“The One and the Many” was the subtitle for Erik Hornung's book “Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt” about ancient Egyptian theology, and it is a fitting shorthand to describe how the Egyptians often (even if not always) viewed their Gods. For example, both Amun-Ra in the New Kingdom, and Horus of Edfu in the Ptolemaic era, are described as making “millions” from themselves when they were alone at the “First Time” of the initial creation of the universe (1)(2). This ontology is due to the “One” being in a state of non-differentiation. Hornung elaborates:
“Only outside the world of creation, in the fleeting transition from nonexistence to existence, do the Egyptians encounter the absolute oneness of God. In his creator labors the first and initially unique God dissolves oneness into the diverse multiplicity that makes every deity unique and incomparable, despite the many characteristics they share in common.”(3)
It is only by division of the divine “One” into a state of “One” alongside “millions” that creation occurs; the total unity of all things into a single entity contains no differences within it that would enable the diverse phenomena of existence (4): creation is the act of division. Living creatures experience this phenomenologically by “creating” things as we identify them from among undifferentiated perception; in humans we go further and name them to bring them even more out of the background and analyze them further. This is vital to understanding the world and moving within it, which may be why the Egyptians didn't seem to be interested in compressing everything back into a unified “One” as an eschatological imperative: the diversity of creation was the point to the life-affirming Egyptian culture. This places them in contrast to the Gnostics, and to a lesser extent the Hermetics, who couldn't wait to shed the material world, in stages or all at once, to get to the source. Meanwhile the Egyptians seemed happy to put off complete union with the Gods until the afterlife, as evidenced by their extensive funerary corpus for that big event.
While these Egyptian Gods are associated with various natural phenomena and human endeavors, the Egyptians believed their Gods primarily to be immanent (5)(6) rather than pantheistic. Horus is clearly associated, among other things, with the falcon and the sun, but it should be noted that he was never thought of as the literal sun, or that all falcons were actually Horus. Rather, these function as theophanies as a being emerges from latent to manifested being, or in Egyptian parlance the ba (7). The sun disk itself we would recognize as the ball of flaming gas was called Aten, before and after Akhenaten's religion, and is called the ba of Horus (8)(9), specifically as a concept of a theophany (10). While a sacred falcon was crowned in Edfu as part of the ceremonies there, this honor did not extend to all falcons, and was likely a stand-in for the Pharaoh as the concept of kingship became precarious (11). The falcon, being of sharp sight and soaring above all, is a good metaphor for Horus as the ruler of all things and the sun sailing high in the sky, so in seeing a falcon or the sun the Egyptians would gain understanding of his nature. Hornung adds that 'the Egyptian creator God may manifest himself in creation, but he is not absorbed in it' and that animal forms of the Gods were understood to be symbolic of their nature, and not their true form (12).
According to Finnestad, divine transcendence exists in the realm of the Duat, associated with the afterlife and the latent state before things come into being (13). Egpytologist Jan Assmann also believes that Amun was seen as extending beyond the cosmos and was thus transcendent, even “deeper than the netherworld” (14) (i.e. the Duat). This transcendence as latent being, which is dormant (albeit not nothing) until it manifests as something, may be thought of as continually refreshing the actualized created world to prevent it from decaying (15).
It is necessary to expand on the concept of “self-generation” or “coming-into-being” (xpr) in Egyptian thought, since Horus is spoken of as “self-created” in his form of Kheper-Ra as he brought himself out of the primordial waters on his own volition, before bringing the rest of the universe into existence through the same xpr concept. since a being creating itself is paradoxical. Finnestad points out that this self-creation is specifically a transition out of latent being, from Duat to mortal world. This is not the Aristotelian process of converting potency into action, but perhaps closer to Husserl's idea of latent being. After all, unlike a state of potentiality, Horus still exists regardless of whether he is in a latent or patent state, before creation in the primordial waters, latent and dormant in a sense, just as Husserl's latent being includes those things outside conscious attention – either in the unconscious mind or that which our attention has yet to bring into awareness. Husserl specifically talks about latent being as “dreamless sleep” and that “birth, death, and that which comes after death” (16), and which parallels the Egyptian concept of existence in the afterlife, the metaphorical “birth” and “death” of the sun in Egyptian theology and cosmology, and the process of revealing and 'waking up' the God in the morning ritual (17). That the Egyptians would sleep in temples hoping for a messages from the Gods in a dream (18), or that the afterlife was likened to a dream state (19)(20), also underscores the latent being symbolism.
Psychologically, we reflect this in our own minds in the transition from holding things in the unconscious, and bringing them to the light of consciousness. Just as each morning recalls the creation of the universe by Horus in the rising of his solar disk, so does our own awakening from slumber, the recalling or emergence of a thought, or a shift in our attention.
This helps illuminate how the Egyptian Gods can experience “death”, be it Horus as the sun becoming “old” like Atum and dying before rising again, the long-dead ancestral Gods of Edfu, Osiris dying and resurrecting, etc. The Gods do not cease to be: they always exist, but they transfer in and out of latent states of being in, into and out of the Duat, in a constant ebb and flow of creation and action, while their archetypal natures remain constant, as does Horus' nature as ruler and creator. Despite the common term for the Duat of 'underworld', it was depicted not as a dreary state, but a place of beautiful repose due to dwelling among the Gods. The concept of repose is appropriate to the idea of latent being as well, as a peaceful slumber where we share in a mutual dream of an idealized creation.
But let’s talk about the other Gods. Henotheism still postulates multiple deities, so we need to look at polytheism seriously, since the temple at Edfu still contained side chapels to several other Gods, and mentioned many more by name.
One defense of polytheism used by Amos Wollen (21) incorporates the concept of Unrestricted Composition (UC), which proposes that for any collection of two separate objects, there exists a third object composed of those two (even as a grouping), functionally making there an infinite number of objects. This holds even for those that seem counter-intuitive, only because humans do not yet have a use to group those objects together as such. UC is likely a true account of metaphysics, being free from contradictions and with the best explanatory value compared to rival theories, and enjoys widespread, even if not total, acceptance. UC turns Saint Anselm's Yahweh as “a being of which no greater one can be conceived” to a polytheistic “maximally great collection of Gods”, specifically “the infinite collection of Gods possesses the maximal consistent set of the great-making properties power, knowledge, aseity, and benevolence” that together equal that of a similarly conceived single God. It also has the added benefit of explaining the diversity of phenomena within the world.
Wollen gives additional support for an infinite number of Gods through expanding on the “Love Argument” for the Christian Trinity (22), which posits a loving God must have always been able to love in three primary ways: the creator should love himself, love another, and love a third person cooperatively with another. Yet, he argues, there are other ways of loving than these three concepts, such as loving large groups or ideas such as nations and sports teams. More intimately we can include families, extended families and friends in this classification. An infinite number of Gods would allow Horus to satisfy the Trinitarian “Love Argument” and go beyond it to love groups of Gods (and humans, animals, etc.) ad infinitum."
Finally, Adelstein and Wollen argue (23) that a creator should create an infinite number of humans (at least, over time) because it is good for humans to exist. If, as the Egyptians (and others) would agree, it is also good for divine beings to exist (or beings in general, which would include divine and semi-divine ones), then Horus as the creator should also will to create an infinite number of Gods as well.
Possible objections to the polytheism via the UC thesis include the denial of infinity, but the polytheist can then convert “maximal” into a “finite yet very large” rather than “infinite” parameter; such a denial would apply to any God, including Yahweh, as well, making that being also “finite yet very large”, bringing us back to square one. A second criticism is that a contradiction occurs when trying to apply UC to both Gods, and to concrete objects separate from any God, but the aforementioned Egyptian theology of immanence states that no object is truly separate entirely from the Gods. All phenomena are ultimately governed by at least one immanent God, if not Horus himself.
A final objection to polytheism claims there cannot be more than one omnipotent supreme being since any disagreement or difference between them would negate the concept of omnipotence (24). However, this is not relevant in a henotheistic system where only the supreme deity need be omnipotent or omnipresent, or is at least more powerful and wise than the rest of the pantheon. The Edfu temple itself does not seem to have examples of deities in conflict with each other, but rather assisting Horus in the creation myth (25) and in his battles against evil (26). The exception at Edfu is Horus' enemy Set, although his status as a netjer seems different than the other Gods: his divine status, and how he fits in a theoretical Egyptian approach to theodicy, will be discussed at a later point, after an explanation of one of the most important concepts in ancient Egyptian religion: Ma'at.
Alliot, Maurice (1949) Le culte d'Horus a Edfou au temps des Ptolemees, Imprimerie de l'Institut Francais d'Archeologie Orientale, Cairo, pg. 182-183.
Hallow, William W., Younger, K. Lawson, Jr. (1997) The Context of Scripture: Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World, Volume One, Brill, pg. 24.
Hornung, Erik (1982) Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, pg. 186.
Ibid., pg. 176.
Ibid., pp. 191, 194.
Finnestad, Ragnhild Bjerre (1985) Image of the World and Symbol of its Creator: On the Cosmological and Iconological Values of the Temple of Edfu, Otto Harrassowitz, Weisbaden, Germany, pp. 144-145.
Ibid., pg. 84.
Ibid., pp. 84, 111.
Gaber, Amr (2009) “The Central Hall in the Egyptian Temples of the Ptolemaic Period”, Durham theses, Durham University, pg. 468.
Finnestad (1985), pg. 113. A comparable idea associates the Holy Spirit in Christianity with the dove: such birds are used in ceremonies such as funerals to evoke the attributes of the Holy Spirit in people's minds such as peace or salvation. Likewise, Jesus is compared to a lamb, and the symbolism of Israelite sacrifice, even being portrayed as a fully theriomorphic lamb holding a cross atop an altar of sacrifice in early depictions. From an Egyptian perspective, the dove is the ba of the Holy Spirit, as is the tongue of flame over a person's head; the lamb is the ba of Jesus, and the burning bush the ba of Yahweh. A similar concept may also be found in the Greek daimon, who acts as a messenger of the Gods even for their images: a person is unaware when a God is next to them, but when they see the anthropomorphic form of that God, it is actually the daimon they are seeing in the image, through which the God communicates to them. The Egyptians did not seem to have daimons in this sense, but the ba would fulfill the idea of an interface between the fundamental latent being of Gods and the dead, and their presence in the manifested world of the living.
van den Hoven, Carina (2017) The Coronation Ritual of the Falcon at Edfu: Innovation and Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Ritual Composition, Leiden, Abstract.
Hornung (1982), pg. 128.
Finnestad (1985), pp. 104-105, 109.
Assmann, Jan (2001) The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, pp. 238-239.
Peterson, Jordan B (1999) Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, Routledge, New York, NY, pp. 130-131.
Strasser, Stephen, Basic Concepts of Edmund Husserl’s Social Ontology, pg. 21.
Elli, Alberto (2014) “The Singing of the Morning Hymn of Awakening at Edfu”, Mediterraneo Antico Special, Number 1, Massa, Tuscany, Italy, pg. 1-20.
El-Kilany, Engy and El-Gammal, Islam (2019) Dream Incubation Tourism: The Resurrection of Ancient Egyptian Heritage of Sleep Temples, International Journal of Heritage and Museum Studies, Volume, 1 Issue 1, pp. 95-96.
Tribl, Gotthard G. (2011) “Dream as a constitutive cultural determinant – the example of ancient Egypt”, International Journal of Dream Research Volume 4, No. 1, Zurich, Switzerland, pp. 26-29.
El-Kilany & El-Gammal (2019), pp. 94-95.
https://wollenblog.substack.com/p/steelmanning-polytheism
https://wollenblog.substack.com/p/gods-an-infinity-not-a-trinity
https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-anthropic-argument-for-theism
Wollen, “Steelmanning Polytheism”.
Finnestad (1985), pp. 60-64.
Fairman, H. W. (1935) "The Myth of Horus at Edfu I", The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology Vol. 21, No. 1 (Sep., 1935), pp. 26-36.