If, then, we would understand the conception of the divine formed by the educated Egyptian of the historical age, we must remember the characteristics of Egyptian thought which lay behind it. Materialism and symbolism constituted the background of Egyptian religion. The one presupposed the other, for the symbol presented the abstract idea in a material and visible shape, while the materialism of the Egyptian mind demanded something concrete which the senses could apprehend. The conception of the ka, with which Egyptian religion begins, is characteristic of Egyptian religious thought up to the last. It is like the "materialised spirits" of modern spiritualism, spirits which are merely matter in an etherialised form. The Egyptian gave not only shape but substance to his mental and spiritual creations; like the "ideas" of Plato, they became sensuous realities like the written symbols which expressed them. Not only were the name and the thing never dissociated from one another, the name was looked on as the essence of the thing, and the name included its expression in both sound and writing. The bird which represented the idea of "soul" became in time the soul itself.
This very fact assisted in spiritualising Egyptian religion. Ideas and their symbols interchange one with the other; the ideas, moreover, develop and pass out of one form into another. The identification, therefore, of the abstract and the concrete, of ideas and substantial existence, made a pantheistic conception of the universe easy. The divinity clothed itself in as many forms as there were symbols to express it, and these forms passed one into the other like phases of thought. The Egyptian was the first discoverer of the term "becoming," and the keynote of his creed was the doctrine of transformation.
Transformation, it must be remembered, is not transmigration. There was no passage of an individual soul from body to body, from form to form; the divine essence permeated all bodies and forms alike, though it manifested itself at a given moment only under certain ones. It was in this power of manifestation that the transformation consisted. Had the Egyptian not been fettered by his materialistic symbolism, he would doubtless have gone further and concluded that the various manifestations of the divinity were subjective only--existing, that is to say, only in the mind of the observer; as it was, he held them to be objective, and to possess the same substantial reality as the symbolic pictures by which they were denoted.