A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries

by Mircea Eliade

Apparently a common theme among religions.

Does this refer specifically to the Egyptian cosmology, or to all cosmology.

Implying that the Egyptians envisioned the world as a machine created and set in motion during the mythical "First Time."

It’s like mitzvah.

It represents what does not quite exist, or what almost exists. Not existing, it cannot be destroyed.

An inner sanctum within a temple. The Naos was not open to the public.

Somewhere other than here.

Relating to the stars.

We go to the same source from which our crops emerge?

Which makes sense given the role and purpose of pyramids.

Mythology never seems to run short of ferrymen. There must be something about crossing a river.

Does each pharaoh individually rule his own celestial Egypt, or do they merge into one pharaoh who rules the celestial Egypt?

Related to salvation

The nine gods (or eight gods plus Ptah) worshipped at Heliopolis and mentioned earlier.

Changing him not so much from living to dead as from inert to active. Is that a valid distinction?

Making Osiris not only a king of the dead, but a fertility god who dies and is revived in time with the seasons.

Every Pharaoh begins as Horus. Every Pharaoh become Osiris.

The footnote makes an interesting point.

Is it coincidental that the religion of a community whose life is so dominated by the periodic flood of the Nile is so deeply suffused with cyclical elements?

The “Order?” Does this means the order of the world, or sort of an Egyptian Tao Te Ching?

The living become deified through death. It is something of a comforting thought.

Our two religious traditions: Mesopotamian and Egyptian, have both come, in different manners, to the common idea of the soul. Or, maybe, each came to an idea that modern westerners can assimilate into our own idea of the soul.

Obviously not the Egyptian name.

So originally only the pharaoh, presumably because of their quasi-divinity, enjoyed an afterlife.

The name for the serpent attached to a Pharaoh's headdress. It was apparently a symbol of power.

Are these crises a result of a change in the world, or just a change in what we make of the world? Have things actually gotten worse, or do we just not expect them to be bad in the way we once did?

So this soul is a separate distinct consciousness that can actually disagree. Or maybe it’s just a drawn out metaphor, the way we envision a person “talking to themself.”

As the gods rule the world the Pharaoh rules Egypt and each of us rules ourselves? Each is a miniature version of its predecessor. There is also this idea of Pharaoh as mitzvah. By doing right things and being “correct” the pharaoh makes the world run as it should. When the pharaoh does not do the things that should be done it fucks up the whole Tao Te Ching of the universe.

So Amon is going to replace Osiris and Horus as the central force in Egyptian religion.

There is also some reason to suspect that the Hyksos did not invade, but had already dwelled in Egypt. One of the dynasties, I think the 13th, was a regional power that governed over foreigners who were settled in the eastern delta, near Avaris, the later Hyksos capital. The foreigners had been settled there intentionally, or at least with the central governments consent, and the cities of the eastern delta served as hubs of trade between Egypt and the Levant. The theory holds that rather than invade, the already present foreigners took advantage of the central government’s collapse to assert their own authority.

Did they mistakenly tolerate the independence of Upper Egypt, or was asserting hegemony over Upper Egypt the extent of their realistic capabilities?

Why was Seth associated with sky gods?

Meaning that Seth was already prominent in that region?

The first dynasty of the Middle Kingdom

Were the Hyksos natives of Canaan? Some apparently were, or at least their names and the names of the gods they worshipped were both Western Semitic.

Is this bad?

What is meant by the term a "universal god?" Was he to become God in the expansive sense of the Christian God.

Akhen-Aten did not create monotheism. It emerged with the acceptance of Amon-Re as a universal God, apparently a The God.

Representing the clergy’s rise as a political force within Late Bronze Age Egypt,

This is the pharaoh outflanking the clergy.

There was very little description of the odd process of combining deities common to Egyptian mythology, and little description of Amon as he was perceived prior to being combined with Re.

Ma'at was always the governing principle of the Egyptian pantheon. Did the meaning, or interpretation of the meaning, change to emphasize "truth" over "justice" and/or "order." Did Egyptian thought change to allow these concepts to be differentiated by one generation when earlier generations would have seen them as inseparable?

How is Aton, the sun disc, different from Amon-Re, the sun?

The emphasis on the Atun's status as sole divinity is a bit self-conscious, as would be expected in the context of a transition away from polytheism. Was Amon-Re also referred to with such intentionally unitary language, or was his position seen as somehow more secure, and less in need of reinforcement?

If the Amarna period was a salvo in the struggle between the pharaohs and the clergy, it also apparently represented Akhenatun’s sincere religious beliefs.

I’ll make certain to tell everyone whose lives there in the past 3,000 years that all the good Egyptians were already gone.

The youthful Re ages and dies, transitioning into Osiris, who traverses the underworld and emerges again as Re.

That’s an odd one. In many places, I could see this as an inference from the fact that the sun appears to descend into the sea at sunset. Egypt, however, meets the sea in the north, so the sun does not even appear to descend into the sea. It seems odd to associate the sun and it’s heat with the waters of chaos.

The belief that they are necessary stages of the same cycle.

Doing ma’at, presumably.