"Understanding the Egyptian Gods and Goddesses" - "" ("Draco Mlusine")(Pevná vazba)

In the days of Egyptian antiquity, many of the gods were abstract concepts rather than the actual anthropomorphic god-pictures familiar to us today. Many of the later fully-morphed deities were originally theological concepts represented by a distinctive hieroglyph, very similar to the correspondences used in modern ritual magic. As the need for a controlling religion grew, so did the spiritual need for more tangible forms on which to focus the common people’s devotions. The common man’s mind dwelt on the concrete, not the abstract, and so the gods took on those strange but easily recognisable animal-human shapes to satisfy the religious-teaching-by-pictures demands of less scholarly folk. The images recorded in tomb paintings, bas-relief and statuary were intended to represent living forms of the gods themselves, or Pharaoh as a god. There was a simple reason behind this. Egyptian life, magic and religion were inextricably intertwined, one could not, and did not exist, without the other. God, or a male/female/multiple concept of that god, was manifest in everything animate and inanimate. The authentic Egyptian religion developed over thousands of years, with each deity assuming many forms under the influence of various religious movements and/or foreign invasions. Each form also developed its own positive and negative aspects, which responded in various ways to different people, and so it is now impossible to be dogmatic about how the gods of those different
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