Jan Assmann (1938-2024), “Rise of Monotheism in the Ancient World 01: What is Polytheism?”
Recording and transcript below
Tuesday, 30 November 2004, 19:00 IDT
Van-Leer Institute
43 Jabotinsky Street
Jerusalem 9214116
ISRAEL
Chaired by Steven E. Aschheim
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
Department of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Lecture Summary: Any reflection about the nature of these new religious movements which we subsume under the term “monotheism” should start with an attempt towards a better understanding of “polytheism”. This will be topic of my first lecture. Ancient Egypt will serve as a paradigm of polytheism. The basic idea is that a polytheistic “pantheon” is not a random accumulation of deities but a structured system giving structure and meaning to the human world in its three dimensions of nature, polity and personal biography.
This lecture series was published as Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Madison, 2008).
Jan Assmann (1938-2024) was a leading scholar in the fields of Egyptology, memory and culture studies, comparative literature, and the history of religion. He studied at Heidelberg, Munich, Göttingen and Paris. He served as professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg from 1976 to 2003 and taught at several other universities in Europe, Israel, and the United States. His many awards included a 1996 Max Planck Award for Research, a German historians’ prize in 1998, and honorary degrees from several institutions of higher learning. He is the author of numerous books, including Moses the Egyptian, The Price of Monotheism, and Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism. Since 1968 he was married to Aleida née Bornkamm. They had 5 children.
Jan Assmann, “Rise of Monotheism in the Ancient World 01: What is Polytheism?”
30 November 2004
Transcribed by: Teresa Bergen, Skye Doney
Steven E. Aschheim: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’m delighted to see such a large and in many cases distinguished crowd. And unfortunately we have to begin with one of those absurd but absurdly necessary announcements for a Jerusalem lecture. Those ghastly apparati, please turn them off before we begin. Neither the polytheists nor the monotheists like telephones.
So, let me welcome you all to what we hope to be a very distinguished lecture series in the name of George Mosse. I don’t think we could have a much more distinguished opening lecture than Professor Jan Assmann. This will be a lecture series which will be held concurrently with our sister university, Madison, Wisconsin. The lecture series was opened a year ago by Professor Christopher Browning in Madison. And we tonight are opening it here with Professor Assmann.
This lecture series is part of a much wider and larger program which has already been functioning for a few years, but which we now, if you like, unveil to a larger public. And this is the George Mosse Exchange Program with the University of Madison and the Hebrew University. It is a very large program and for many of you, personal. In the first place, it consists of student exchanges. Students from Madison to Jerusalem, Jerusalem to Madison. And some of the very fine students who are already products of this program are sitting in this hall. I won’t embarrass you by asking you to get up. But let me assure you they are here. It is a program that also funds faculty exchanges. It is a program that has already had numerous very successful international conferences. It is a program that has a publication series, very thoughtfully including the publication of Hebrew manuscripts of promising young scholars. And we hope in the next few years to bring out such publications. This particular lecture series will also be published there. And we also have distinguished visits for short periods from scholars, Emilio Gentile, the student of fascism, visited Madison. And we will be hosting at the beginning of this coming academic year the distinguished classicist, Professor Fergus Millar (1935-2019).
So it is a remarkable program. It enables us to bring the senior scholars like Professor Jan Assmann here. [00:03:00] And I would just like to welcome and ask him to please stand up. Mr. John Tortorice, who is if you like the executive program director of the Mosse Program. (applause) He has come specially from Madison for this occasion. Does sterling work, as all the students will tell you. And also to thank very much Mr. Arik Dubnov, who’s become the administrator of the Program here. It’s because of him that we’re all sitting so comfortably here tonight.
So, before I speak about Professor Assmann, I don’t really have to say much about George Mosse, because I think he’s an exceedingly familiar and loved figure to Jerusalemites, at least those from the last ten or fifteen years who knew him. He was a superb and pioneering historian, a great friend, a teacher par excellence, and of course the most generous benefactor of this Program. It’s important to say that because he was determined not to have a monument or a building put up in his name. He wanted something alive. And that living presence is in the intellectual interchange in the people that we bring and the fact that all the time we actually are able to have discussions, some of which we hope will be lively and even provocative. George was very interested in religion. He wrote about it quite a lot. But I don’t really know what his views on polytheism or monotheism were.
I do know that he couldn’t speak Hebrew very well. And there’s just one story related to monotheism which I have to tell you. He used to go to restaurants in Jerusalem. And when he used to call the waiter, he used to say, “Adonai!” (laughter) And he always said, “I get magnificent service.” (laughter)
One thing is sure, though. He thrived on provocation. And one of the reasons that he thrived on provocation, on questioning taboos and conventions. And I’m sure he would have been utterly delighted with our speaker tonight, who is really well known for his powerful and refreshing questioning of orthodox views.
So let me turn now to our guest, Professor Jan Assman of Heidelberg University. Now anybody who knows me, would wonder why I, a cultural historian of the very late modern period, would want to invite an Egyptologist. Because Egyptology and these kinds of topics are completely foreign to me and almost impossible for me to understand. Anyone who has read any of Jan Assman’s books [00:06:00] will realize—and of course the one that I read was Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, will immediately know the answer to the question. How is it that somebody who deals with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can immediately tune in to Assmann’s work? And I think Jan Assmann has that very rare quality. It is really rare. I think someone like Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) had it, for instance, of rendering apparently obscure topics immediately accessible. Electrifying. Very much part of our own resonant and relevant problematic. His terms of reference are universal. And his framework is much philosophical and contemporary as it is strictly philological and historical. With his equally productive wife, Aleida, he has written one of the most important statements on the whole relation of culture, history and memory. In German, Kultur und Gedächtnis from 1998. His connections and insights are inevitably subtle and remarkably broad-ranging. His Moses the Egyptian is a tour de force. It’s a breathtaking trip through large slices of ancient and Western culture through to our own time. His theses are as provocative as they are brilliantly formulated. And I really hope that as this series proceeds, after the lectures we will engage in real dialogue and perhaps even argumentation. That depends upon this audience and the other audiences in the coming lectures.
Professor Assmann is a very familiar figure to Jerusalemites. He tells me that he’s been here at least fifteen times. Were I to list his awards, accomplishments and publications, we’d simply have to skip the lectures themselves. His CV casually lists 32 books and 450 articles. Thus far. His latest book—and we had this love of Mozart in common—which is still unpublished, is a book on The Magic Flute [Die Zauberflöte: Eine Oper mit zwei Gesichtern, 1791].
How he all does this is another ancient mystery that he will have to solve for us. Especially in the light of the fact that he and his wife have broken the entire German demographic profile and have raised five children.
Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me enormous pleasure to welcome Professor Jan Assmann. (applause)
[00:08:48]
Jan Assmann: Thank you, Steven, for this wonderful, warm, friendly, and also demanding introduction. I don’t know how to be able to live up to such a presentation. [00:09:00] And I’m of course extremely grateful for this invitation, which I think is a tremendous honor to be the first Mosse Lecturer in Jerusalem.
Well. Monotheism. Monotheism has become one of the most hotly debated topics in theological and intellectual circles at least in the Western world. Is this clear enough? Oh, yeah. Aha! Like this? Better? Okay. There are still empty seats in front. Okay? There are still people who are people sitting so uncomfortably on the stairs, there’s no reason to be accommodated in such an uncomfortable way. There are many seats up front, technically.
Before we start to enter this debate and to treat this topic ourselves, we should give some moments to the reflection why and in which context we ask the question and what precisely is the problem of monotheism that leads to debate and keeps it going. My impression is that it, it is this alleged revolutionary character. Its character of a break, of a major turn in history. A phenomenon of the Axial Age, so to speak. Of a kind of, even of collective conversion. Which may also account for some problematic implications, such as intolerance, violence, exclusivism and aggressive exclusive universalism. A similar debate had already occupied the eighteenth century in the context of Enlightenment and its struggle for emancipation from clerical and political control. Already then, more than 250 years ago, Voltaire (1694-1778) and others had pointed out the striking scenes of violence in the Hebrew Bible. And David Hume (1711-1776) had postulated a connection between monotheism and intolerance. The eighteenth century was also the time when the terms we are using today were coined. Monotheism, polytheism, pantheism, atheism, and so on.
With our modern debate, we have very much taken up the debate of the eighteenth century. In those times, it was the advent of Enlightenment that raised these discussions. Today it is inversely the unexpected return of religion and its digressive, revolutionary, and intolerant aspects which brought these questions again to the fore.
[00:12:00] For these reasons, the rise of monotheism is not a just a harmless historical topic. Rather it is the topic of a heated debate, a touchiness, means grasping the nettle, or even playing with dynamite. Whoever stresses its revolutionary character and its meaning of a major turn in human history is in our days running the risk of being understood as interpreting it as a turn for the worst. Pleading for a return to polytheism. And is even being suspected of antisemitism, since monotheism is a Jewish achievement.
I know what I’m talking about after more than five years living with polemical responses to this book Moses the Egyptian[: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, 1997] which Steven Aschheim has already mentioned. In this book I held the thesis that monotheism is a religion based on the distinction between true and false. That this distinction was alien to traditional religions, which in the light of this novel distinction became excluded as false. And labeled such as paganism, avodah zarah, idolatry, djahiliya, shirk, and so on. And that for this reason, monotheism can be described as a counter religion. Opposing and projecting what went before and what is going on outside itself. I meant this diagnosis not as a critique of monotheism, but as a framework to understand the role of Egypt in Biblical and subsequent Western intellectual history. Egypt being the symbol or paradigm of paganism and of the world out of which Israel had to move out, this is, has had to leave behind in order to enter the new world of monotheism. Seen against this background, the boldness of those blurring the distinction and bridging the gap and making Moses an Egyptian from John Spenser (1559-1614) in the seventeenth century up to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in the twentieth century, set out in full clarity. This was the story I wanted to tell in that book, but it has been read by some as a severe attack against monotheism. When I wrote Moses the Egyptian, I was not aware of playing with dynamite in stressing the revolutionary and polemical character of monotheism. By now, I’ve been taught better. And I am now trying to approach the topic with due caution and circumspection. This is one of the reasons why I’m so extremely grateful of having been given this second chance. (laughter)
[00:15:00]
Any reflection about the nature of those new religions, religious movements which since the eighteenth century we have come to subsume under the term monotheism, whether different movements in fact. So every reflection about monotheism should start with an attempt toward the better understanding of polytheism. Up till now, there is no valid theory of polytheism. There are, of course, many descriptions and histories of polytheistic religions such as Indian, Greek, Babylonian, Egyptian and so on. But no such thing like a coherent theory, a systematic theology of polytheism. At least of one polytheistic religion. The only religion that seems to make an exception is that of ancient Greece. But Greece, with its very elaborated and earliest aestheticized mythology seems to be a rather special case, not to be generalized. In studying ancient Egyptian religious texts, mostly through hymns my impression has always been to detect the system behind this vast material. These studies led me first to a more systematic understanding of what Egyptian polytheism and perhaps up to a certain degree, polytheism in general is about. And then as a later step, also to a new appraisal of its counterpart and opposite, namely, monotheism.
In order to explain this theory, let me start with some biographical reminiscences. Almost thirty years ago, I was asked by the editors of the Lexikon der Aegyptologie to contribute an article on the entry “Gott,” “God.” In looking for categories how to describe an Egyptian deity, I analyzed hundreds of Egyptian hymns. And came across a number of texts which distinguished three major forms of divine presence or manifestation: shapes, in Egyptian iru, transformation in Egyptian kheperu, and names. So, shapes or forms, transformation, and names. The term “shape” refers to the various cult images and representations of a deity in the temple cult. The term “transformation” refers to cosmic manifestations, such as sun, moon, stars, wind, light, fire, water, the Nile and its inundation, fertility, vegetation, and so on. And the term “name” refers not only to names [00:18:00] such as Osiris, Amun, and so on, but far beyond to everything that may be said and told about a deity, such as epithets, titles, pedigrees, genealogies, myths, in short its linguistic representation.
I then realized that these three notions—shape, transformation, and name—refer to three dimensions of divine presence. Dimensions of synonyms, which I call the cultic, the cosmic, and the linguistic dimensions. Thus it became possible to define a major Egyptian deity as a being that was equally present or represented in all three dimensions. That has its temple and cult image, its characteristic cosmic manifestation, and a proper genealogy and mythology.
Several years later, I started writing a book on Egyptian religion. I avoided the term “religion,” however, because I felt very strongly the difference between the term religion as it was understood in the Western tradition with all its biblical implications and what I was going to describe with regard to the ancient Egyptian world. These differences seem to me too big to be covered by one and the same term. If we call the biblical tradition and its derivatives such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam religions, we should look for another term with regard to ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and so on. In Egypt, it seems impossible to draw a clearcut distinction between culture in general, and religion and public life. There is a demarcation line. But it does not run between what we should call the religious and the secular world, but between the secluded places of cult and ritual and the outside world. This demarcation line is very obviously in ancient Egypt. Sacred architecture, for instance, is built in stone. Whereas secular architecture, including the royal palace, is built in mud brick. If we want to apply our notion of religion to the Egyptian world, we get two very different sets of phenomena. One, too large because it includes culture, the whole of culture. And the other one to reflect it. The large set of phenomena includes really everything what we call culture. Because there’s next to nothing of social importance that is not religiously founded or connected in one way or another. [00:21:00] The narrow set of phenomena includes only what the Egyptians themselves set apart as sacred.
Thus I found myself left with two concepts of religion, a large one and a narrow one. And I had to decide which concept to treat in my book on Egyptian religion. There is the Egyptian text which draws the same distinction. It speaks of the role of kingship. Quote, “the sun god and creator, Re, has placed the king on Earth forever and ever. In order that he may establish ma’at and annihilate Isfet.” So, ma’at is order and justice and Isfet is the opposite: disorder, injustice, chaos. “In all of that he may judge mankind and satisfy the gods. Giving offerings to the gods and funerary offerings to the dead.”
Establishing ma’at and ameliorating Isfet, this formula refers to the broad concept of religion, encompassing both cult and culture. Within this broad concept the next verse draws a further distinction, setting off a narrow concept of religion or of establishing ma’at, namely satisfying the gods, from a more secular way of establishing ma’at namely judging, meaning administering justice to mankind. This, by the way, teaches us that in Egypt the law was not a sacred institution as in Israel. And not a medium of satisfying God. On the contrary, the law was kept outside the sea of religion proper, which exclusively concerned the communication with the divine sphere. Satisfying the gods means practicing worship, giving offerings, sacrifice, performing rituals and festivals, but not keeping the laws. Doing what is right. Administering justice. Rescuing the poor, supporting the widow and the orphan, and so on.
In anticipation of what will be dealt with in the third lecture, we may say that this distinction between the spheres of justice on the one hand and of cult on the other, has been consciously and emphatically destroyed in biblical monotheism. The famous invectives of the prophets against sacrificial cults are well known and need not be repeated here. What they reject is the idea that God can be satisfied by priestly efforts alone. Instead, they promote the idea that in the eye of God, justice is more important than offerings. Thus justice [00:24:00] moves into the center of religion. This step is crucial for our understanding of the revolutionary innovation brought about by biblical monotheism. As soon as it has adopted the idea of justice as its religious centerpiece, it began looking down on pagan religions as lacking any ethical normativity and orientation. Until today, this idea of paganism is commonplace in biblical scholarship and theological thought. The idea that moral is an invention or an achievement of monotheism.
This concept of pagan religion as an entity morally different applies however only to religion in its narrow sense. Here it is true only the distinction of pure and impure matters, and not the moral distinction between good and evil. But it would be at gross distortion of historical truth to deny ancient so-called pagan civilizations any ethical foundation and orientation. These questions are dealt with not in the context of religion proper, which is concerned with satisfying the gods, but in the comparatively secular context of judging, administering justice to mankind.
In the broader frame of establishing ma’at, justice and morals play a central role in almost everything that the Bible has to say on these topics is inherited from its its ancient Eastern and Egyptian neighbors. It was the narrow concept of religion at satisfying gods in the sense of divine communication to which I finally decided to limit myself on the book which I intended to devote to Egyptian religion. It appeared in 1984 under the title Theology and Piety (Ägypten: Theologie Und Frömmigkeit Einer Frühen Hochkultur), avoiding the term “religion” altogether. And has also been translated into English under the title The Search of God in the Ancient Egypt (2001). I think the English translation is much superior to the German original.
Some years later I dealt with a broader concept of religion, too, in a book titled Ma’at: Justice and Immortality in Ancient Egypt (Ma’at: Gerechtigkeit und Unsterblichkeit im alten Ägypten). I wondered if this form of too-forward descriptions is adequate for Egyptian religion only, and if it was not equally well-applied to other traditional religions that are not based on revelation but that have grown in the course of centuries along with all of the other institutions of culture and civilization from which they cannot be separated.
In preferring the term [00:27:00] the term “theology” to “religion,” I distinguish between explicit and implicit theology. By explicit theology, I mean theology as a discourse about God and the divine world, which in contrast to mythology, is not structured according to the rules of narration, but rather to those of argumentation. Explicit theology is a specific phenomenon which must not be expected to exist in every religious tradition. There are doubtlessly many tribal and traditional religions that did not develop an explicit theology. Also in Egypt, explicit theology does not exist right from the start, but developed slowly in the middle and earlier kingdom. So the first half of the second millennium BCE to explode in the Ramesside Age after the monotheistic revolution of Amarna, this is in the middle of the fourteenth century BCE.
Then, judging from the hundreds of texts preserved, ancient Egypt seems to have turned into a country of theologians. And explicit theology seems to have become in Egypt the major concern of the time. Implicit theology by contrast is a necessary prerequisite of every cult or religion in the narrow sense, in the same way as a grammar is a necessary prerequisite of every language, independently of the question whether there exists an explicit grammar of this language or not. The implicit theology of Egytpian religion in its narrow sense of satisfying the gods with each structure as it were of worship and sacrifice is made up precisely by those three categories which I had found to be characteristic of the Egyptian notion of deity. The cultic or politic, the cosmic, and the linguistic dimension.
I was now able to realize that the Egyptian pantheon was everything other than just a random accumulation of deities. The common view of Egyptian polytheism interpreted the pantheon as the result of political unification. Originally this was the common opinion. Originally these deities were worshipped more or less in isolation by tribes and villages living in Egypt in similar isolation. Only the closeness of increasing alliances and context, alliances and final unification brought these various originally unrelated deities into contact and made them enter [00:30:00] family and other relations, mirroring and representing the emerging state and society of pharaonic Egypt.
This explanation may hold for Mesopotamia and other early states and societies, but not for ancient Egypt. Here, most of the deities are not autochthonic to their places of worship. The relationship has been placed in the pantheon is rather the other way around. It is not the interrelation and unification of places that structures a formerly unstructured set of deities. But the structured pantheon of the divine world which lends structure to a human reality, including the various tribes and towns that made up the Egyptian state and society.
With this observation, we are already moving in the first dimension of divine presence, which in Egyptian thought is related to the concept of jrw, shape, the cult-image of a deity and its place of worship. Physically, the local or cultic dimension. Here the main topic is the specific relationship that in Egypt exists between a deity and a place. All of the major deities are lords and ladies of a town. And all of the major towns, cities, are the realm of a specific deity.
The Egyptian concept of a city has distinct religious connotations. A major city is a sacred city, in the same way that a major deity is the ruler of a city. This principle proved most useful when the Greeks conquered Egypt and had to rename the towns and cities of Egypt in order to make their names pronounceable for Greek tongues. They just took the names of the Egyptian deities in the conventional Greek translation, interpretation and suffixed it by “polis.” Thus, Thebes became Diospolis, the city of Zeus, Amun. Dendera became Aphroditopolis, the city of Hathor being equated to Aphrodite. Shmun became Hermopolis, the city of Hermes, corresponding to the Egyptian Thot. And On became Heliopolis, the city of Helios, corresponding with Re.
The institution of divine rulership—and so on, there were dozens and dozens of similar names. The institution of divine rulership served as a representation of social and political identity. The Egyptian considered himself to be a citizen [00:33:00] of a specific town or city in the first place, and not to be an Egyptian, member of a nation or country. The focus of social and political identification were the temple and its lord, the specific deity.
To go in another town meant to go into a foreign country. To be at home meant to stay in one’s native town or village. Belonging to a town, being a citizen of a town, meant to be a member of a festive community. To participate in the feasts which were celebrated in the form of processions. The concept of civic allocation was not invested with religious meaning. Being a citizen of a town meant to be a follower of a ruling deity. Residents founded and decided about religious belonging. It was a kind of covenant where the religious tasks of the citizen corresponded to the political role of the deity. But the principle of religious identity and representation was not limited to the level of religious towns and cities. The gods Horus and Seth represented the two parts of Egypt, lower and upper Egypt. And later, Egypt and the foreign countries.
The sun god Re, later Amun-Re represented the unified empire. Therefore the cultic dimension of divine presence can also be called the political dimension. Cult and political identity are just aspects of one and the same concept of divine presence and communication. The relationship between the divine world and the terrestrial sphere of Egypt, her towns and temples, may be described as a relation of mutual structuring or modeling. Mutual modeling. The structure of the pantheon and the properties of its constituent deities, mirror in a way the structure of Egypt and their political organization. But this structuring relation goes also the other way around. The divine world gives structure, identity and meaning to the country in its different units of state, nome, district, town, and neighborhood.
The structure of an Egyptian temple tells much about the nature of the Egyptian deity. This house is normally three, sometimes even more sanctuaries. The deity occupies his or her temple never alone but always in the company of theoi synnaoi [00:36:00] the Greek term has it, gods inhabiting a common temple, typically in the form of a family: the father, mother, and child.
The sequence of rooms of a temple are arranged along a central axis stressing and mediating the distance between inner and outer, darkness and light, narrowness and width, closure and openness. The Egyptian temple is both the residence of a deity and the starting and ending points of a processional route. The cult is divided into everyday and festive cults. The difference between these two forms is extreme. The everyday cult is performed backstage in extreme seclusion in camera, so to speak. Whereas the feasts are celebrated in the form of a procession involving the entire population of a town or district. The procession is performed in which the gods exert their rulership over their territory. And in which lay humans participate in their religion because the temples are closed to the public. The feasts celebrate divine rulership, civic belonging, and religious participation. The cultic dimension of the divine is a matter of structure and not only sacred space but also sacred time. The religious feast in ancient Egypt is the one occasion when the gods leave the temple and appear to the people at large. While they normally dwelled in complete darkness and seclusion inside the sanctuaries of their temples inaccessible to all save for the priest and servants.
The Egyptian temple is definitely not a place where a person could enter and pray. For the common people, it was more a symbol of actions and inaccessibility than of presence and contact. The Egyptian concept of the holy is connected with the secret, the hidden and the inaccessible. Contact and communication did of course take place in the temple. But this contact was of a very symbolic, indirect, and complex nature. It was nothing the common person could participate in. Profane people knew they were somehow distantly represented and involved in the sacred communication which went on constantly inside the impermeable temple walls, inside the endless sequence of courtyards, pylons, halls, and chapels. But there was no possibility for them to play an active part in this sacred game. The cult by its very complexity makes the distance between the spheres of the holy and of everyday life, which it is meant to bridge, [00:39:00] all the more palpable. But on the occasion of a feast, these boundaries between secrecy and publicity, sacred and profane, inner and outer, were suspended. The gods appear to the public outside the temple walls. Every major Egyptian religious feast was celebrated in the form of a procession.
The Egyptian concept of the feast finds its verbal expression in the songs which are chanted on this occasion. And are centered around two basic ideas. The idea of a union of heaven and earth, and the idea of the “coming,” the “advent,” of God. The image of a union between heaven and earth translates precisely what we described as the suspending of the boundaries between inner and outer, secrecy and publicity, sacred and profane. It is this boundary which marks the normal state of reality. According to Egyptian belief, the gods are real and living powers. But they do not live on Earth among men. They are not to be encountered, experienced in everyday life. Certainly there was a time when they did live on Earth. But on account of some tragic events, they withdrew to heaven and the underworld, leaving the Earth to mankind and thus creating that relatively profane sphere of human order and activity which is indispensable for ordinary, everyday life.
On the occasion of the feast, however, this state of affairs is reversed. And the original paradisiac state of divine presence is restored to the world. Or at least in the city, where the feast takes place. Heaven and earth unite. God returns to mankind.
The idea of the coming god is the other nucleus of the Egytpian concept of the feast. It is this coming which is expressed in the symbolic form of processional motion. The oldest processional song runs: “the god comes, beware,” the Earth must be warned and prepared. Because it must give up its usual profanity and adapt to the heavenly conditions which the divine presence requires. In the feast, God, who is usually absent, who is usually residing far above in heaven, and only symbolically present on Earth, within the inaccessible secrecy of the sanctuary comes to his city. It is he who takes the initiative. While in the temple, he is passive and attended to by the priest. But in the feast, he is active. And the processional motion is a symbol [00:42:00] of his living activity and real presence. This turn from passivity to activity marks the events celebrated by the feast. The whole city participates in this happening. The whole city “is in feast” as the Egyptian phrase runs. What the temple normally is for the god, is now the city, a vessel of his earthly presence.
The Egyptian idea of the city is centered around and shaped by this festive situation. The city is the place on Earth where viewing the main processional feast, the divine presence, can be seen by everyone. The more important the feast, the more important the city. People from all parts of the country assemble there during the festival period, to participate in the event and to see the god. To see the god Egyptian has the pregnant meaning of participating in a feast. Being an inhabitant of a city means being granted the chance of seeing the god of the city on the occasion of his “coming.” The inhabitants of a city form the festive community. And conceive of themselves as followers of their particular city-god. It is the feast which establishes and secures their identity of “Thebans,” “Memphites,” and so on. Festive participation is for the concept of the Egyptian city what political and commercial participation is for the Greek city and the city of the Italian Renaissance. It is the focus of civic identity. However, the nature or essence of the god is not completely defined by their cultic political rule. This is just one aspect of their much more encompassing nature. It is just a form of their turning towards the world (Weltzuwendung), of their immanence.
Another aspect, or another form of divine presence and immanence is constituted by the cosmic dimension. This aspect represents us, or presents us with the Egyptian idea of the cosmos as a sphere of divine manifestation. According to the Egyptians, the world “cosmos” is rather a process than a space. And the idea of order is more a measure of success in overcoming disorder and destruction than a matter of spatial structure and beautiful arrangement. Virtually all of the gods cooperate in the project of maintaining the world. Keeping the cosmic process [00:45:00] going. The core of this process is constituted by what the ancient Egyptians conceived of as the “solar circuit,” the daily course of the sun across the heaven and the netherworld. In the eyes of the Egyptians, the success of this process or project was everything but granted, it was at stake in every instant. In the same way as the Mesopotamians, the Chinese and the Romans, the ancient Egyptians were constantly occupied in watching the sky and in observing all kinds of natural phenomena with the greatest attention and scrutiny.
But unlike the Mesopotamians, Chinese, and Romans, the goal of this attention was not divination. That is, to find out about the will of the gods and to foretell the future. But to assist the gods in maintaining the world. Thus the Egyptians observed the regular and the recurrent, whereas the divination cultures observed the exceptions and deviations. In the context of this task and intellectual preoccupation, the Egyptians accumulated an incredible amount of knowledge, a kind of sacred cosmology. Every major Egyptian deity had a role in this project of world maintenance, and the specific cosmic manifestation in the same way that they had a place on earth to observe their terrestrial rulership. The term in explicit theological discourse or “cosmic manifestation” is kheperu transformation. A term that had strong temporal connotations. A transformation was something you take on for a while, a form of being or rather becoming this in time. Time is absolutely primary in the cosmic dimension of divine presence. This dimension relates to time as the cultic dimension relates to space. The basic structure of cosmic time is provided by the apparent circular movement of the sun around the earth. There is no clearer expression of this time-based cosmology than the Egyptian term for creation, corresponding to Hebrew, Be-sherit, which reads the first time in Egyptian, sep tepi, the first time referring to the first sunrise, as the first time of a never-ending cyclical process.
Speaking of Be-sherit there’s also no clearer expression of the huge difference between Egyptian and biblical cosmologies than the demotion of the sun from its position of being the origin [00:48:00] of all, to the position of a clock and a lamp which God hung up in the sky only on the fourth day of creation.
The movement of the sun in Egypt, now we return to Egypt, the movement of the sun generates time and light. Which is interpreted in terms of rulership and life. In crossing the sky, the sun god observed his rulership over the cosmos in the same way as on Earth, divine rulership is exerted by means of processions. Yet the solar circuit has also the meaning of a life cycle. The sun god is born every morning and dies every evening. Enters the netherworld and is reborn the next morning. Again, we leave with the principle of mutual modeling. We will come back to this issue in the context of the next paragraph on the linguistic dimension, because the establishment of this relationship of mutual transparency and modeling is primarily the achievement of language.
The third dimension of divine presence is constituted by what Egyptians understood by the term “name.” A name, in the Egyptian sense, is not just a name, but everything that can be said and told of a person. A name is not just an identifier, but a description. A linguistic representation of a person’s essence. Telling the names of a deity means reciting hymns and eulogies in his or her place, the linguistic dimension therefore refers to sacred language and sacred texts whose recitation in the appropriate contexts, according to the ancient Egyptians, has magical power. And contributes to the maintenance of the world. To this dimension belongs also the whole context of mythology. The concept of language as a means of divine presence refers to the question of how to approach the gods, how to address them, how to describe their power and actions. In the medium of their linguistic representation, recited by the right person at the right moment and place, by naming the names and telling the stories, the gods take shape and become present and immanent. In the same way as they are present and imminent in their cult images, jrw, and cosmic manifestations.
This idea of divine presence may perhaps be compared to the Jewish concept of Shekhina, literally “indwelling,” the gods come to dwell, or the Egyptian gods come to dwell in their temples, their cosmic manifestations and in their sacred recitations or names. As a form of indwelling, so to speak. Language, however, [00:51:00] is not only just one dimension of divine presence alongside the local and the cosmic one; it serves also as the cement that establishes the connection between three dimensions and that integrates the human, the social, the political, and the cosmic spheres into one coherent system of cultural semantics. The linguistic representation of the cosmic process makes it transparent for the concerns of the state and for those of the individual human being. The structure of ritual modeling is primarily a question of speech and language. Of that kind of linguistic representation which we call myths. Myths is not only a story about the gods, but also a form of thought. A way of world-making. A deep structural generator of stories. The underlying principle of Egyptian mythmaking is the establishment of a connection between the three fields of cosmos, state, and individual life and death in the form of mutual modeling. The solar myth represents the sun god circulating around the earth in times of rulership that obviously mirrors Pharaoh’s terrestrial leadership and in terms of performing a life cycle. Of being born, dying, and being reborn, which mirrors the human fate and hope. Pharoah’s rule and man’s life cycle clearly serve as models for figuring the solar circuit. But the sun gods ride across the sky and through the netherworld also serve as models for Pharaoh, the state, and the life and hopes of the individual human being. The one serves as an allegory of the other.
The same applies to the myth of Osiris, which mirrors models and structures the human hopes of overcoming death. The political idea of Pharaonic legitimacy succession, and the cosmic concept of the netherworld. The stories told about the gods show them in a very human—almost all-too-human—form. In this dimension, and only here, the deities assume personal traits. However, they develop these personal characteristics not in relation to the human world, but in the relation to each other. The gods are interconnected within networks of constellations. They display their personalities in the frame of divine constellations, in which they act as fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, lovers, warriors, murderers, avengers, [00:54:00] kings, judges, viziers, officials, and so on. There is no myths about a god that would not mention other gods. Myths are the stories the gods have with each other. You may call this kind of mythology historia divina a history taking place in the divine world. Where the human world is involved only by ways of mirroring. But not as an object of divine action. The gods are acting upon each other. But not or only very exceptionally on the human sphere. They relate to the human world in the first dimension and in making cult images, inhabiting their temples, and ruling their cities. But not in the third dimension of the linguistic representation. The mythology or narrative theology of the Egyptians is anthropomorphic but not anthropocentric. This changes drastically as soon as we leave the level of implicit theology and enter the universe of explicit theological discourse. It changes also in the course of history. I will come back to this question in the second lecture. Today I’m not concerned with historical changes but with the basic structure.
The three dimensional basic structure of the Egyptian religion is certainly not to be generalized. It has, however, the striking parallel in the stoic theory of theologia tripertita three-partite theology, for which the Roman antiquarian Varro (116-27 BCE), as quoted by Saint Augustine is the most explicit authority. Varro continuing stoic traditions and translating Greek terms distinguishes three forms of theology: theologia physike or theologia naturalis, theologia civilis or politike, and theologia mythike or fabularis. So naturalis, civilis, fabularis – physike, politike, mythike. In this concept, we easily recognize our three dimensions of implicit theology. Theologia naturalis according to Varro is the concern of the philosophers. And theologia poetike or fabularis is the concern of the poets. Whereas theologia politike or civilis is the concern of the priest. That’s the political and cultic aspect that are considered identical in the theory and the same way as in Egypt. The only difference between Varro’s and Egyptian’s seems to be the attribution of different truth values to the different theologies. [00:57:00] For Varro, only theologia naturalis of the philosophers has any claim to truth, whereas the two other theologies, the political theology of the priests and the mythical theology of the poets are based on fiction and imagination.
In Egypt, all three dimensions of divine presence had equal validity. And no approach is given precedence over the other two. All are equally close to or distanced from the truth. In Egypt, the division of labor was not so far advanced as in Rome and the Egyptian priests acted as philosophers and poets as well. The three dimensions complement each other. It is obvious that such a conception is laid out in the context either of scientific thought in Greece or of revelation as in Israel. There is only one privileged knowledge about the divine. If we compare, excuse me, if we compare the three dimensional structure of Egyptian polytheism to biblical religion, it becomes immediately evident that the dimension of divine presence or impact that is most prominent in the Bible is completely lacking in Egypt. This is history. Or to be more precise, sacred history. History understood as a dimension of encounter and communication between God and man. In the Bible, sacred history, or historia sacra, takes the place of myth or historia divina. The biblical god develops and shows his personal characteristics not towards other gods in the frame of mythical constellations, because there are no other gods around him, but towards mankind. Many of his most characteristic traits, such as his loving kindness, and forgiving mercy or furious anger and inexorable judgment and above all his jealousy belong to his role as overlord and legislator within the covenant. They are still absent. Most of them are still absent in the book of Genesis and appear only after the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Whereas in Egypt, narrative theology deals with actions and events between gods and a biblical form of historiography appeals to the actions and events between God and his people. History becomes the privileged dimension of God’s closeness or remoteness to men, at the expense of both the local and cosmic dimensions.
Many of the biblical books are pure historiography. Josephus Flavius wrote that in Israel [01:00:00] the writing of history was committed to the prophets. This statement reflects the theological importance attributed to history in biblical religion. I think that the sacralization of history that is a process of elevating history onto the rank of a dimension of divine presence has much to do with a strong connection that the Bible establishes between history and justice, or doing and faring. History is seen as the manifestation of the will of God, of a god who is reacting to the deeds of mankind: punishing, rewarding, guiding and, eventually, redeeming. History, or God’s interaction with humanity of his chosen people is based upon justice. Justice in other words appears to function as a generator of history. The case of history as a dimension of religious experience and divine immanence marks the distinctive difference between biblical religion on the one hand and Egyptian, Greek, Roman religions on the other. This might seem trivial because the difference between biblical and pagan religion is obvious enough. But it becomes less trivial as soon as soon as we recognize that this same difference that sets off biblical religion against Egyptian, Greek and Roman religions, links it up with Mesopotamia and the Hittite world. We can even observe the slow rise of history, presumably under Babylonian influence in Egypt as a fourth dimension of divine immanence and religious experience. And we can see how the emergence of history as a fourth dimension changes the whole structure of Egyptian religion. In Egypt we actually observe the emergence of history as a fourth parameter or dimension of the divine world, starting with the eighteenth dynasty, with the fifteenth century BCE and gaining predominance in the Ramesside Age, which is from 1300 to 1100 BCE.
With the emergence of the dominion of history, the relationship between the divine and the human world changes from anthropomorphism to anthropocentrism. The gods not only maintain the cosmic process, they not only dwell and rule on Earth in their temples, and are not only involved in stories that take place in their own sphere among the gods, they also determine the course of human history on Earth. The welfare of the state and of their individual worshippers. They do this by sending victories and defeats, health and illness, disparity and disaster.
In Egypt, this theologization [01:03:00] or sacralization of history was a new development. In Mesopotamia, however, as in Greece, Rome and Bronze Age Anatolia, this—well, I’m not so sure about Greece and Rome. But in Mesopotamia, the religious view of history seems to have been a concept that was in place right from the start. God supervised the observance of treaties and helped to protect the integrity of the sanctuaries and cities.
In Mesopotamia, we also find the concept of a personal god. Which brings the world of gods and humans into closer relationship while at the same time preserving the principal of duality and diversity. Each human being has a specific personal god among the lesser gods who cares for him, his or her wellbeing and intercedes on his or her behalf with the greater gods. Unlike Egypt where any forms of historiography dealing with longer periods of the past are missing, until the Greek or Roman period. Mesopotamia yields many royal inscriptions that narrate the entire extension of a reign, and even texts that stretch back over a series of different reigns into the remote past. The “Curse on Aggade,” for example, narrates the history of the rise and fall of the Sargonid dynasty during the twenty-third and twenty-second centuries BCE. Among other events it relates how King Naramsin destroyed the temple of Enlil in Nippur and how Enlil responded to this crime by sending forth the Guteans, who put an end to the Sargonid empire.
Similarly, the fall of the empire of Ur is traced back in another text to certain forfeits, transgressions committed by King Shulgi. The theological and juridical concept of religious guilt and divine punishment gives meaning to history and coherence to the chain of events and sequence of dynasties. In Egypt, disaster is a manifestation of chaos and of blind contingency. In Mesopotamia, however, it is read as the manifestation of the punishing will of a divinity whose anger has been stirred of a king. The apex of the theologization of history is reached with biblical, especially Deuteronomous historiography. The idea of forming an alliance with God himself instead of only appointing certain deities as supervisors of political alliances draws God much closer, much more closely into the ups and downs of human affairs than had been the case in Mesopotamia and its neighboring civilizations. There history was just a seed of possible interventions by the gods, favorable or punitive. Now it turns [01:06:00] into one coherent connection of events touching from creation until the end of the world. A sequence known as the historia sacra in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
However, the idea of divine verdict and intervention was not totally absent even in Egypt. On the contrary, the typically Egyptian idea of a judgment after death appeals as the strongest possible manifestation of the principle of divine verdict. But the concept of postmortem human immortality provides a horizon of fulfillment beyond history. Whereas in Mesopotamia and Israel, where the concept of human immortality is unknown. Every account has to be settled on Earth. Here the horizon of fulfillment is confined to the terrestrial world, but stretched into the future over generations and dynasties.
In Israel, it is this fourth dimension of theology that tends to prevail over, and in the course of time, to replace the three others. With the rise of monotheism, the cosmos ceases to appear as a manifestation of divine presence, and comes to be seen merely as the creation, the work of God. The geographical and cultic dimension is reduced after the reform of King Josiah at the end of the seventh century to the temple at Jerusalem. And no longer reflects the pluralistic identity of various centers and regions. Historia divina the stories that got told about the gods and displayed their characters and their vicissitudes is turned into historia sacra the story of the one god and his chosen people.
Historia sacra is the successor to the third and mythic dimension of narrative articulation of divine constellation. And its written codification no longer serves as a magical presentification of the divine the way sacred texts were used in the context of the third, and linguistic dimension of divine presence. The rise of monotheism, this much we may retain from this first step towards its understanding meant the destruction of this multidimensional structure of divine presence or immanence in order to prepare the way for a totally new construction of reality. Thank you all for listening.
[applause]
Aschheim: The floor is open [01:09:00] for comments, questions, criticisms, mutual modeling of the linguistic kind. (laughter) Ah!
Audience: Just wanted to say that…[inaudible question asked without microphone]
Assmann: Yeah. Thank you very much. I take this as a contribution and not as a question. But I think similar observations apply to modern India as well. Also Indian feasts are celebrated in the form of processions. Yeah, go ahead. There’s another question.
Audience: And I’m basing my question only on the knowledge that you impart to us today. But I see something in the methodology which I would like to question. The question that I have relates to what I see as the most intriguing part of your analysis, and that relates to transformation. The elements of the three dimensions. And I’m thinking that the thinking of order that you define, the chaos and the creation of order, which is a divine process, but also at the same time a human process. I’m wondering if at the same time it’s also replica, if it’s an allegory, to use your own terms, of the researcher or the historian or the theologian. The modern researcher, in this case. As you as the person who’s coming to seek order in this process of chaos. And I’m wondering in that sense, what is the process? Because maybe your own structure itself is a process as well. It is incomplete. Meaning you’re trying to shape and put it into order, but it’s a process. I’ll leave that as a question. But I’ll relate it to another process which I think goes together. And it relates to the notion of the sacred history of, the sacred history which is missing in this structure. Until monotheism comes on the stage and puts it in the fourth dimension. But at the same time, you also say that you want to take out change. And historical changes in the model, while you’re looking at your model. Meaning you want to look at a synchronic analysis in order to see the structure. And then after changing is happening all the time, through Babylonian influence and other influences. [01:12:00] But in a way, what you’re doing here is you’re saying I’ll take out the change in order to find the essence. Therefore I’m going to reify the structures and take away the changes that occur in the process. And maybe that’s part of the process. Maybe I’m out of the league here, but that’s my feeling.
Assmann: This is a good question. Well, of course the researcher is always in the picture. This is of course unavoidable. Of course I am in the picture which I drew of ancient Egyptian religion. And, but now I think in order to understand this sort of change, you have to get an idea of the basic structures. Otherwise, there must be some, it’s a common structure in order to build, to decipher, and to identify the changes that are going on. So I think the basic structure of this three dimensions helps me to define the change in the New Kingdom as being brought about by the introduction of the fourth dimension of history. And this observation is based on the idea of “entrance” of this dimension in the Old and the Middle Kingdoms. So it’s already mentioned but there are so many hundreds and hundreds of texts that the absence of this idea in these texts is really objective, I think, capture of it. So I think it’s, it would be, I think, I would have, I would have a problem if I limit my reconstruction, my description of ancient Egyptian culture just to basic structures, to synchronic systems of leaving out the historical development all together. But it’s just one part. So this idea of implicit theology is just one part of a picture which then will be complemented in the next lecture by explicit theology. And then you will see a very fundamental change and development going on in Egypt in the frame and under the conditions of this basic structure. [01:15:00]
Audience: [Question describing Egyptian death and burial rituals asked without microphone]. You find a divorce between social justice and the religion as I understood it. Am I not right in saying that women who wanted, or woman wants to get to the next world, and the woman’s affairs have to have them [inaudible] and you made the declaration whether a boy or a girl, or the orphan, and didn’t [unclear] in order to achieve, in order to reach Osiris, you had to have handed out social justice. That was vital to the religion.
Assmann: Yeah. Thank you very much. I’m really grateful that you, yeah, brought this very essential Egyptian idea to our mind. Of course, I just briefly mentioned the idea of the judgment after that. So there are two, and you are perfectly right. This is already a first step towards what I call the theologization or sacralization of justice. This is another of these transformations going on between Egyptian and the biblical world. And I think one of the most important transformations is the sacralization of justice becoming the centerpiece of religion. And the first step towards this is the Egyptian idea of the judgment of the dead. This idea is not original. You wouldn’t find it in the Old Kingdom. But it develops and during the first half of the second millennium it becomes the central component. There is one decisive distinction between the Egyptian idea of the judgement of the dead and the biblical idea of divine judgment. And the distinction lies in the fact that in Egypt, there is no possible difference between the social and the divine judgment. So in the terrestrial success or what you call it, if you lead a successful life on Earth, so the, let’s say the applause you get from your contemporaries is echoed and, well, it’s very much the same as the applause you get from God by entering the next world. There’s no possible difference between earthly success [01:18:00] and that worldly, let’s say as a justification for God’s judgment is always identical to the judgment of the society on Earth. And whereas in the Bible, God judges this totally different, on totally different criteria. So a person who led a miserable life on Earth may hope for a very positive judgment in the next world. There is even the idea of a complete reversal. And this is up till very late texts, there is a one demotic text in Egypt, that appears a similar reversal, but this is in Egypt very unusual and I think reflects already early Jewish influence. So this possible reversal of judgment is a biblical innovation. But in general, you are perfectly right that in Egypt we observe in Egypt several first steps toward what is then taking place in Israel and their core reality. And this is one of the most decisive first steps towards the idea.
Ashheim: As time is going on, we’ll take one last question. Yes?
Audience: [restates question with microphone] Thank you. Do you think it’s possible or important to discuss the internal movements between the three components, the cultic, cosmic, and what you call linguistic. And if you allow me, I’ll ask about this firstly, the directions. What is it towards? Is it possible to describe how the cultic moves into the cosmic, how the cosmic into the linguistic, in each direction or is it completely impossible to describe that kind of movement? That’s my first question.
Assmann: Hmm.
Audience: The other one would be do you think that the mutual modeling that you describe is, I wasn’t sure about how far you were arguing that it was culturally specific to Egyptian. And how much is universal.
Assmann: Yeah. Nor am I. That’s an open question. I always was hoping for a comparative discussion. That these categories which I proposed for analysis would be taken up by others. [01:21:00] But I’m still waiting. Yeah. While your first question’s really intriguing and difficult. How these dimensions also influence each other, of course the linguistic or the discursive dimension is all pervasive. There is language involved also of course in the other two dimensions. So there is much interference and interconnectedness and so on. And also of course much, yeah, much change and development. The cosmology evolves. That’s the cultic dimension. It’s the most original and everything else of course evolves in the frame of the cult. Of course, by priests who go to the texts and who observe, describe and write, and observe this cosmology and so that’s exactly the center of the cult. And the medium was language. And the most let’s say for the Egyptians, the most obvious manifestation of the divine was the cosmos.
Aschheim: Okay. I really want to thank Professor Assmann very much for a highly stimulating lecture. [applause] I think it’s two lectures. We start getting into more and more controversy, hopefully. It’s “Evolutionary and Inclusive Monotheism” to be followed by “Revolutionary and Exclusive Monotheism.” You’re all invited back again with light refreshments on Thursday evening at 6:30PM. Thank you very much. [applause]
1:23:13