In the company of the divine entities the king is attended by the flock of Egyptian animal archetypes, each displaying not only his own potent nature, but also symbolic of some larger dimension. The tremendous bull; the majestic lion, both early symbols of the king; the swift hound; Horus the soaring falcon, the exemplar of kingship itself; Wepwawet, the alert and watchful dog; the baboon; an entire menagerie of zoomorphs surged out of the subconscious of the emerging Egyptian personality. As Jung again observed, ‘The archetypes are the imperishable elements of the unconscious but they change their shape continuously’.26 The Egyptians were not, of course, the first to employ animal forms to express ideas so profound that they were beyond words, even beyond abstract symbols, but they fixed them so completely that no mythology could ever equal either their endurance or their penetration.
The perception which Jung so frequently displayed when considering the nature of myth and the outpouring of the archetypes in antiquity is nowhere more acutely expressed than in his observation of the nature of the divine animal:
Zarathustra is an archetype and therefore has the divine quality, and that is always based on the animal. Therefore the gods are symbolized as animals; even the holy ghost is a bird, all the antique gods, and the exotic gods are animals at the same time. The old wise man is a big ape really, which explains his peculiar fascination.27
This is a quite remarkable insight into the process of god-making, when the gods are realized in animal form. It was the special genius of the Egyptians first to recognize the nature of the archetypes and, in so doing, to conceal their nature in animal forms when they manifest themselves. The majority of the high gods of Egypt have an animal persona; only Ptah, who is one of the greatest of the divine powers, is invariably shown in human form though even he can also be manifested in the bulls — Apis, Mnevis, Buchoris — which are sacred to him; however, in this case the bull is Ptah, not Ptah the bull. The Egyptians went still further in interpreting the animal forms in which the gods appear as archetypes by merging their physical presence with human forms: the gods are animal-headed when they appear in the rituals and when they are attendant upon the king.
It is surely significant that theriomorphs, the conflation of animals and humans, play little part in the symbolism of the Old Kingdom, in comparison with their proliferation in the later periods of Egyptian history. In the third millennium, all was assured and determined, the Valley was secure and the gods, principally because they are remote from the affairs of humans, do not represent menace.
Very frequently in myths which arise from archetypal sources the animals are helpful to men, aiding them in trials or rescuing them from danger. The ‘helpful animal’ is an archetype recognized by Jung and Egypt provides examples of the intervention of the helpful animal in human affairs. The story of the Shipwrecked Sailor from the Middle Kingdom is one of these.
The Egyptian attitude to animals probably explains the generally friendly nature of the theriomorphic and zoomorphic divinities: animals were part of the natural world which they shared. As such, they were worthy of respect, even of veneration in later times. Jung was responding to his own unconscious when he remarked, in the extract quoted earlier, that ‘the old wise man is a big ape really’. The Egyptians were in advance of him in this perception for Thoth, the god of wisdom is very frequently represented as a baboon. The cynocephalus, the same species that so impressed Jung when its members seemed to be greeting the sunrise, was sacred to Thoth and one of the most ancient animal deities, known in the First Dynasty, was a baboon, ‘The Great White’.
The people of ancient Egypt and Carl Gustav Jung alike recognized the archetypal significance of the ape, a remarkable instance of correspondence over a great tract of time. The acknowledgement of the primate nature of modern humans is fundamental to an understanding of what happened in Egypt in the early centuries of its corporate existence. There were two special qualities which determined the nature of the archaic Egyptian society: it is hierarchic and it is pristine. Egypt is the first, most perfectly realized complex society because it is organized on firmly hierarchic principles. Man belongs to the order ‘Primate’; whilst he is a particularly developed form of primate, with special skills and qualities none of these obscures his essentially primatial nature.
Most primates, and certainly all the higher primates, the great apes and the chimpanzees for example, live in structured bands most, though not all, under the leadership of a dominant or alpha male. The alpha male will be attended by (and eventually will have to compete with) a group of lesser-ranking males.
Thus, dominance over the group by an individual is an inheritance which is drawn from the most distant frontiers of our species. By an extraordinary insight the Egyptians clearly apprehended the nature of the dominant leader of the group, the primatial ‘Great Individual’, the ‘big ape’ as hierarch. The leap from this relatively simple concept to the idea of the kingship, with all its attendant ceremony and ritual with the overlay of divinity, is immense but wholly logical. In conceiving the kingship the Egyptians acknowledged the primatial nature of human society and by its creation, wittingly or not, maintained a connection between the impending complex societies into which humankind was evolving and the small bands which, for all of mankind’s previous history, as primate and as modern human, had provided the hierarchic structure which made the group viable. It was as if the
Egyptians of late predynastic times and the early centuries of dynastic rule attempted to reconcile the condition of humans who had chosen to live in groups which were so vastly greater in number than anything that primates could endure. That they ultimately failed does not diminish the nobility of the attempt to restore the human condition to its primatial matrix.
World History
