What role did religion play in everyday situations?
Births
woman holding her baby
Because larger families, with mostly sons was wanted, the Ancient Egyptian people prayed to the gods and asked to be able to give birth, and sometimes to give birth to a boy. They included special ceremonies and rituals as a mandatory celebration during childbirth. Also during childbirth, the gods Hathor, Nekhbet, Khnum and Bes came to the assistance of the mother and the newborn to help them.
Death between couples
couples statue
After the death of a man and woman, they can still stay together if they pray to be buried next to each other and have statues showing them embraced or next to each other. The deceased were known as being magical and so being buried next to each other shows them how special they were.
Illness
man healing an eye infection
To prevent yourself from contracting diseases, the Ancient Egyptian’s wore amulets in honour of the God, Horus. If the disease had any relation to demons, then the amulet would protect the wearer, and even if the demon had affected the person before they wore the amulet, then Horus could still possibly protect them by giving them a healing plaque, that draws the demon out of the person. The Gods, Horus, Mafdet and Shu, did not want to kill the demons, instead Shu non-fatally poisoned the demons, whilst Mafdet wrote the demons name on a loaf of bread, filling it with meat and then feeding it to a cat, intending it to scare off the demons. Other Gods that healed people were Babi, who conjured healing spells, Imhotep, who was very closely identified with the Greek God of medicine, received offerings of models of injured limbs and ailing organs and mummified ibises, as a way of implying to him what what part of their body needed healing.
Weddings
an ancient egyptian family
Religion was involved in almost every aspect of Ancient Egyptian life, except marriage. This is because they wanted it to be simple and special, and so their marriages were simply one person moving in with the other, normally the wife moving in with the husband, however this doesn't mean they weren't special. Many different examples have shown that they take it very seriously. Normally the wife would be 14/15 whereas the man would be around 17/20 plus, because the life span was very short, it was encouraged to marry early. It wasn't always like this, but mostly the marriages consisted of the people marrying, signing a contract. The poor did not always participate in this because the cost of using a scribe to confirm this was often to extortionate for them.