Not That Kind Of Fetish

Can you clear up the animal/human egyptian stuff some more? I find it interesting!

I’m honestly not sure any explanation will ‘clear it up’ but I’ll give it a go, since the original post has so many reblogged comments that misunderstand things. 

I kinda went into it a bit here in this post, and a little in this one, but I’ll reiterate it here for posterity. 

Egyptian gods appear to have animal heads, but, in truth, the animal headed form is merely to demonstrate the duality of the god - the animal and the human. (I want to point out at this juncture that not every Egyptian god has an animal form. Some are simply human, and others have forms that are anthropomorphised inanimate objects). Duality was important to the Egyptians as they were intrinsically linked to the world around them and often their religious mythology is deeply linked to the natural world. This is why we see themes such as life/death structure/chaos male/female animal/human etc. They equated what they saw in their lives as aspects of the divine. 

One such example is the god Khepri. Khepri is the god of the Morning/Rising sun, and was responsible for pushing the sun across the sky. Khepri is depicted as, in most cases, as simply a Scarab beetle, and sometimes with the body of a man whose entire head is a scarab beetle. The Egyptians took inspiration from the natural world to explain the divine, so they saw the humble dung beetle (that’s what a Scarab beetle is) pushing it’s ball of dung about, and also its babies hatching out from this dung ball seemingly out of nowhere. The ball of dung they equated with the Sun moving across the sky, thus assuming that a divine scarab was pushing the sun in a similar manner. Khepri took on a ‘creator’ aspect as the Egyptians saw the dung beetle seemingly creating life from nothing, though in reality they’re just laying eggs within the dung ball that eventually hatch. But this wasn’t something the Egyptians understood, so they believed that the scarab beetle had the power to create life from nothing, much like their own creation myth of life springing forth from a mound of earth in the waters of chaos. Dung ball = mound that emerged from the waters of chaos. Thus, when naming the god, the Egyptians chose a word xpr (kheper) which means ‘to come into being’ to relate to the creation of life and also the rising of the sun. And how is xpr written? With a Scarab beetle! Everything has it’s place in Ancient Egypt. As for the human body with a scarab beetle head form, well that’s more of a form that in art allows the Egyptians to show the Scarab beetle doing humanoid things in religious scenes. 

For gods like Anubis, who are depicted with the head of their animal form, it’s different. The duality works the same, insomuch as the form you see (Golden Wolf headed human) is just a combination to show that the god has two forms and two kinds of power - the divine human form and the divine animal form. In most cases you would never see the human form as you were only allowed to see a God’s true form after death, so it was prohibited to depict the god as human (though there’s a rare depiction of Anubis in human form at Seti’s temple at Abydos). Basically, the Egyptians believed that images could magically come to life so depicting a god as a mortal human would cause the god to die. No one wants that.* So, the Egyptians combined the Animal and Human in order to show the god legitimately in a scene.

* I am aware that there are gods that only have a human form, but they’ve always got divine markers such as headdresses that mark them as ‘not mortal human’ but a god, therefore they wouldn’t be subject to them to the same rules. Isis and Nepthys for instance have their names in hieroglyphs as headdresses to mark them as different, and Hathor has her cow horns and sun disk.

However, when I say ‘animal form’ I do not mean, and neither did the Egyptians, a walking talking animal that does everything a human does. Anubis’ animal form is not a walking, talking Golden Wolf in human clothing. When I say ‘animal form’ I mean a literal animal. Just a wolf. Nothing else. Every wolf an Egyptian saw they would believe was a form of Anubis visiting the mortal realm. 

Unlike in Greek Mythology, where the gods were essentially human (though looking at Zeus…goddamn Zeus) and everyone knew they lived on Mount Olympus, Egyptian gods had no such thing. The Ancient Egyptians believed that their gods lived on the same plane of existence, but on another level. Kinda like ghosts I guess? There but not really. So they would manifest as something. Khepri was the scarab beetle pushing the dung in a ball and in turn rose the sun. Dogs/Wolves hung about in the necropolis so they saw that as a manifestation of Anubis guarding the dead (even though those dogs were most likely eating the dead…), which also gives way to the epithet of Anubis on his Mound (i.e. Anubis who sits upon a mastaba guarding the tomb). Bastet was the cat hunting mice around the grain stores so that the harvest wouldn’t be ruined. The Egyptians would feed these animals as a form of worship,** and that’s how they ended up with so many cats in the house. 

** I say worship in a very loose sense. The worship of gods like Osiris, Isis, Amun, Mut, Khonsu etc was the prerogative of the Pharaoh and his phyles of priests (set of Priests for each god). Most Egyptians were not allowed into the major temples. In fact, they were not allowed past the first forecourt, and that was at festival time. The Egyptians believed that their Pharaoh was a demi-god and therefore their link between the gods and themselves. Only he was allowed to worship the gods, as it was Pharaoh’s job to maintain what’s known as Ma’at (cosmic order). If Pharaoh didn’t then the world would fall into chaos, which is why they tried to exorcise Akhentaten from the record because he did not maintain ma’at! Of course, Pharaoh couldn’t be in the temples for each god every day, so most of it was devolved to High Priests and their underlings. Regular Egyptians would not have worshipped the main pantheon, but rather the more minor domestic gods, such as Bes and Taweret, at home. Feeding cats would have fed into this more ‘loose’ worship.

But of course there was also the ‘human’ form, which meant that a god could come to you as a person and you wouldn’t even know it. Sekhmet could manifest as the general who leads the troops into battle, Taweret is the midwife who delivers your baby, Sobek is the fisherman responsible for the good haul of fish today etc etc. The depiction of them in one zoomorphic form is purely to demonstrate that they could be both and that human and animal forms were equal parts of their power and character.

I hope this clears some of it up!

Sources:

Silverman, D. (1991) Divinity and Deities in Ancient Egypt, In J. Baines, L. Lesko, & D. Silverman, Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths and Personal Practice. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. 7-87

Schoske. S & Wildung. D, (1992) Gott und Götter im Alten Ägypten. Berlin: Von Zabern

Meeks. D & Favard-Meeks. C, (1996) Divine Life of the Egyptian Gods (Hachette (original), 1993 / Cornell University (translation), 1996)

Assmann, J. (2001). The Search for God in Ancient Egypt.(D. Lorton, Trans.) Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press.

Hornung, E. (1982). Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. (J. Baines. Trans) Ithica & London: Cornell University Press