her
way, by making them one. Ra "comes as" Tum, the god is known here
under one name or aspect and there under another. The names of two
deities being added together, a new deity is produced; and in later
times these gods with double, treble, or multiple names are among the
most important. Raharmachis and Amonra are national gods, and have
left much evidence of themselves.

It is a little step from syncretism to pantheism. Let the gods once
lose the individual character that keeps them separate from each
other, and it is possible for one god, who grows strong and great
enough, to swallow up all the rest, till they appear only as his
forms. In the position which they occupied in Egypt the various gods
could not disappear, their local connections kept them alive; but
they were so like one another that one of them could be regarded as a
form of another, and a multitude of them as forms of one. The god who
did most in the way of swallowing up the rest was Ra, the great
sun-god of Thebes. The Litany of Ra[7] represents that god as eternal
and self-begotten, and sings in seventy-five successive verses
seventy-five forms which he assumes; they are the forms of the gods
and of all the great elements and parts of the world. The separate
gods are reduced from the rank of independent potentates to shapes of
Ra, and thus a kind of unity is set up in the populous Egyptian
Pantheon. But Ra is not strong enough to get the better of these
shapes, and to rule a sole monarch by his own right, in his own way.
He is the god, but he is not an independent god; it is pantheism, not
theism, to which he owes his exaltation. The one in Egypt cannot
govern the many; the pure exaltation of Ra as a supreme and absolute
god does not prevent the worship of a different being in each
different town. The one sole god is for the priests alone, not for
the people; and this belief in him does not even lead to attempts to
root out the worship of animals, or to concentrate the service of the
temples on him alone. And in the absence of such attempts we read the
sentence condemning a religion which produced most noble fruits of
thought, to grow worse and not better as time went on, and to pass
away without bringing any permanent contribution to the development
of the religion of the world.

[Footnote 7: _Records of the Past_, viii. 105.]

Worship.--The Egyptian temple was constructed rather to afford the
god a splendid residence among his people than to ac