The Pharaoh's Shadow by Anthony Sattin

Author:Anthony Sattin [Anthony Sattin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780600031
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2012-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

Bimbashi McPherson, a Briton who worked in Egypt for ‘more than half of a long life’, published one of very few works dedicated to the phenomenon of moulids. His Moulids of Egypt, published in Cairo in the dark year of 1941, remains a useful source book.

‘A moulid,’ he wrote in his elaborate prose, ‘is a popular religious feast in honour of some saint – in Egypt, usually of Islam, corresponding to the Feasts and Fairs held in Europe (and its colonies) to honour some Christian saints; and although moulids hardly became a national institution in Egypt till the seventh century of the Hegira – the thirteenth AD, nor perhaps entirely recognised officially as such till two centuries later, they in many cases are a continuation of Feasts held hundreds or even thousands of years before the Prophet.’ Moulids, McPherson was suggesting, are the modern equivalent of feasts in honour of local gods in ancient Egypt. McPherson then proceeded to cite several examples, some of them providing direct parallels, the most famous of which was a moulid held near Cairo where a young man was carried naked in the procession with a string tied round his penis. A man behind him would pull on the string to keep him erect. The ancient fertility god Min appears on many temple walls in procession with an erect member, and then there is this description from Herodotus of the feast of Dionysus, in which ‘they have puppets, about eighteen inches high; the genitals of these figures are made almost as big as the rest of their bodies, and they are pulled up and down by strings as the women carry them round the villages’.

Every village in Egypt has its sheikh or saint, and some have many more than one; Aswan, for instance, has seventy-seven. No one has ever managed to calculate the number of saints in Cairo, though there are certainly hundreds of them, probably thousands and maybe even more. Some were buried in magnificent mosque tombs, which became the centre of their cults – the mosques of Husayn, Sayyida Zaynab and Imam esh-Shafei spring to mind. Others were buried under the Egyptian earth, which is itself made up of the dust of past saints, their graves marked with a simple slab of concrete topped with a basic dome. However they were interred, I found the parallels between these sheikhs and the ancient gods irresistible.

In ancient temples, statues of the gods were kept in the sanctuary and storerooms, away from the public eye. In theory only the pharaoh could officiate in the temples. ‘Only he,’ wrote the American Egyptologist William Murnane, ‘could stand, as a son before his parents, in the presence of the gods, and yet act as the representative of mankind.’ But in spite of his divine nature, the pharaoh couldn’t be everywhere at once, so priests stood in for him and it was they who had daily contact with the gods. Lay people had less access and relied on priests to intercede for them when the gods left their sanctuaries.

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