Practical Religion and Piety

Abstract

Official religion is presented as centring on royal-divine relations; decorum excludes human non-funerary religious concerns. For want of evidence, pre-New Kingdom personal religion must therefore be approached through constructing hypotheses rather than accumulating evidence. A biographical model suggests that practical religionȔreligious action in an everyday contextȔmay focus on affliction, to which responses include communication with the deadȔletters to the dead among the literateȔand perhaps divination through oracles and consulting seers. These approaches may precede further, unknown actions. The use of intermediaries to deities and the deification of non-royal individuals does not certainly extend beyond the élite. PietyȔpersonal relations with deitiesȔis most clearly attested in personal names, while the élite display of personal religious involvement implies some general aspiration to divine contact. Later Egyptian society, in which practical religion and piety are more visible and integrated, had different rules of decorum and perhaps a different organization, in which values and religious action were less local in their focus.