RELIGION

The Egyptian priests alone were acquainted with the mystical or recondite sense of their mythology. Their religion appears to have been founded upon the worship of the supreme power of nature that is of one spiritual being , the author of the universe, adored under different names and forms, according to his different attributes and operations. The belief in supreme being seems to have been the grand of the priests.
Temple were the setting for the performance of a wide variety of cult actions that provided the basic structure of Ancient Egypt religion and the means of communication between the divine and the profane realms. Most cult actions took the form of offering rituals in which the king is shown giving the gods food, drinks, flowers, or any other gifts.
The performance of the temple cults rituals served several essential function. Most importantly, they were believed to maintain the cosmic and earthly order. Temple ritual also served as a place for legitimacy of the king, for all cult actions were done in His name and few with his exception. The importance of temple cult actions is evidence in their longevity. Offerings to the God can be documented through all periods of ancient Egypt history. Many of the specific rituals were unchanged for millenia, a reflection of the deeply conservative nature of the Egyptians.
This permanence of ritual actions reflects the Egyptians love and desire for repetition.
So, the main focus of the temple cults was the maintenance of the God who in the form of the cult statue, dwelled in the sanctuary of the temple. Because deities were patterned upon humans, they were believed to have the same fundamental requirements.
The Egyptian priests alone were acquainted with the mystical or recondite sense of their mythology. Their religion appears to have been founded upon the worship of the supreme power of nature that is of one spiritual being , the author of the universe, adored under different names and forms, according to his different attributes and operations. The belief in supreme being seems to have been the grand of the priests.
Temple were the setting for the performance of a wide variety of cult actions that provided the basic structure of Ancient Egypt religion and the means of communication between the divine and the profane realms. Most cult actions took the form of offering rituals in which the king is shown giving the gods food, drinks, flowers, or any other gifts.
The performance of the temple cults rituals served several essential function. Most importantly, they were believed to maintain the cosmic and earthly order. Temple ritual also served as a place for legitimacy of the king, for all cult actions were done in His name and few with his exception. The importance of temple cult actions is evidence in their longevity. Offerings to the God can be documented through all periods of ancient Egypt history. Many of the specific rituals were unchanged for millenia, a reflection of the deeply conservative nature of the Egyptians.
This permanence of ritual actions reflects the Egyptians love and desire for repetition.
So, the main focus of the temple cults was the maintenance of the God who in the form of the cult statue, dwelled in the sanctuary of the temple. Because deities were patterned upon humans, they were believed to have the same fundamental requirements.








Soon after the establishment of the Egyptian Empire, religion underwent debasement. He ethical of the religion was extremely largely destroyed and superstition and magic take control. The chief cause seems to have been bitter war to expel the Hykos fostered the growth of irrational attitudes and correspondingly depreciated the intellectual. They use the practice of selling magical charms, which were supposed to have the effect of preventing the heart of deceased from betraying his or her real character. They also sold formulas which were alleged to be effective in facilitating the passage of the dead to the realm of the blessed. The collection is referred as the Book of Dead.
Pharaoh Amenhotep, is the leader of this movement. After the some attempts to correct the most flagrant abuses, he resolved to crush the system entirely. He bring out the priest from the temple and hacked the names of the traditional deities from the public monuments and initiated it the worship of a new God.
More important than these physical changes was the set of doctrines that initiated by the reforming of pharaoh. He taught first of all a religion of qualified monotheism. Aton and Akhenaton himself were the God in existence. Like none other Gods before him. Aton had no human or animal shape but was to be known in terms of life-giving, warming rays of the sun. he was the creature of all and thus, god not merely of Egypt but of the whole universe.
A side of these qualification, Akhenaton restored the ethical quality of Egyptian religion as its best by insisting that Aton was the author of the moral order of the world and the rewarded of humanity for integrity and purity of the heart. The religion of Aton gained little popular following because of the masses remained devoted to their old God. The new religion was to strange for them and lacked the greatest attraction of the older faith. There after Egyptian religion was characterized by growing faith in ritualism and magic. Priests sold formulas and charms that were supposed to trick the Gods into granting salvation, thus even the cult of Osiris lost most of its moral quality.