dualism

Egypt and Mesopotamia

While there was generally no explicit dualism in ancient Egyptian religion, there was an implicit dualism in the contrast between the god Seth and the god Osiris. Seth, a violent, aggressive, “foreign,” sterile god, connected with disorder, the desert, and loneliness, was opposed to Osiris, the god of fertility and life, active in the waters of the Nile. Seth also possessed some typically dualistic marks of a mythological character: his action, as well as his personality itself, was ambivalent; and, as a typical trickster, he was also capable, at times, of constructive action in the cosmos. The myths of Osiris and Seth may be compared in various ways with those recently discovered among the Dogon people of the western Sudan, which contrast Nommo, a fertile and happily mated primordial being pictured in fish form, with Yurugu (“Pale Fox”), an unhappy, sterile character who lives in the wilderness without a mate. Yurugu is considered to be the element that makes the universe complete (the same role assigned to Seth in the Egyptian myth).

Dualism, broadly speaking, was also present in ancient Mesopotamian religion. In myths pertaining to the origin of the gods and of the cosmos, the opposition between the primordial deities (Apsu, the Abyss, and Tiamat, the Sea) and the new ones (particularly Marduk, the demiurge, or creator) displayed some dualistic aspects. Though the earlier deities had established the basic reality of the universe—its ontological core—because of their chaotic and selfish nature they resisted their own offspring, who were later to create the now existing definite order of the cosmos. A dualism of the ontological—basic reality or being—versus the cosmological—the form or order of the material universe—is thus implicitly affirmed.