the outset in mortal antagonism to the Egyptian worship of sun-gods, and to the star-worship, the service of Baal, and of sensual or savage divinities joined with him, to that service which was diffused through the Semitic nations of western Asia.
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