THREE FIGURES

The extraordinary number of representations of boats, in drawings, engravings on rocks, in two-and three-dimensional models, would suggest a positive armada of ships, certainly a remarkable degree of marine activity. There can be little doubt that boats and their occupants also had a ritual significance, though what that significance might have been is obscure. Many of the most compelling representations show three figures in a boat, often a type of skiff; this constant repetition of the boat with three occupants is too frequent not to be especially significant. A sizeable vessel with a striped awning amidships is shown with its three occupants distributed one in the stern and two sitting in the powerfully curved prow. A black basalt amulet from Gebelein shows three schematically depicted passengers, seated side by side, in a vessel which has animal heads fore and aft.17 In the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, is a decorated knife hilt which shows three figures once again, with an ideogram representing water denoting that they, too, are on board ship.18 The three hold hands (another common device) and one holds up a sort of stylized weapon or fan.

The theme of ‘three standing figures’ is one of considerable power in Early Dynastic times. The repetition of the group of three figures in predynastic Egypt, in Sumer of the same period, in early Elam, and from later times in the Arabian Gulf, is one of the more intriguing phenomena in ancient iconography, and the recurrence of motifs which endure in their significance and associations is remarkable.

This phenomenon of the three figures in association, either as a family — father, mother, son — or a trinity or triad, is immensely ancient. Jung recognized ‘the Divine Triad’ as one of the most ancient of the archetypes;19 in Egypt it is particularly to be found in the late predynastic period and in the First Dynasty. An example of the triad, which seems to recall much earlier Egyptian originals (which may, of course, themselves be drawn from western Asiatic precedents), is a stamp seal from Failaka in the Bay of Kuwait, which shows three figures standing in a boat with the smallest (to the right) apparently leaping out of it, grasping a curved object.20 This figure seems to be nude, whilst the other, larger standing figures, one of whom holds a bow, appear to be wearing long robes. However, this seal cannot be dated later than the early second millennium, whereas the Egyptian example, with which it has notable similarities, is taken to be at least a thousand years older.

Although the Sumerians and the Egyptians were contemporaries, flourishing at a time when they alone in all the world were laying down systems for the management and mores of complex societies, there is a profound difference the way in which they tried to express and to apply something approaching reason to the apprehension of supernatural powers in their lives. In the case of both peoples the involvement of the divine powers affected the management of the state as much as it elicited unforeseeable consequences of their concern for the affairs of humans. The Egyptian kingship is a divine institution; in Sumer the ruler was the delegate of the divine, for whilst Egyptian kings lived on equal terms with the gods, early Sumerian rulers, ‘great men’ as they were more modestly called, were always, theoretically at least, stewards of a divine master. Each Sumerian city, its temples, fields, even the people themselves, were the property of the god to whom the city belonged.

There is little similarity, equally, between the way the Egyptians and the Sumerians visualized and personified their gods. Sumerian divinities were essentially human in appearance, and their attributes and their behaviour were merely the characteristics of humankind written large. The Egyptian gods were a great deal more complex and diverse.

It appears that the earliest divinities were abstractions, represented by objects which had acquired a special sanctity. The most ancient sign for ‘god’, netjer is abstract; it is thought that it represents ‘a staff bound with cloth’.21 It is a fetish, an object which, for whatever reason, is perceived to have acquired a particular and numinous character. Fetishes of this sort were evidently adopted as the totems or standards of some of the early clans into which the predynastic people seem to have divided themselves. The standards can be seen being borne before the earliest kings on the schist palettes and ceremonial maceheads of the late predynastic period.

The next category of divine beings from the various Egyptian colleges of deities was that which revealed the gods in human form. Many of these are known from the First Dynasty; Re, Ptah, Atum, Isis and Neith. Much later Osiris appeared; all these are shown as human, albeit with divine attributes. In later times, though the custom may reach back to the earliest days, the

Figure 3.6 This enigmatic stamerre from El Amra, carved in schist and dating from the Naqada I period, is remarkable both for its disturbing suggestion of menace and for the shape of the figure’s hood, which is very reminiscent of the high crown of Upper Egypt, though evidence for its existence only appears at a much later date. It has been suggested that the figure represents a shaman or magically-endowed individual.

Source: photograph John G. Ross. Musee de Saint-Germain-en-Laye 77705 Q.

Gods took shapes in which human figures were shown surmounted by animal heads, thus neatly conflating two of the categories of divinity. The priests and other officiants in the temple ceremonies wore masks under which they impersonated the gods attendant upon the king.

The anthropomorphic gods were represented as the predecessors of the king on the throne of Egypt. These were Ptah, Re, Shu, Geb, Osiris, Set, and Horus. Then came Thoth and Maat; these concluded the divine or semidivine dynasties, the reigns of whose kings were of astronomical length. After the gods came the demi-gods, the ‘Spirits of the Dead’ (as they were evocatively called) who were the ‘Followers of Horus’. These seem to have been the chiefs or kings who were the immediate predecessors of the First Dynasty. The dynasties of historic time then began and the number of gods proliferated as those who were identified with particular districts gradually assumed more and more significance. Thus Min, represented as an ithyphal-lic, one-armed man, was the patron of that region of the Wadi Hammamat through which Mesopotamian influences supposedly entered Egypt, and there is some evidence that his worship was associated with a fish cult, though this was not sustained.

The third aspect of Egyptian god-making turned to investing certain animal forms with the prerogatives of divinity. The slate palettes, which are amongst the earliest graphic representations to survive, provide much of the evidence of this practice: setting aside for a moment the occasional monsters which appear amongst the predynastic fauna — scorpions, lions, bulls, the ubiquitous falcon, the ibex, gazelle, hounds are all shown as personifications of the gods, assisting the king in putting down his enemies or in conducting the rituals of the state. Men needed the power of animals; even the early kings, in the later predynastic period and the First Dynasty, called themselves by animal names: Scorpion, Catfish, Fighting Hawk, Serpent are four of the best known. An early palette, now in the collection of the Manchester Museum, shows a man wearing an ostrich mask, evidently hunting the birds which are shown in line at the head of the palette.22 The artist has contrived, with remarkable skill, to suggest considerable menace in the representation of the birds whose heads actually look like masks themselves.

It may be that the animal-headed divinities of Egypt owe their existence to the effects of some form of shamanism. There is no direct or specific evidence of shamanistic practices in predynastic Egypt. It would nonetheless be surprising if such practices were wholly absent from the society which flourished in Egypt at this time, which has many characteristics of the ancient hunting communities in which shamanism has always been a powerful conduit for contact with the spirit world, or with the human unconscious; a distinction which depends mainly on taste. A peculiarly sinister hooded figure, carved in schist is said to come from the important Naqada site of El Amra. A tall, standing man, wrapped in a totally enveloping cloak, wears a diamond-shaped cowl, the crown of which is surmounted by a ball; two blank, staring eye sockets are set into the hood, emphasizing the sense of menace which the figure conveys.23 The hood is remarkably similar in outline to the White Crown of Upper Egypt, the first actual evidence of which comes from many centuries later.

The El Amra figure is unique in form though there are other, bearded male figurines known from the same period. There is no indication of the figure’s status but if a representation of a shaman were to be sought from a predynastic Egyptian context, it would be an impressive candidate.

The ancient Egyptians knew of narcotics and probably of hallucinogens; the conflation of animal and human is typical of shamanistic societies, with the shaman returning from deep trance (‘communing with the ancestors’ or with ‘the gods’), and recording his visions received whilst he was transported.24 At the deepest state of trance it has been suggested that the subject will see visions of the animal which is of special importance to the people, especially if they are hunters.25

The greatest compendium of shamanistic visions available to the modern world is to be found amongst groups such as the Kung San of the Kalahari26 and some of the Australian aboriginal peoples. The painted caves of south western Europe also reveal evidence of paintings produced under the effect of hallucinogens or recalled from trance. In Egypt there are many representations of the soul’s journey after death; an especially powerful image is that of a human-headed bird flying down a tomb corridor or flight of descending steps. These scenes come generally from context later in Egypt’s history than those discussed here but they express a typical metaphor of the journey to the underworld, a form which is known from many widely dispersed cultures. By contrast, one of the most familiar literary allusions to the king’s journey to the Afterlife is the description of him ‘flying up’ to join the company of the gods. These scenes appear frequently in tomb decorations and funerary equipment and are typical recreations of shamans’ experiences (in other cultures) in the trance state.

It must remain uncertain whether Egypt employed psychedelic techniques in their temple rituals and ceremonies; it is however beyond doubt that they depicted situations which, in other cultures, would be cited as revealing psychedelic experiences and probably Altered States of Consciousness (ASCs). It is not wholly unthinkable that the Egyptian practice of conflating human and animal physiology in their representations of the presence of divine or supernatural entities may have derived from the exploitation of hallucinogens or have been the product of trance-induced visions.