According to the egyptologist Geraldine Pinch, once the gods were born and creation set in motion,
The symbol of the ouroborus, the snake swallowing its own tail, representing eternity, comes from this connection of the serpent with creation and the divine. Atum (Ra) is depicted in early inscriptions as a serpent, and later he is the serpent-as-sun-god (or a sun deity protected by a serpent) who battles the forces of chaos symbolized by the serpent Apophis.
The deities of ancient Egypt maintained harmony and balance after the primordial One divided at creation. Geraldine Pinch writes, “Texts that allude to the unknowable era before creation define it as the time ‘before two things had developed’. The cosmos was not yet divided into pairs of opposites such as earth and sky, light and darkness, male and female, or life and death” (58). In the beginning, all was One and then, with the rise of the ben-ben  and the birth of the gods, multiplicity entered creation; the One became the many.
Egyptian religious beliefs centered on the balancing of these ‘many’ through the principle of harmony known as ma’at . Ma’at was the central value of Egyptian culture influencing every aspect of the people’s lives from how they conducted themselves to their art, architecture, literature, and even their vision of the afterlife. The power which enabled the gods to perform their duties, allowed human beings access to their gods, and sustained ma’at  was heka . Heka, the god, is represented in the Coffin Texts  as claiming to have existed before any other deity.
Like the people of Mesopotamia, from whom some scholars claim the Egyptians developed their religious beliefs, the people of Egypt believed they were partners with the gods in maintaining order and holding the forces of chaos at bay. The story best illustrating this concept is The Overthrowing of Apophis which generated its own ritual. Apophis was the primordial serpent who, every night, attacked the sun barge of Ra as it traveled through the darkness toward the dawn. Different gods and goddesses manned the boat with Ra to protect him from Apophis, and the souls of the á´
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were also expected to help fend off the serpent. One of the most famous images from this story shows the god Set, before he became known as the villain of the Osiris Myth, spearing the serpent and protecting the light.
Apophis Defeated
kairoinfo4u (CC BY-NC-SA)
The ritual which grew out of the story included people making images of Apophis from wood or wax and then destroying them with fire to help the souls of the á´
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and the deities who traveled with them to bring the morning sun. Cloudy days were troublesome to the ancient Egyptians because they were taken as a sign that Apophis was overpowering Ra; a solar eclipse was a source of great dread. The Egyptians, through rituals and devotion to their gods, helped the sun to rise again every morning and each day was seen as a struggle between the forces of order and chaos. Geraldine Pinch writes:
When creator gods such as Atum are spoken of as serpents they usually represent the positive aspect of chaos as an energy force but they had a negative counterpart in the great serpent Apophis. Apophis represented the destructive aspect of chaos that constantly tried to overwhelm all individual beings and reduce everything back to its primeval state of “oneness”. So, even before creation began, the world contained the elements of its own destruction (58).
This destruction would overwhelm even the gods and goddesses themselves. The return to the state of wholeness, of the many combining back into the One, was considered inevitable. Scholar R. H. Wilkinson notes how “a number of Egyptian texts show that although the gods were not considered to be mortal in the usual sense, they could nevertheless die” (20). This belief seems to have come from the Egyptian value of balance and harmony; as the multiplicity of the universe had arisen from the One, it would someday return to its original state. A god like Osiris could be killed and then return to life but this was only a temporary situation; one day, all would be gathered back into the primordial chaos from which it had come. Wilkinson writes:
The principle of divine demise applies, in fact, to all Egyptian deities. Texts which date back to at least the New Kingdom tell of the god Thoth á´ssigning fixed life spans to humans and gods alike, and Spell 154 of the Book of the á´
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 unequivocally states that death (literally, ‘decay’ and ‘disappearance’) awaits ‘every god and goddess’…and only the elements from which the primordial world had arisen would eventually remain (21).
The concept of oneness, of recognition of an undifferentiated whole, was not valued by Egyptian culture as it was by certain aspects of Chinese or Hindu culture but was rather feared. To return to undifferentiated oneness meant the loss of one’s personal idenŃΚŃy, one’s memory, one’s accomplishments in life, and loved ones; this thought was intolerable to the ancient Egyptians. In the afterlife, instead of a ‘hell’, the worst thing which could happen to a soul was to be judged unfit for paradise. When the heart of the soul was weighed against the white feather of truth and was found to be heavier it was dropped onto the floor and eaten by the monster Ammut.
The heart was believed to be the center of one’s personality and spirit, and once it was eaten, the soul ceased to exist. Non-existence was terrifying to the Egyptians. Bunson writes, “The Egyptians feared eternal darkness and unconsciousness in the afterlife because both conditions belied the orderly transmission of light and movement evident in the universe” (86). That “transmission of light and movement” was life itself. The elaborate vision of the Egyptian afterlife as a perfect reflection of one’s life on earth developed precisely because of this fear of non-existence, of losing one’s self. When the gods finally died, after millions of years, human beings would die with them and all of human history would be rendered meaningless.
The Death of the Gods & Goddesses of Egypt
The gods and goddesses of ancient Egypt did eventually die and it did not even take millions of years. The rise of Christianity meant the end of ancient Egyptian religious practices and a world imbued and sustained by magic. God now resided in heaven, a single deity far from the earth, and there were no longer the multiplicity of gods and spirits inhabiting one’s daily life. Even though this new god could be present through the intermediary of his son Jesus Christ, he is still described by the Christian scriptures themselves as “dwelling in light inaccessible” (I Timothy 6:16). The image of the divine serpent had already been taken by the Jewish scribes and transformed into a symbol of human beings’ fall from paradise (Genesis 3) and the earth itself, far from being inbued with the spirits of friendly gods was now considered evil by the Christian scriptures and under the control of their adversary Satan (Romans 5:2, II Corinthians 4:4, Galatians 1:4, I John 5:19, etc). By the 5th century CE the Egyptian gods were dwindling, and by the 7th century CE they were gone. As Wilkinson notes, however, they did not go quietly:
In AD 383 pagan temples throughout the Roman Empire were closed by order of the Emperor Theodosius and a number of further decrees, culminating in those of Theodosius in AD 391 and Valentinian III in AD 435, sanctioned the actual destruction of pagan religious structures. Soon most of Egypt’s temples were shunned, claimed for other use, or actively destroyed by zealous Christians, and the ancient gods were largely deserted (22).
Wilkinson and others note how the ancient Egyptian beliefs lived on in spite of Christianity’s and then Islam’s attempts to destroy them. The Myth of Osiris, with its central Dying and Reviving God figure, became central to the Cult of Isis which traveled to Greece after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 331 BCE. From Greece, worship of Isis was taken to Rome where her cult became the most popular religious belief in the Roman Empire before the rise of Christianity and its most stubborn opponent afterwards. Temples to Isis have been found all over the ancient world from Pompeii through Asia Minor, throughout Europe, and into Britain.
The concept of the Dying and Reviving God which had long been established through the Osiris Myth was now made manifest in the figure of the son of God,Â
Jesus the Christ. In time, epithets for Isis became those for the Virgin Mary such as “Mother of God” and “Queen of Heaven” as the new religion drew on the power of the older belief to establish itself. The Abydos Triad of Osiris, Isis, and Horus became the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost in the new religion which had to destroy the old belief in order to achieve supremacy.
The Temple of Isis on Philae in Egypt is considered the last pagan temple to have survived. Records show that in 452 CE pilgrims visited the Temple of Philae and removed the statue of Isis, carrying her in honor as in former days to visit with the neighboring gods of Nubia (Wilkinson, 23). By the time of the emperor Justinian in 529 CE, however, all pagan beliefs were suppressed. There were no doubt pockets of resistance to the new faith but the widespread veneration of the old gods was now a memory. Wilkinson writes:
By AD 639 when Arab armies claimed Egypt they found only Christians and the disappearing legacy of ancient gods who had ruled one of the greatest centres of civilization for well over 3,000 years (23).
The gods and goddesses of Egypt would never completely vanish, however. They infused the new monotheistic ideologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Of the Five Pillars of Islam, prayer, pilgrimage, fasting, and alms-giving were all practiced millennium before by the ancient Egyptians in the worship of their gods. The concept of heka , an eternal, invisible force which empowered creation and sustained life, was developed by the Greek and Roman Stoics and the Neo-Platonists as the Logos and the Nous , respectively, and both of these philosophies influenced the development of Christianity.
In the modern day, people routinely refer to the faith of the ancient Egyptians as a primitive, polytheistic faith; however, the Egyptian gods were worshipped for more than 3,000 years and the only religiously-themed conflict recorded was during the reign of Akhenaten (1353-1336 BCE) when the king insisted on a monotheistic reverence for the supreme god Aten and even this was most likely more of a political maneuver to decrease the power of the Priests of Amun. For the greater part of Egypt’s history, making war on the grounds of religion would have gone against one of the most important values the gods gave to the people: harmony.
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