MEEKS, D., and Chr.FAVARD-MEEKS,
Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods. Translated from the French by G.M. Goshgarian.
John Murray, London, 1997. VII,249p. ills.(B&W photographs and line drawings. Original light blue cloth with pictorial dust wrps. spine gilt titled.
The ‘Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods’ is an introduction to ancient Egyptian religion and at the same time a most interesting historiographic experiment. (…) It presents a general, synchronous interpretation of some two thousand years of religious history in ancient Egypt. (…) The first half of the book, ‘The Gods among Themselves’, (…) is mainly based on myth and, on the whole, narrative elements of ancient Egyptian religious literature. The study of Egyptian mythology has to face, on the one hand, the extreme importance of myth demonstrated by allusions and quotations in each and every Egyptian religious text and, on the other hand, the scarcity of extant myths told in full. Meeks’s approach permits a comprehensive synthesis of Egyptian mythology, including materials from the Coffin Texts as well as the temples of the Greco-Roman period, two very large groups of texts that have only in recent decades begun to exert a substantial influence on the general and introductory literature on ancient Egyptian religion. The second half, ‘Meditating between the Gods and Humankind’ (…) deals with the ritual aspect of Egyptian religion. It deserves the attention of the nonspecialist because, along with its own interesting perspective, it surveys and summarises in a systematic way much of the less familiar source material from the temples of the Greco-Roman period made accessible by the work of French Egyptologists. (…) It is not really the intention (of the authors - ND) to invest gods with a life of their own, independent of human thinking and imagination, but rather to find a level of inquiry on which the human ideas expressed in myth and ritual may be systematically described. And their project is not a theistic enterprise; its focus is always divine functions and ways of interacting, never the personality of individual gods. (…) The author consider their investigation an approach to ‘the essential structure of Egyptian myth not as an imaginary construct designed to justify the reality of ritual acts, but rather as a reality whose existence could not be maintained without rites. It is to confront the gods without intermediaries, as the extant documents suggest one should.’ (…) A lot of predictable criticism might be advanced against this ‘bracketing’ of divine life, but it should be borne in mind that the book is no naive compilation of religious ideas. It is a very conscious experiment exploring the possibilities of ancient Egyptian religion. (…) The enterprise seems least convincing when its questionnaire comes closest to animal ethology. (…) Much more convincing and instructive are the accounts of temple ritual. (…). A n experiment, the book is instructive in a general methodological sense. (…) In ‘The Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods’. The ethological approach is conscious and unmixed and, not least, paired with indisputable Egyptological scholarship, This makes the book a very clear demonstration of both the potential and the shortcomings of the ethology of gods.’ (J. PODEMANN SØRENSEN in History of Religions, 1999, p.391-392).
€ 25.00
(Antiquarian)