d by the Egyptian
districts those of the immediate neighborhood, or if you like, the cycle of
Osiris, his wife Isis, their son Harpocrates and their faithful servant
Anubis, were the only ones that were adopted by the Hellenic populations.
All other heavenly or infernal spirits worshiped by the Egyptians remained
strangers to Greece.[9]

In the Greco-Latin literature we notice two opposing attitudes toward the
Egyptian religion. It was regarded as the highest and the lowest of
religions at the same time, and as a matter of fact there was an abyss
between the always ardent popular beliefs and the enlightened faith of the
official priests. The Greeks and Romans gazed with admiration upon the
splendor of the temples and ceremonial, upon the fabulous {78} antiquity of
the sacred traditions and upon the erudition of a clergy possessed of a
wisdom that had been revealed by divinity. In becoming the disciples of
that clergy, they imagined they were drinking from the pure fountain whence
their own myths had sprung. They were overawed by the pretensions of a
clergy that prided itself on a past in which it kept on living, and they
strongly felt the attraction of a marvelous country where everything was
mysterious, from the Nile that had created it to the hieroglyphs engraved
upon the walls of its gigantic edifices.[10] At the same time they were
shocked by the coarseness of its fetichism and by the absurdity of its
superstitions. Above all they felt an unconquerable repulsion at the
worship of animals and plants, which had always been the most striking
feature of the vulgar Egyptian religion and which, like all other archaic
devotions, seems to have been practised with renewed fervor after the
accession of the Saite dynasty. The comic writers and the satirists never
tired of scoffing at the adorers of the cat, the crocodile, the leek and
the onion. Juvenal says ironically: "O holy people, whose very
kitchen-gardens produce gods."[11] In a general way, this strange people,
entirely separated from the remainder of the world, were regarded with
about the same kind of feeling that Europeans entertained toward the
Chinese for a long time.

A purely Egyptian worship would not have been acceptable to the Greco-Latin
world. The main merit of the mixed creation of the political genius of the
Ptolemies consisted in the rejection or modification of everything
repugnant or monstrous like the phallophories of Abydos, and in the
retention of