Eternal Measures and Symbols of Egyptian Sages 95
“And farther still, the Egyptian priests, from their transcendent wisdom and association with divinity, discovered what animals are more acceptable to the Gods [when dedicated to them] than man. Thus they found a hawk is dear to the sun, since the whole of its nature consists of blood and spirit”.
“In a similar manner, the Egyptians philosophize about the ram, the crocodile, the vulture, and the ibis, and, in short, about every animal; so that, from their wisdom and transcendent knowledge of divine concerns, they came at length to venerate all animals”.
Prophyry
5 Sacred Animals, Philosophers, and Cosmic Numbers
Speaking about Egyptian philosophy as it is attested by Chaeremon the Stoic, Porphyry emphasizes that the priests on the basis of their wisdom (phroneseos) and their profound theosophy (theosophias) came to worship even animals, not believing them to be gods but making them the images and symbols of the gods (eikonas de epoiounto kai sumbola tauta theon). In fact, as noted above, the philosophers themselves, who devoted their whole life to contemplation and vision of the divine (ton theion theoria kai theasei), were regarded as a kind of sacred animals.(5)
Hellenes and Romans rarely understood the real meaning of “honouring sacred animals” and ridiculed such practices. It must be remembered that in spite of the permanent fame as the land of spiritual masters, philosophers, mystagogues of ancient mysteries, and magicians, even the Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt stood a bit aside from the rest of the eastern Mediterranean world. The Egyptian hieratic culture was quite uncharacteristic of the Graeco-Roman world, because it preserved the unbroken, though slightly transformed, tradition from the earliest Dynasties which, in the form of religious practices, liturgies, official ritual expertise, oracles, literary genres, patterns of thought, continued well into the 4th century A.D., proving that the temple cult was not a “sheer formalism”, but a means of transformation, ritualization of the environment, and theurgic ascent, keeping at the same time the dynamic rhythms of the magnificent cosmic order.
Bearing in mind this continuous functioning of the literate temple culture and maintaining religious practices even at the local level with little overall formal change, D. Frankfurter contrasts this constant tradition covering several millennia with “the comparatively briefer or less unilinear histories of Greece, Palestine, and Asia Minor with their great vicissitudes of religious centralization”.7