EGYPTIAN SYMBOLS

EGYPTIAN SYMBOLS

Sign-language was from the beginning a substitution of similars for the purpose of expression by primitive or pre-verbal Man, who followed the animals in making audible sounds accompanied and emphasised by human gestures. The same system of thought and mode of utterance were continued in mythography and totemism. Renouf says the Scarabeus was “an object of worship in Egypt,” as a symbol of divinity. But this is the modern error. If there was a God, and the Beetle was his symbol, obviously it was the divinity that was the object of worship, not the symbol: not the zootype. Ptah, we know, was that divinity, with the Beetle as a type, and those who read the types were worshippers of the God and not of his symbolic dung-beetle which was honoured as a sign of transformation.

When told that the Egyptians were worshippers of the “Bee,” the “Mantis,” and the “Grasshopper,” we recall the words of Hor-Apollo, who says that when the Egyptians would symbolise a mystic and one of the Initiated they delineate a Grasshopper because the insect does not utter sounds withits mouth, but makes a chirping by means of its spine. The grasshopper, then, which uttered a voice that did not come from its mouth, was a living type of superhuman power. And being an image of mystery and superhuman power, it was also considered a fitting symbol of Kagn, the Bushman Creator, or Great Spirit of creative mystery. Moreover, the grasshopper made his music and revealed his mystery in dancing; and the religious mysteries of Kagn were performed with dancing or in the grasshopper’s dance. Thus the Initiates in the mysteries of the Mantis are identical with the Egyptian Mystæ symbolised by the grasshopper; and the dancing probably goes back to the time when pre-verbal man was an imitator of the grasshopper, which was a primitive type of mystery, like the transforming frog and the self-interring tortoise. There is a religious sect still extant in England who are known as the “Jumpers,” and their saltatory exercises still identify them with the leaping “Grasshoppers” and the “praying Mantis” in the Mysteries of old. They still “dance that dance.” The “Moon belongs to the Mantis,” say the Bushmen, which goes to show that the Mantis was not only a Lunar type as the leaper round the horizon, but on account of its power of transformation; and this again suggests the reason why the Mantis should be the zootype of the Mystæ who transformed in trance, as well as leaped and danced in the mysteries. The Frog and the Grasshopper were earlier leapers than the Hare. These also were figures of the Moon that leaped up in a
fresh place every night. It was this leaping up of the light that was imitated in the dances of the Africans who jumped for joy at the appearance of the New Moon which they celebrated in the monthly dance, as did the Congo Negroes and other denizens of the Dark Continent who danced the primitive mysteries and dramatised them in their dances. The Leapers were the Dancers, and the leaping Mantis, the Grasshopper, the Frog, the Hare, were amongst the pre-human prototypes.