 CHAPTER II. The lower offices in the households of the gods, as in princely households, were held by a troop of servants and artisans, butchers to cut the throats of the victims, cooks and pastry cooks, confectioners, weavers, shoemakers, florists, cellarers, water-carriers, and milk-carriers. In fact, it was a state within a state, and the prince took care to keep its government in his own hands, either by investing one of his children with the titles and functions of Chief Pontiff, or by arrogating them to himself. In that case he provided against mistakes which would have annulled the sacrifice by associating with himself several masters of the ceremonies, who directed him in the orthodox evolutions before the god and about the victim, indicated the due order of gestures and the necessary changes of costume, and prompted him with the words of each invocation from a book or tablet which they held in their hands. In addition to its rites and special hierarchy, each of the sacerdotal colleges thus constituted had a theology in accordance with the nature and attributes of its god. His fundamental dogma affirmed the unity of the Nome God, his greatness, his supremacy over all the gods of Egypt and of foreign lands, whose existence was nevertheless admitted, and none dreamed of denying their reality or contesting their power. The latter also boasted of their unity, their greatness, their supremacy, but whatever they were, the god of the Nome was master of them all, their prince, their ruler, their king. It was he alone who governed the world, he alone kept it in good order, he alone had created it. Not that he had evoked it out of nothing, there was as yet no concept of nothingness, and even to the most subtle and refined of primitive theologians creation was only a bringing of pre-existent elements into play. The latent germs of things had always existed, but they had slept for ages and ages in the bosom of new, of the dark waters. In the fullness of time the god of each Nome drew them forth, classified them, marshaled them according to the bent of his particular nature, and made his universe out of them by methods peculiarly his own. Nitt of Sais, who was a weaver, had made the world of warp and wolf, as the mother of a family weaves her children's linen. Kanumu, the Nile god of the cataracts, had gathered up the mud of his waters, and therewith molded his creatures upon a potter's table. In the eastern cities of the delta these procedures were not so simple. There it was admitted that in the beginning earth and sky were two lovers lost in the new, fast locked in each other's embrace, the god lying beneath the goddess. On the day of creation a new god, Shu, came forth from the primeval waters, slipped between the two, and seizing Nuit with both hands, lifted her above his head with outstretched arms. Though the starry body of the goddess extended in space, her head being to the west and her loins to the east, her feet and hands hung down to the earth. These were the four pillars of the firmament under another form, and four gods of the four adjacent principalities were in charge of them. Osiris, or Horus the Sparrowhawk, presided over the southern, and sit over the northern pillar, thought over that of the west, and Sopti, the author of the Zodiacal Light over that of the east. They had divided the world among themselves into four regions, or rather into four houses, bounded by those mountains which surround it, and by the diameters intersecting between the pillars. Each of the houses belonged to one, and to one only, none of the other three, nor even the sun himself, might enter it, dwell there, or even pass through it without having obtained its master's permission. Hadeshu had not been satisfied to meet the eruption of Shu by a mere passive resistance. He had tried to struggle, and he is drawn in the posture of a man who has just awakened out of sleep, and is half turning on his couch before getting up. One of his legs is stretched out, the other is bent and partly drawn up as in the act of rising. The lower part of the body is still unmoved, but he is raising himself with difficulty on his left elbow, while his head droops and his right arm is lifted towards the sky. His effort was suddenly arrested. Rendered powerless by the stroke of the creator, Sibu remained as if petrified in this position, the obvious irregularities of the earth's surface being due to the painful attitude in which he was stricken. His sides have since been clothed with verger. Generations of men and animals have succeeded each other upon his back, but without bringing any relief to his pain he suffers ever more from the violent separation of which he was the victim when New Eat was torn from him, and his complaint continues to rise to heaven night and day. The aspect of the inundated plains of the delta, of the river by which they are furrowed and fertilized, and of the desert sands by which they are threatened, had suggested to the theologians of Mendes and Buto an explanation of the mystery of creation, in which the feudal divinities of these cities and of several others in their neighborhood, Osiris, Cete, and Isis, played the principal parts. Osiris first represented the wild and fickle Nile of primitive times. Afterwards, as those who dwelt upon his banks learned to regulate his course, they emphasized the kindlier side of his character, and soon transformed him into a benefactor of humanity, the supremely good being, on a frui, on a virus. He was the Lord of the Principality of Didu, which lay along the subanitic branch of the river between the coast-marches and the entrance to the Wadi Timilat. But his domain had been divided, and the two nomes thus formed, namely the ninth and sixteenth nomes of the delta in the pharaonic lists, remained faithful to him, and here he reigned without arrival, at Busiris as at Mendes. His most famous idol form was the Didu, whether naked or clothed. The fetish formed of four superimposed columns which had given its name to the Principality. They ascribed life to this Didu, and represented it with a somewhat grotesque face, big cheeks, thick lips, a necklace round its throat, a long flowing dress which hid the base of the columns beneath its folds, and two arms bent across the breast, the hands grasping a whip and the other a crook, symbols of sovereign authority. This perhaps was the most ancient form of Osiris, but they also represented him as a man, and supposed him to assume the shape of rams and bulls, or even those of water-birds, such as lap-wings, herons and cranes, which disported themselves about the lakes of that district. The goddess whom we are accustomed to regard as inseparable from him, Isis the cow, or woman with cow's horns, had not always belonged to him. Originally she was an independent deity, dwelling at Bouteau in the midst of the ponds of Atu. She had neither husband nor lover, but had spontaneously conceived and given birth to a son, whom she suckled among the reeds, a lesser Horus, who was called Harsiasit, Horus the son of Isis, to distinguish him from Herohris. At an early period she was married to her neighbor Osiris, and no marriage could have been better suited to her nature. For she personified the earth, not the earth in general like Cebu, with its unequal distribution of seas and mountains, deserts and cultivated land, but the black and luxuriant plain of the delta, where races of men, plants and animals increase and multiply in ever-succeeding generations. To whom did she owe this inexhaustible productive energy, if not to her neighbor Osiris, to the Nile? The Nile rises, overflows, lingers upon the soil. Every year it is wedded to the earth, and the earth comes forth green and fruitful from its embraces. The marriage of the two elements suggested that of the two divinities. Osiris wedded Isis and adopted the young Horus. But this prolific and gentle pair were not representative of all the phenomenon of nature. The eastern part of the delta borders upon the solitudes of Arabia, and although it contains several rich and fertile provinces, yet most of these owe their existence to the arduous labor of the inhabitants, their fertility being dependent on the daily care of man and on his regular distribution of the water. The moment he suspends the struggle or relaxes his watchfulness, the desert reclaims them and overwhelms them with sterility. Sit was the spirit of the mountain, stone and sand, the red and arid ground as distinguished from the moist black soil of the valley. On the body of a lion or of a dog he bore a fantastic head with a slender curved stout, upright and square-cut ears, his cloven tail rose stiffly behind him, springing from his loins like a fork. He also assumed a human form, or retained the animal head only upon a man's shoulders. He was felt to be cruel and treacherous, always ready to shrivel up the harvest with his burning breath, and to smother Egypt beneath a shroud of sifting sand. The contrast between this evil being and the beneficent couple, Osiris and Isis, was striking. Nevertheless, the theologians of the delta soon assigned a common origin to these rival divinities of Nile and Egypt, Redland and Black. Sibu had begotten them, Nuit had given birth to them one after another when the Demiurs had separated her from her husband, and the days of their birth were the days of creation. As a matter of fact his companion, Nephthys, did not manifest any great activity, and was scarcely more than an artificial counterpart of the wife of Osiris, a second Isis who bore no children to her husband, for the sterile desert brought barrenness to her as to all that it touched. Yet she had lost neither the wish nor the power to bring forth, and sought fertilization from another source. Tradition had it that she made Osiris drunken, drawn him to her arms without his knowledge, and borne him a son. The child of this furtive union was the jackal and nubus. Thus when a higher Nile overflowed lands not usually covered by the inundation, and lying unproductive for lack of moisture, the soil eagerly absorbs the water, and the germs which lay concealed in the ground burst forth into life. The gradual invasion of the domain of Sit by Osiris marks the beginning of the strife. Sit rebels against the wrong of which he is the victim, involuntary though it was. He surprises and treacherously slays his brother, drives Isis into temporary banishment among her marshes, and reigns over the kingdom of Osiris as well as over his own. But his triumph is short-lived. Horus, having grown up, takes arms against him, defeats him in many encounters, and banishes him in his turn. The creation of the world had brought the destroying and the life-sustaining gods face to face. The history of the world is but the story of their rivalries and warfare. None of these conceptions alone suffice to explain the whole mechanism of creation, nor the part which the various gods took in it. The priests of Heliopolis appropriated them all, modified some of their details and eliminated others, added several new personages, and thus finally constructed a complete cosmogony, the elements of which were learnedly combined so as to correspond severally with the different operations by which the world had been evoked out of chaos, and gradually brought to its present state. Heliopolis was never directly involved in the great revolutions of political history, but no city ever originated so many mystic ideas, and consequently exercised so great an influence upon the development of civilization. It was a small town built on the plain not far from the Nile at the apex of the delta, and surrounded by a high wall of mud bricks whose remains could still be seen at the beginning of the century, but which have now almost completely disappeared. One obelisk standing in the midst of the open plain, a few waste mounds of debris, scattered blocks, and two or three links of crumbling wall, alone marked the place where once the city stood. Ca was worshipped there, and the Greek name of Heliopolis is but the translation of that which was given to it by the priests, P. Ra, city of the sun. Its principal temple, the mansion of the prince, rose from about the middle of the enclosure, and sheltered, together with the god himself, those animals in which he became incarnate, the bull, Menevis, and sometimes the phoenix. According to an old legend, this wondrous bird appeared in Egypt only once in five hundred years. It is born and lives in the depths of Arabia, but when its father dies it covers the body with a layer of myrrh, and flies at utmost speed to the temple of Heliopolis, there to bury it. In the beginning Ra was the sun itself, whose fires appear to be lightest every morning in the east and to be extinguished at evening in the west, and to the people such he always remained. Among theologians there was considerable difference of opinion on the point. Some held the disc of the sun to be the body which the god assumes when presenting himself for the adoration of his worshippers. Others affirmed that it rather represented his active and radiant soul. Finally, there were many who defined it as one of his forms of being, Copriu, one of his self-manifestations, without presuming to decide whether it was his body or his soul which he deigned to reveal to human eyes. But whether soul or body, all agreed that the sun's disc had existed in the new before creation. But how could it have lain beneath the primordial ocean without either drying up the waters or being extinguished by them? At this stage the identification of Ra with Horus and his right eye served the purpose of the theologians admirably. The god needed only to have closed his eyelid in order to prevent his fires from coming in contact with the water. He was also said to have shut up his disc within a lotus bud whose folded petals had safely protected it. The flower had opened on the morning of the first day, and from it the god had sprung suddenly as a child wearing the solar disc upon his head. But all theories led the theologians to distinguish two periods, and as it were, two beings in the existence of Supreme Deity, a pre-mundane sun lying inert within the bosom of the dark waters, and our living and life-giving sun. CHAPTER II. THE GODS OF EGYPT PART VII. One division of the Heliopolitan School retained the use of traditional terms and images in reference to these sun-gods. To the first it left the human form and the title of Ra, with the abstract sense of creator, deriving the name from the verb Ra, which means to give. For the second it kept the form of the sparrow-hawk and the name of Harmakuiti, Horus in the Two Horizons, which clearly did note his function, and it summed up the idea of the sun as a hole in the single name of Ra Harmakuiti, and in a single image in which the hawkhead of Horus was grafted upon the human body of Ra. The other divisions of the school invented new names for new conceptions. The sun existing before the world they called Creator, Tumu, Atumu, and our earthly sun they called Kopri, he who is. Tumu was a man crowned and clothed with the insignia of Supreme Power, a true king of gods, majestic and impressive as the pharaohs who succeeded each other upon the throne of Egypt. The conception of Kopri as a disk enclosing a scarabias, or a man with a scarabus upon his head, or a scarabus-headed mummy, was suggested by the accidental alliteration of his name and that of Kopiru, the scarabus. The difference between the possible forms of the God was so slight as to be eventually lost altogether. His names were grouped by twos and threes in every conceivable way, and the scarabus of Kopri took its place upon the head of Ra, while the hawkhead piece was transferred from the shoulders of Hamakuiti to those of Tumu. The complex beings resulting from these combinations, Ra Tumu, Atumu Ra, Ra Tumu Kopri, Ra Hamakuit Tumu, Tumu Hamakuit Kopri, never attained to any pronounced individuality. They were as a rule simple duplicates of the feudal God, whose rather than persons, and though hardly taken for one another indiscriminately, the distinctions between them had referenced to mere details of their functions and attributes. Hence arose the idea of making these gods into embodiments of the main phases in the life of the sun during the day and throughout the year. Ra symbolized the sun of springtime and before sunrise, Hamakuiti, the summer and the morning sun, Atumu, the sun of autumn and of afternoon, Kopri, that of winter and of night. The people of Heliopolis accepted the new names and the new forms presented for their worship, but always subordinated them to their beloved Ra. For them Ra never ceased to be the god of the Nome, while Atumu retained the god of the theologians, and was invoked by them, the people preferred Ra. At thinnest and at semenitos, Unhurri incurred the same fate as Befel Ra at Heliopolis. After he had been identified with the sun, the similar identification of Shu inevitably followed. Of old, Unhurri and Shu were twin gods, incarnations of sky and earth. They were soon but one god and two persons, the god Unhurri Shu, of which the one half under the title of Unhurri represented, like Atumu, the primordial being, and Shu, the other half, became, as his name indicates, the creative sun god who upholds Shu, the sky. Ternu then, rather than Ra, was placed by the Heliopolitan priests at the head of their cosmogony as supreme creator and governor. Several versions were current as to how he had passed from inertia into action, from the personage of Toomu into that of Ra. According to the version most widely received, he had suddenly cried across the waters, Come unto me! and immediately the mysterious lotus had unfolded its petals, and Ra had appeared at the edge of its open cup as a disk, a newborn child, or a disk crowned sparrow-hawk. This was probably a refined form of a ruder and earlier tradition, according to which it was upon Ra himself that the office had devolved, up separating Sibu from Nuit, for the purpose of constructing the heavens and the earth. But it was doubtless felt that so unseemly an act of intervention was beneath the dignity even of an inferior form of the Suzuran god. Sibu was therefore borrowed for the purpose from the kindred cult of Anhuri, and at Heliopolis, as at Sebenitos, the office was entrusted to him of seizing the sky goddess and raising her without stretched arms. The violence suffered by Nuit at the hands of Shu led to a connection of the Osirin dogma of Mendes with the solar dogma of Sebenitos, and thus the tradition describing the creation of the world was completed by another, explaining its division into deserts and fertile lands. Sibu, hitherto concealed beneath the body of his wife, was now exposed to the sun. Osiris and Sitt, Isis and Nephthys, were born, and falling from the sky, their mother, onto earth, their father. They shared the surface of the latter among themselves. Thus the Heliopolitan doctrine recognized three principal events in the creation of the universe. The dualization of the supreme god and the breaking forth of light, the raising of the sky and the laying bear of the earth, the birth of the Nile and the allotment of the soil of Egypt, all expressed as the manifestations of successive deities. Of these deities, the latter ones already constituted a family of father, mother and children, like human families. Learned theologians availed themselves of this example to affect analogous relationships between the rest of the gods, combining them all into one line of descent. As Atumu Ra could have no fellow, he stood apart in the first week, and it was decided that Shu should be his son, whom he had formed out of himself alone, on the first day of creation, by the simple intensity of his own virile energy. Shu, reduced to the position of divine son, had in his turn begotten Sibu and Nuit, the two deities which he separated. Until then he had not been supposed to have any wife, and he also might have brought his own progeny into being, but lest a power of spontaneous generation equal to that of the Demiurge should be ascribed to him, he was married, and the wife found for him was Tap Nuit, his twin sister, born in the same way as he was born. This goddess, invented for the occasion, was never fully alive, and remained like Nephthis, a theological entity rather than a real person. The text describes her as the pale reflex of her husband. Together with him she upholds the sky, and every morning receives the newborn son as it emerges from the mountain of the east. She is a lioness when Shu is a lion, a woman when he is a man, a lioness-headed woman if he is a lion-headed man. She is angry when he is angry, appeased when he is appeased. She has no sanctuary wherein he is not worshipped. In short, the pair made one being in two bodies, or to use the Egyptian expression, one soul in its two twin bodies. Hence we see that the Heliapolitans proclaimed the creation to be the work of the sun-god, Atumurah, and of the four pairs of deities who were descended from him. It was really a learned variant of the old doctrine that the universe was composed of a sky-god, Horus, supported by his four children and their four pillars. In fact, the four sons of the Heliapolitan cosmogony, Shu and Sibu, Osiris and Sitt, were occasionally substituted for the four older gods of the houses of the world. This being premised, attention must be given to the important differences between the two systems. At the outset, instead of appearing contemporaneously upon the scene, the four children of Horus, the four Heliapolitan gods who were deduced one from another, and succeeded each other in the order of their birth. They had not that uniform attribute of a supporter, associating them always with one definite function, but each of them felt himself endowed with faculties and armed with special powers required by his condition. Ultimately they took to themselves goddesses, and thus the total number of beings working in different ways at the organization of the universe was brought up to nine. Hence they were called by the collective name of the Enneid, the nine gods Pauit Niteru, and the god at their head was entitled Pauiti, the god of the Enneid. When creation was completed, its continued existence was ensured by countless agencies with whose operation the persons of the Enneid were not at leisure to concern themselves, but had ordained auxiliaries to preside over each of the functions essential to the regular and continued working of all things. The theologians of Heliopolis selected eighteen from among the innumerable divinities of the feudal cults of Egypt, and of these they formed two secondary Enneids, who were regarded as the offspring of the Enneid of the creation. The first of the two secondary Enneids, generally known as the minor Enneid, recognized as chief Harsiesus, the son of Osiris. Harsiesus was originally an earth-god who had avenged the assassination of his father and the banishment of his mother by Sitt, that is, he had restored fullness to the Nile and fertility to the Delta. When Harsiesus was incorporated into the solar religions of Heliopolis, his affiliation was left undisturbed as being a natural link between the two Enneids, but his personality was brought into conformity with the new surroundings into which he was transplanted. He was identified with Ra through the intervention of the older Horus, Hauriris, Harmakis, and the minor Enneid, like the great Enneid, began with the sun-god. This assimilation was not pushed so far as to invest the younger Horus with the same powers as his fictitious ancestor. He was the son of earth, the everyday sun, while Atumurah was still the sun pre-mandain and eternal. Our knowledge of the eight other deities of the minor Enneid is very imperfect. We see only that these were the gods who chiefly protected the sun-god against its enemies and helped it to follow his regular course. Thus, Haruditi, the Horus of Edfu, spear in hand, pursues the hippopotami or serpents, which haunt the celestial waters and menace the god. The progress of the sun-bark is controlled by the incantations of thought, while Ua Pua Itu, the dual, jackal god of Seuf, guides and occasionally tows it along the sky from south to north. The third Enneid would seem to have included among its members Anubis the jackal, and the four funerary genie, the children of Horus, Hapi, Amsit, Teumoft, Kabsonif. It further appears as though its office was the care and defence of the dead sun, the sun by night, as the second Enneid had charge of the living sun. Its functions were so obscure and apparently so insignificant as compared with those exercised by the other Enneids that the theologians did not take the trouble either to represent it or to enumerate its persons. They invoked it as a whole, after the two others, in the formulas in which they called into play all the creative and preservative forces of the universe, but this was rather as a matter of conscience and from love of precision than out of any true deference. At the initial impulse of the Lord of Heliopolis the three combined Enneids started the world and kept it going, and gods whom they had not incorporated were either enemies to be fought with or mere attendants. The doctrine of the Heliopolitan Enneid acquired an immediate and a lasting popularity. It presented such a clear scheme of creation and one whose organisation was so thoroughly in accordance with the spirit of tradition that the various sacerdotal colleges adopted it one after another, accommodating it to the exigencies of local patriotism. Each placed its own Nome God at the head of the Enneid as the God of the Nine, the God of the First Time, Creator of Heaven and Earth, Sovereign Ruler of Men and Lord of All Action. As there was the Enneid of Atumu at Heliopolis, so there was that of Anhurri at Denes and at Sabanitos, that of Minu at Coptos and at Panopolis, that of Hororis at Edfu, that of Sabkuit Ambos, and later that of Patah of Memphis and Amun at Thebes. Nome's which worshiped a goddess had no scruples whatever in ascribing to her the part played by Atumu, and in crediting her with the spontaneous maternity of Shu and Tapnuit. Nit was the source and ruler of the Enneid of Sais, Isis, that of Buto, and Hathor, that of Dendera. Few of the sacerdotal colleges went beyond the substitution of their own feudal gods for Atumu. Provided that the God of each Nome held the rank of Supreme Lord, the rest mattered little, and the local theologians made no change in the order of the other agents of creation, their vanity being unhurt even by the lower offices assigned by the Heliopolitan tradition to such powers as Osiris, Sibu, and Sit, who were known and worshipped throughout the whole country. CHAPTER II The theologians of Hermopolis alone decided to borrow the new system just as it stood, and in all its parts. Hermopolis had always been one of the ruling cities of Middle Egypt. Standing alone in the midst of the land lying between the eastern and western Mies, it had established upon each of the two great arms of the river a port and a custom house, where all boats traveling either up or downstream paid toll on passing. Not only the corn and natural products of the valley and of the delta, but also goods from distant parts of Africa brought to Sioux by Sudanese caravans helped to fill the treasury of Hermopolis. Thought, the god of the city, represented as Ibis or Baboon, was essentially a moon god, who measured time, counted the days, numbered the months, and recorded the years. Lunar divinities, as we know, are everywhere supposed to exercise the most buried powers. They command the mysterious forces of the universe. They know the sounds, words, and gestures by which these forces are put in motion, and not content with using them for their own benefit, they also teach to their worshippers the act of employing them. He had discovered the incantations which evoke and control the gods. He had transcribed the texts and noted the melodies of these incantations. He recited them with that true intonation, ma cro, which renders them all powerful, and every one, whether god or man, to whom he imparted them, and whose voice he made true, sma cro, became like himself master of the universe. He had established the creation not by muscular effort, to which the rest of the cosmogonical gods primarily owed their birth, but by means of formulas, or even of the voice alone, the first time when he awoke in the new. In fact, the articulate word and the voice were believed to be the most potent of creative forces, not remaining immaterial on issuing from the lips, but condensing, so to speak, into tangible substances, into bodies which were themselves animated by creative life and energy, into gods and goddesses who lived or created in their turn. By a very short phrase, Tumu had called forth the gods who order all things, for his come unto me, uttered with a loud voice upon the day of creation, had evoked the sun from within the lotus, thought had opened his lips, and the voice which proceeded from him had been an entity, sound had solidified into matter, and by a simple emission of voice the four gods who presided over the four houses of the world had come forth alive from his mouth, without bodily effort on his part, and without spoken evocation. Creation by the voice is almost as great a refinement of thought as the substitution of creation by the word for creation by muscular effort. In fact, sound bears the same relation to words that the whistle of a quartermaster bears to orders for the navigation of a ship transmitted by a speaking trumpet. It simplifies speech, reducing it, as it were, to appear abstraction. At first it was believed that the Creator had made the world with a word, then that he had made it by sound, but further conception of his having made it by thought does not seem to have occurred to the theologians. It was narrated at Hermopolis, and the legend was ultimately universally accepted, even by the Heliapolitans, that the separation of Nuit and Sibu had taken place at a certain spot on the side of the city where Sibu had ascended the mound on which the feudal temple was afterwards built, in order that he might better sustain the goddess and uphold the sky at the proper height. The conception of a creative council of five gods had so far prevailed at Hermopolis, that from this fact the city had received in remote antiquity the name of the House of Five. Its temple was called the Abode of Five down to a late period in Egyptian history, and its Prince, who was the hereditary High Priest of Thought, reckoned as the first of his official titles that of great one of the House of Five. The four couples who had helped Atumu were identified with the four auxiliary gods of thought, and changed the council of five into a great Hermopolitan Aeneid, but at the cost of strange metamorphoses. However artificially they had been grouped about Atumu, they had all preserved such distinctive characteristics as prevented their being confounded one with another. When the universe which they had helped to build was finally seen to be the result of various operations demanding a considerable manifestation of physical energy, each god was required to preserve the individuality necessary for the production of such efforts as were expected of him. They could not have existed and carried on their work without conforming to the ordinary conditions of humanity, being born one of another, they were bound to have paired with living goddesses as capable of bringing forth their children as they were of begetting them. On the other hand the four auxiliary gods of Hermopolis exercised but one means of action, the voice. Having themselves come forth from the master's mouth it was by voice that they created and perpetuated the world. Apparently they could have done without goddesses had marriage not been imposed upon them by their identification with the corresponding gods of the Heliopolitan Aeneid. At any rate their wives had but a show of life almost destitute of reality. As these four gods worked after the manner of their master, thought, so they also bore his form and reigned along with him as so many baboons. When associated with the Lord of Hermopolis the eight divinities of Heliopolis assumed the character and the appearance of the four Hermopolitan gods in whom they were merged. They were often represented as eight baboons surrounding the supreme baboon, or as four pairs of gods and goddesses without either characteristic attributes or features, or finally as four pairs of gods and goddesses, the gods being, as far as we are able to judge, the couple Nuh Nuit, answers to Shu Tafnuit, Hahu Hehit to Sibu and Nuf, Kaku Kakit to Osiris and Isis, Nuh Nuh Nuit to Sit and Nephthis. There was seldom any occasion to invoke them separately. They were addressed collectively as the eight, Khmunu, and it was on their account that Hermopolis was named Khmunu, the city of the eight. Ultimately they were deprived of the little individual life still left to them, and were fused into a single being to whom the texts refer as Khmunu, the god eight. By degrees the Nuit of thought was thus reduced to two terms. Take part in the adoration of the kings. According to a custom common towards the Greco-Roman period, the sculptor has made the feet of his gods like jackals' heads. It was a way of realizing the well-known metaphor, it is a way of realizing the well-known metaphor which compares a rapid runner to the jackal-roaming around Egypt. As the sacerdotal colleges had adopted the Heli-Apollitan doctrine, so they now generally adopted that of Hermopolis, Amun, for instance, being made to preside indifferently over the eight baboons, and over the four independent couples of the Primitive Aeneid. In both cases the process of adaption was absolutely identical, and none would have been attended by no difficulty whatever had the divinities to whom it was applied only been without family. In that case the one needful change for each city would have been that of a single name in the Heli-Apollitan list, thus leaving the number of the Aeneid unaltered. But since these deities had been turned into triads, they could no longer be primarily regarded as simple units, to be combined with the elements of some one or other of the Aeneids without preliminary arrangement. The two companions whom each had chosen had to be adopted also, and the single thought, or single attumu, replaced by the three patrons of the Nome, thus changing the traditional nine into eleven. Happily, the Constitution of the Triad lent itself to all these adaptations. We have seen that the father and the son became one in the same personage, whenever it was thought desirable. We also know that one of the two parents always so far predominated as almost to efface the other. Sometimes it was the goddess who disappeared behind her husband, sometimes it was the god whose existence merely served to account for the offspring of the goddess, and whose only title to his position consisted in the fact that he was her husband. Two personages, thus closely connected, were not long in blending into one, and were soon defined as being two faces, the masculine and the feminine aspects of a single being. On the other hand, the father was one with the son, and on the other he was one with the mother. Hence the mother was one with the son as with the father, and the three gods of the triad were resolved into one god in three persons. Thanks to this subterfuge, to put a triad at the head of an Aeneid was nothing more than a roundabout way of placing a single god there. The three persons only counted as one, and the eleven names only amounted to the nine canonical divinities. Thus the Theban Aeneid of Aman Matkansu, Shu, Taknuit, Sibu, Nuit, Osiris, Isis, Sitt, and Nephthis is, in spite of its apparent irregularity, as correct as the typical Aeneid itself. In such Aeneids Isis is duplicated by goddesses of like nature, such as Hathor, Selkit, Taninit, and yet remains but one, while Osiris brings in his son Horus, who gathers about himself all such gods as play the part of divine son in other triads. The theologians had various methods of procedure for keeping the number of persons in an Aeneid at nine, no matter how many they might choose to embrace in it. Supernumeraries were thrown in like the shadows at Roman suppers, whom guests would bring without warning to their host, and whose presence may not the slightest difference either in the provision for the feast or in the arrangements for those who had been formally invited. Thus remodeled at all points, the Aeneid of Heliopolis was readily adjustable to sacerdotal caprices, and even profited by the facilities which the triad afforded for its natural expansion. In time the Heliopolitan version of the origin of Shu Taknuit must have appeared too primitively barbarous. Allowing for the license of the Egyptians during pharaonic times, the concept of the spontaneous omission whereby Atornu had produced his twin children was characterized by a superfluity of coarseness, which it was at least unnecessary to employ. Since by placing the God in a triad, this double birth could be duly explained in conformity with the ordinary laws of life. The solitary Atornu of the more ancient dogma gives place to Atornu, the husband and father. He had, indeed, two wives, Iusuit and Nebthapeet, but their individualities were so feebly marked that no one took the trouble to choose between them, each passed as the mother of Shu and Taknuit. This system of combination, so purile in its ingenuity, was fraught with the gravest consequences for the history of Egyptian religions. Shu having been transformed into the divine son of the Heliopolitan triad, could henceforth be assimilated with the divine sons of all those triads, which took the place of Tumu at the head of provincial Aniads. Thus we find that Horus, the son of Isis at Buto, Ari Hastnofir at the son of Nid at Sayis, Kanumu the son of Hathor at Ezna, were each in turn identified with Shu the son of Atornu, and lost their individualities in his. Sooner or later this was bound to result in bringing all the triads closer together and in their absorption into one another. Through constant reiteration of the statement that the divine sons of the triad were identical with Shu as being in the second rank of the Aniad, the idea arose that this was also the case in triads unconnected with Aniads, in other terms that the third person in any family of gods was everywhere and always Shu under a different name. It having been finally admitted in the Sasserdotal colleges that Tumu and Shu, father and son, were one, all the divine sons were therefore identical with Tumu, the father of Shu, and as each divine son was one with his parents it inevitably followed that these parents themselves were identical with Tumu. Being in this way, Egyptians naturally tended towards that conception of the divine oneness to which the theory of the Hermopolitan Agdoad was already leading them. In fact they reached it, and the monuments show us that in comparatively early times the theologians were busy uniting in a single person the prerogatives which their ancestors had ascribed to many different beings. But this conception of deity towards which their ideas were converging has nothing in common with the conception of the God of our modern religions and philosophies. No God of the Egyptians was ever spoken of simply as God. Tumu was the one and only God, Nutu Uau Aiti at Heliopolis. Anhui Shu was also the one and only God at Sabanitos and at Thines. The unity of a Tunu did not interfere with that of Anhui Shu, but each of these gods, although the sole deity in his own domain, ceased to be so in the domain of the other. The feudal spirit, always alert and jealous, prevented the higher dogma which was dimly apprehended in the temples, from triumphing over local religions and extending over the whole land. Egypt had as many sole deities as she had large cities, or even important temples. She never accepted the idea of the sole God, beside whom there is none other. CHAPTER III The building up and diffusion of the doctrine of the Ennead, like the formation of the land of Egypt, demanded centuries of sustained effort, centuries of which the inhabitants themselves knew neither the number nor the authentic history. When questioned as to the remote past of their race, they proclaimed themselves the most ancient of mankind, in comparison with whom all other races were but a mob of young children, and they looked upon nations which denied their pretensions with such indulgence and pity as we feel for those who doubt a well-known truth. Their forefathers had appeared upon the banks of the Nile even before the Creator had completed his work, so eager were the gods to behold their birth. No Egyptian disputed the reality of this rite of the firstborn, which ennobled the whole race, but if they were asked the name of their Divine Father, then the harmony was broken, and each advanced the claims of a different personage. Pata had modelled man with his own hands, Kanumu had formed him on a potter's table. Ma at his first rising, seeing the earth desert and bare, had flooded it with his rays as a flood of tears. All living things, vegetable and animal, and man himself, had sprung palmel from his eyes, and were scattered abroad with the light over the surface of the world. Sometimes the facts were presented under a less poetic aspect. The mud of the Nile, heated to excess by the burning sun, fermented and brought forth the various races of men and animals by spontaneous generation, having molded itself into a thousand living forms. Then its procreative power became weakened to the verge of exhaustion. Yet on the banks of the river, in the height of the summer, smaller animals might still be found whose condition showed what had once taken place in the case of the larger kinds. Some appeared as already fully formed, and struggling to free themselves from the oppressive mud. Others, as yet imperfect, feebly stirred their heads and forefeet, while their hindquarters were completing their articulation and taking shape within the matrix of earth. It was not Ra alone whose tears were endowed with vitalizing power. All divinities, whether beneficent or malevolent, sit as well as Osiris or Isis, could give life by weeping, and the work of their eyes, when once it had fallen upon earth, flourished and multiplied as vigorously as that which came from the eyes of Ra. The individual character of the Creator was not without bearing upon the nature of his creatures. It was not the necessary outcome of the good gods, evil of the evil ones, and herein lay the explanation of the mingling of things excellent and things excruable, which is found everywhere throughout the world. Voluntarily or involuntarily, Sit and his partisans were the cause and origin of all that is harmful. Daily their eyes shed upon the world those juices by which plants are made poisonous, as well as malign influences, crime and madness. Their saliva, the foam which fell from their mouths during their attacks of rage, their sweat, their blood itself, were all no less to be feared. When any drop of it touched the earth, straightway it germinated, and produced something strange and baleful, a serpent, a scorpion, a plant of deadly nightshade or of henbane. But on the other hand, sun was all goodness, and persons or things which it cast forth into life infallibly partook of its benignity. Then that maketh man glad, the bee who works for him in the flowers secreting wax and honey, the meat and herbs which are his food, the stuffs that clothe him, all useful things which he makes for himself, not only emanated from the solar eye of Horus, but were indeed nothing more than the eye of Horus under different aspects, and in his name they were presented in sacrifice. The devout generally were of opinion that the first Egyptians, the sons and flock of Ra, came into the world happy and perfect, by degrees their descendants had fallen from that native felicity into their present state. Some on the contrary affirmed that their ancestors were born as so many brutes, unprovided with the most essential arts of gentle life. They knew nothing of articulate speech, and expressed themselves by cries only, like other animals, until the day when thought taught them both speech and writing. These tales suffice for popular edification, they provided but meager fare for the intelligence of the learned. The latter did not combine their ambition to the possession of a few incomplete and contradictory details concerning the beginnings of humanity. They wished to know the history of its consecutive developments from the very first. What manner of life had been led by their fathers? What chiefs they had obeyed, and the names or adventures of those chiefs? Why part of the nations had left the blessed banks of the Nile and gone to settle in foreign lands? By what stages and in what length of time, those who had not emigrated rose out of native barbarism into that degree of culture to which the most ancient monuments bore testimony? No efforts of imagination were needful for the satisfaction of their curiosity. The old substratum of indigenous traditions was rich enough. Did they but take the trouble to work it out systematically, and to eliminate its most incongruous elements? The priests of Heliopolis took this work in hand, as they had already taken in hand the same task with regard to the myths referring to the creation, and the Enneads provided them with a ready-made framework. They changed the gods of the Enneads into so many kings, determined with minute accuracy the lengths of their reigns, and compiled their biographies from popular tales. The duality of the feudal gods supplied an admirable expedient for connecting the history of the world with that of chaos. Tumu was identified with new, and relegated to the primordial ocean. Tawa was retained and proclaimed the first king of the world. He had not established his rule without difficulty. The children of defeat, beings hostile to order and light, engaged him in fierce battles, nor did he succeed in organizing his kingdom until he had conquered them in nocturnal combat at Hermopolis and even at Heliopolis itself. Pierced with wounds, a pope, the serpent, sank into the depths of ocean at the very moment when the new year began. The secondary members of the great Ennead, together with the sun, formed the first dynasty, which began with the dawn of the first day and ended at the coming of Horus, the son of Isis. The local schools of theology welcomed this method of writing history as readily as they had welcomed the principle of the Ennead itself. Some of them retained the Heliopolitan Demiurge and hastened to associate him with their own. Others completely eliminated him in favor of the feudal divinity. Men at Thebes thought at Hermopolis, Ptah at Memphis, keeping the rest of the dynasty absolutely unchanged. The gods in no way compromised their prestige by becoming incarnate and descending to earth. Since they were men of finer nature and their qualities, including that of miracle-working, were human qualities raised to the highest pitch of intensity, it was not considered derogatory to them personally to have watched over the infancy and childhood of primeval man. The railery in which the Egyptians occasionally indulged with regard to them, the good-humored and even ridiculous roles ascribed to them in certain legends, do not prove that they were despised or that zeal for them had cooled. The greater their respective believers for the objects of their worship, the more easily do they tolerate the taking of such liberties, and the condescension of the members of the Ennead, far from lowering them in the eyes of generations who came too late to live with them upon familiar terms, only enhanced the love and reverence in which they were held. Nothing shows this better than the history of Ra. His world was ours in the rough, for since Shu was yet non-existence and Nuit still were posed in the arms of Cebu, earth and sky were but one. Nevertheless, in this first attempt at a world there was vegetable, animal, and human life. Egypt was there, all complete, with her two chains of mountains, her Nile, her cities, the people of her nomes, and the nomes themselves. When the soil was more generous, the harvests, without the laborer's toil, were higher and more abundant, and when the Egyptians of pharaonic times wished to mark their admiration of any person or thing, they said that the like had never been known since the time of Ra. It is an illusion common to all peoples, as their insatiable thirst for happiness is never assuaged by the present. They fall back upon the remotest past in search of an age when that supreme felicity which is only known to them as an ideal was actually enjoyed by their ancestors. Ra dwelt in Heliopolis, and the most ancient portion of the temple of the city, that known as the Mansion of the Prince, Hyat Saru, passed for having been his palace. His court was mainly composed of gods and goddesses, and they as well as he were visible to men. It contained also men who filled minor offices about his person, prepared his food, received the offerings of his subjects, attended to his linen and his household affairs. It is said that the Oriru Mao, the High Priest of Ra, the Hong Kistit, his High Priestess, and generally speaking all the servants of the temple of Heliopolis, were either directly descended from members of this first household establishment of the god, or had succeeded to their offices in unbroken secession. In the morning he went forth with his divine train, and amid the acclamations of the crowd, entered the bark in which he made his accustomed circuit of the world, returning to his home at the end of twelve hours after the accomplishment of his journey. He visited each province in turn, and in each he tarried for an hour to settle all disputed matters as the final judge of appeal. He gave audience to both small and great. He decided their quarrels and adjudged their lawsuits. He granted him best sure of fives from the royal domains to those who had deserved them, and allotted or confirmed to every family the income needful for their maintenance. He pitied the sufferings of his people, and did his utmost to alleviate them. He taught to all comers potent formulas against reptiles and beasts of prey, charms to cast out evil spirits, and the best recipes for preventing illness. His incessant bounties left him at length with only one of his talismans, the name given to him by his father and his mother at his birth, which they had revealed to him alone, and which he kept concealed within his bosom, lest some sorcerer should get possession of it to use for the furtherance of his evil spells. But old age came on, and infirmities followed. The body of Ra grew bent, his mouth trembled, his slover trickled down to earth, and his saliva dropped upon the ground. Isis, who had hitherto been a mere woman-servant in the household of the Pharaoh, conceived the project of stealing his secret from him, that she might possess the world and make herself a goddess by the name of the August God. Force would have been unavailing, all enfeebled as he was by reason of his years, none was strong enough to contend successfully against him. But Isis was a woman more knowing in her malice than millions of men, clever among millions of the gods, equal to millions of spirits, to whom as unto Ra nothing was unknown either in heaven or upon earth. She contrived a most ingenious stratagem. When man or God was struck down by illness, the only chance of curing him lay in knowing his real name, and thereby aduring the evil being that tormented him. Isis determined to cast a terrible malady upon Ra, concealing its cause from him, then to offer her services as his nurse, and by means of his sufferings to extract from him the mysterious word indispensable to the success of the exorcism. She gathered up mud impregnated with the divine saliva, and moulded of it a sacred serpent, which she hid in the dust of the road. Suddenly bitten as he was setting out upon his daily round, the God cried out aloud, his voice ascended into heaven, and his nine called, What is it? What is it? and his gods, What is the matter? What is the matter? But he can make them no answer, so much to his lips tremble, his limbs shake, and the venom take hold upon his flesh as the Nile seizeth upon the land which it invaded. Finally he came to himself, and succeeding in describing his sensations, something painful hath struck me, my heart perceiveth it, yet my two eyes see it not. My hand hath not wrought it, nothing that I have made knoweth it what it is, yet have I never tasted suffering like unto it, and there is no pain that may overpass it. Fire it is not, water it is not. Yet is my heart in flames, my flesh trembleth, all my members are full of shiverings born of breaths of magic. Let there be brought unto me children of the gods of beneficent words, who know the power of their mouths, and whose science reacheth into heaven. They came, these children of the gods, all with their books of magic. There came Isis with her sorcery, her mouth full of life-giving breaths, her recipe for the destruction of her pain, her words which pour life into breathless throats, and she said, What is it? What is it, O father of the gods? May it not be that a serpent hath wrought this suffering in thee, that one of thy children hath lifted up his head against thee. Surely he shall be overthrown by beneficent incantations, and I will make him to retreat at the sight of thy rays. On learning the cause of his torment the sun-god is terrified, and begins to lament anew. I then, as I went along the ways, travelling through my double land of Egypt and over my mountains, that I might look upon that which I have made, I was bitten by a serpent that I saw not. Fire it is not, water it is not, yet I am colder than water, I burn more than fire, all my members stream with sweat. I tremble, mine eye is not steady, no longer can I discern the sky, drops roll from my face as in the season of summer. Isis proposes her remedy, and cautiously asked him his ineffable name. But he devines her trick, and tries to evade it by the enumeration of his titles. He takes the universe to witness that he is called Capri in the morning, Ra at noon, Tumu in the evening. The poison did not recede but steadily advanced, and the great God was not ease. Then Isis said to Ra, Thy name was not spoken in that which thou hast said, Tell it to me, and the poison will depart, for he liveth upon whom a charm is pronounced in his own name. The poison glowed like fire, it was strong as the burning of flame, and the majesty of Ra said, I grant thee leave that thou should assert within me, O mother Isis, and that my name pass from my bosom into thy bosom. In truth the all-powerful name was hidden within the body of the God, and could only be extracted thence by means of a surgical operation similar to that practiced upon a corpse which is about to be mummified. Isis undertook it, carried it through successfully, drove out the poison, and made herself a goddess by virtue of the name. The cunning of a mere woman had deprived Ra of his last talisman. CHAPTER III In course of time men perceived his decrepitude. They took counsel against him. Below his majesty waxeth old, his bones are of silver, his flesh is of gold, his hair is of lapis lazuli. As soon as his majesty perceived that which they were saying to each other, his majesty said to those who were of his train, Call together for me my divine eye, Shu, Tafnuit, Sibu, and Nuit, the father and the mother-gods who were with me when I was with the god knew. Let each bring his cycle along with him. Then when thou shalt brought them in secret, thou shalt take them to the great mansion that they may lend me their counsel and their consent, coming hither from new into this place where I have manifested myself. So the family counsel comes together, the ancestors of Ra and his posterity still awaiting amid the primordial waters the time of their manifestation, his children Shu and Tafnuit, his grandchildren, Sibu and Nuit. They place themselves, according to etiquette, on either side his throne, prostrate, with their foreheads to the ground, and thus their conference begins. O Nuit, thou the eldest of the gods, from whom I took my being, and ye the ancestor gods, behold, men who are the emanation of mine eye have taken counsel together against me. Tell me what you would do, for I have bidden you here before I slay them, that I may hear what you would say there, too. Nuit as the eldest has the right to speak first, and demands that the guilty shall be brought to judgment and formally condemned. My son Ra, God greater than the God who made him, older than the gods who created him, sit thou upon thy throne, and great shall be the terror when thine eye shall rest upon those who plot together against thee. But Ra, not unreasonably, fears that when men see the solemn pomp of royal justice, they may suspect the faith that awaits them, and flee into the desert, their hearts terrified at that which I have to say to them. The desert was even then hostile to the tutelary gods of Egypt, and offered an almost invaluable asylum to their enemies. The conclave admits that the apprehensions of Ra are well founded, and pronounces in favour of summary execution. The divine eye is to be the executioner. Let it go forth, that it may smite those who have devised evil against thee, for there is no eye more to be feared than thine when it attacketh in the form of Hathor. So the eye takes the form of Hathor, suddenly falls upon men, and slays them right and left with great strokes of the knife. After some hours Ra, who would chasten but not destroy his children, commands her to cease from her carnage, but the goddess has tasted blood and refuses to obey him. By thy life, she replies, when I slaughter men, then is my heart right joyful. That is why she was afterwards called Sokheet, the slayer, and represented under the form of a fierce lioness. Call stayed her course in the neighbourhood of Heraccleopolis, all the way from Heliopolis she had trampled through blood. As soon as she had fallen asleep, Ra hastily took effectual measures to prevent her from beginning her work again on the morrow. He said, Call on my behalf messengers, agile and swift, who go like the wind. When these messengers were straightaway brought to him, the majesty of the gods said, Let them run to Elephantine and bring me Mandragora in plenty. When they had brought him the Mandragora, the majesty of this great god summoned the miller, which is in Heliopolis, that he might bray it. And the woman servants having crushed grain for the beer, the Mandragora, and also human blood, were mingled with the liquor, and therefore was made in all seven thousand jars of beer. Ra himself examined this delectable drink, and finding it to possess the wish for properties, it is well, said he, therewith shall I save men from the goddess. And then addressing those of his train, take these jars in your arms, and carry them to the place where she has slaughtered men. Ra, the king, caused dawn to break at midnight, so that this field-tra might be poured down upon the earth, and the fields were flooded with it to the depth of four palms, according as it pleased the souls of his majesty. In the morning the goddess came, that she might return to her carnage, but she found that it was all flooded, and her countenance softened. When she had drunken it was her heart that softened. She went away drunk, without further thought of men. There was some fear lest her fury might return when the fumes of drunkenness were passed, and to obviate this danger Ra instituted a rite, partly with the object of instructing future generations as to the chastisement which he had inflicted upon the impious, partly to console Sakhit for her disconfiture. He decreed that on New Year's Day there should be brewed for her as many jars of field-tra as there were priestesses of the sun. That was the origin of all those jars of field-tra, in number equal to that of the priestesses, which at the feast of Hathor all men make from that day forth. Peace was re-established, but could it last long? Would not men, as soon as they had recovered from their terror, but take themselves again to plying against the god? Besides, Ra now felt nothing but disgust for our race. He in gratitude of his children had wounded him deeply. He foresaw ever-renewing rebellions as his feebleness became more marked, and he shranked from having to order new massacres in which mankind would perish altogether. By my life, says he to the gods who accompanied him, my heart is too weary for me to remain with mankind and slay them until they are no more. Annihilation is not of the gifts that I love to make. And the gods exclaim in surprise, breathe not a word of thy weariness at a time when thou dost triumph at thy pleasure. But Ra does not yield to their representations. He will leave a kingdom wherein thy murmur against him. And turning towards new, he says, my limbs are decrepit for the first time. I will not go to any place where I can be reached. It was no easy matter to find him an inaccessible retreat owing to the imperfect state in which the universe had been left by the first effort of the demiurge. New saw no other way out of the difficulty than that of setting to work to complete the creation. Ancient tradition had imagined the separation of earth and sky as an act of violence exercised by Shu upon Cebu and Nuit. History presented facts after a less brutal fashion, and Shu became a virtuous son who devoted his time and strength to upholding Nuit, that he might thereby do his father a service. Nuit, for her part, showed herself to be a devoted daughter whom there was no need to treat roughly in order to teach her her duty. Of herself she consented to leave her husband and place her beloved ancestor beyond reach. The majesty of Nuit said, Son Shu, do as thy father Ra shall say, and thou, daughter Nuit, place him upon thy back and hold him suspended above the earth. Nuit said, And how then, my father Nuit? Thus spake Nuit, and she did that which Nuit commanded her. She changed herself into a cow and placed the majesty of Ra upon her back. And those men who had not been slain came to give thanks to Ra, behold, they found him no longer in his palace, but a cow stood there, and they perceived him upon the back of the cow. They found him so resolved to depart that they did not try to turn him from his purpose, but only desired to give him such a proof of their repentance as should assure them of the complete pardon of their crime. They said unto him, Wait until the morning, O Ra, our Lord, and we will strike down thine enemies who have taken counsel against thee. So his majesty returned to his mansion, descended from the cow, went in along with them, and earth was plunged into darkness. But when there was light upon earth next morning, the men went forth with their bows and their arrows, and began to shoot at the enemy. Whereupon the majesty of this god said unto them, Your sins are remitted unto you, for sacrifice precludes the execution of the guilty. And this was the origin upon earth of sacrifices in which blood was shed. As it was that went on the point of separating forever, the god and men came to an understanding as to the terms of their future relationship. Men offered to the god the life of those who had offended him. Human sacrifice was, in their eyes, the obligatory sacrifice. Human sacrifice was, in their eyes, the obligatory sacrifice, the only one which could completely atone for the wrongs committed against the godhead. Man alone was worthy to wash away with his blood the sins of men. For this one time the god accepted the expiation just as it was offered to him. Then the repugnance which he felt to killing his children overcame him. He substituted beast for man, and decided that oxen, gazelles, birds should henceforth furnish the material for sacrifice. This point settled he again mounted the cow, who rose, supported on her four legs as on so many pillars, and her belly stretched out above the earth like a ceiling formed the sky. He busied himself with organizing the new world which he found on her back. He peopled it with many beings, chose two districts in which to establish his abode, the Field of Reeds, Sokhet, Ialu, and the Field of Rest, Sokhet, Hotpeet, and suspended the stars which were to give light by night. All this is related with many plays upon words, intended, according to Oriental custom, as explanations of the names which the legend assigned to different regions of heaven. At sight of a plane whose situation pleased him he cried, the Field rests in the distance, and that was the origin of the Field of Rest. He added, There I will gather plants, and from this the Field of Reeds took its name. While he gave himself up to this philological pastime, Nuit, suddenly transported to unaccustomed heights, grew frightened, and cried for help. For pity's sake, give me supports to sustain me. This was the origin of the support gods. They came and stationed themselves by each of her four legs, steadying these with their hands, and keeping constant watch over them. As this was not enough to reassure the good-beast, Ra said, My son Shu, place thyself beneath my daughter Nuit, and keep watch on both sides over the supports, who live in the twilight. Hold thou her up above thy head, and be her guardian. Shu obeyed, Nuit composed herself, and the world, now furnished with the sky which it had hitherto lacked, assumed its present symmetrical form. Shu and Cebu succeeded Ra, but did not acquire so lasting a popularity as their great ancestor. Nevertheless they had their annals, fragments of which have come down to us. Their power also extended over the whole universe. The majesty of Shu was the excellent king of the sky, of the earth, of Hades, of the water, of the winds, of the inundation, of the two chains of mountains, of the sea, governing with a true voice according to the precepts of his father, Ra Harmakis. Only the children of the serpent at Popi, the impious ones who haunt thee solitary places in the deserts, disavowed his authority. Like the Bedouin of later times, they suddenly streamed in by the isthmus routes, went up into Egypt under cover of night, slew and pillaged, and then hastily returned to their fastnesses with the booty which they had carried off. From sea to sea Ka had fortified the eastern frontier against them. He had surrounded the principal cities with walls, embellished them with temples, and placed within them those mysterious talismans more powerful for defense than a garrison of men. Thus Ait Nobsu, near the mouth of Wadi Tumulat, possessed one of the rods of the sun god. Also the living ureas of his crown whose breath consumes all that it touches, and finally a lock of his hair, which, being cast into the waters of a lake, was changed into a hawk-headed crocodile to tear the invader in pieces. The employment of these talismans was dangerous to those unaccustomed to use them, even to the gods themselves. Scarcely was Sibu enthroned as the successor of Shu, who, tired of reigning, had re-ascended into heaven in the nine days tempest before he began his inspection of the eastern marshes, and caused the box in which was kept the ureas of Ra to be opened. As soon as the living viper had breathed its breath against the majesty of Sibu there was a great disaster, great indeed for those who were in the train of the god perished, and his majesty himself was burned in that day. When his majesty had fled to the north of Ait Nobsu, pursued by the fire of this magic ureas, polled, when he came to the fields of Hena the pain of his burn was not yet asswaged, and the gods who were behind him said unto him, O Sire, let them take the lock of Ra which is there, when thy majesty shall go and see it and its mystery, and his majesty shall be healed as soon as it shall be placed upon thee. So the majesty of Sibu caused this magic lock to be brought to Piyarat, the lock for which was made that great reliquary of hard stone which is hidden in the secret place of Piyarat, the district of the divine lock of the Lord Ra, and behold, this fire departed from the members of the majesty of Sibu. And many years afterwards, when this lock, which had thus belonged to Sibu, was brought back to Piyarat and Ait Nobsu, and cast into the great lake of Piyarat whose name is Ait Tostesu, the dwelling of waves that it might be purified, behold, this lock became a crocodile, it flew to the water and became Sobku, the divine crocodile of Ait Nobsu. In this way the gods of the solar dynasty from generation to generation multiplied talismans and enriched the sanctuaries of Egypt with relics. CHAPTER III. THE LEGENDARY HISTORY OF EGYPT. PART III. Were there ever duller legends and a more senile fantasy? They did not spring spontaneously from the lips of the people, but were composed at leisure by priests desirous of enhancing the antiquity of their cult, and augmenting the veneration of its adherents in order to increase its importance. Each city wished it to be understood that its futile sanctuary was founded upon the very day of creation, that its privileges had been extended or confirmed during the course of the first divine dynasty, and that these pretensions were supported by the presence of objects in its treasury which had belonged to the oldest of the king-gods. Such was the origin of tales in which the personage of the beneficent pharaoh is often depicted in ridiculous fashion. Did we possess all the sacred archives? We should frequently find them quoting as authentic history more than one document as artificial as the chronicle of Ait Nobsu. When we come to the later members of the Eniad, there is a change in the character and in the form of these tales. Doubtless Osiris and Sit did not escape unscathed out of the hands of the theologians, but even if sacerdotal interference spoiled the legend concerning them, it did not altogether disfigure it. Here and there in it is still noticeable a sincerity of feelings and liveliness of imagination, such as are never found in those of Shu and Sibu. This arises from the fact that the functions of these gods left them strangers, or all but strangers, to the current affairs of the world. Shu was the stay, Sibu the material foundation of the world, and so long as the one bore the weight of the firmament without bending, and the other continued to suffer the tread of human generations upon his back, the devout took no more thought of them than they themselves took thought of the devout. The life of Osiris, on the other hand, was intimately mingled with that of the Egyptians, and his most trivial actions immediately reacted upon their fortunes. They followed the movements of his waters. They noted the turning points in his struggles against drought. They registered his yearly decline, yearly compensated by his aggressive returns, and his intermittent victories over Typhon. His proceedings and his character were the subject of their minute study. If his waters almost invariably rose upon the appointed day, and extended over the black earth of the valley, this was no mechanical function of a being to whom the consequences of his conduct are indifferent. He acted upon reflection, and in full consciousness of the service that he rendered. He knew that by spreading the inundation he prevented the triumph of the desert. He was life, he was goodness, oh no for you, and Isis as the partner of his labors became like him the type of perfect goddess. But while Osiris developed for the better, Sitt was transformed for the worse, and increased in wickedness as his brother gained in purity and moral elevation. In proportion as the person of Sitt grew more defined, and stood out more clearly, the evil within him contrasted more markedly with the innate goodness of Osiris, and what had been at first an instinctive struggle between two beings somewhat vaguely defined, the desert and the Nile, water and drought, was changed into conscious and deadly enmity. No longer the conflict of two elements, it was war between two gods, one laboring to produce abundance, while the other strove to do away with it, one being all goodness in life, while the other was evil and death incarnate. A very ancient legend narrates that the birth of Osiris and his brothers took place during the five additional days at the end of the year. A subsequent legend explained how Nuit and Cebu had contracted marriage against the express wish of Ra and without his knowledge. When he became aware of it he fell into a violent rage, and cast a spell over the goddess to prevent her giving birth to her children in any month of any year whatever. But thought took pity upon her, and playing at drafts with the moon, one from it, in several games, one seventy second part of its fires, out of which he made five whole days, and as these were not included in the ordinary calendar, Nuit could then bring forth her five children, one after another, Osiris, Dororis, Scyt, Isis, and Nephthys. Osiris was beautiful aface, but with a dull and black complexion, his height exceeded five and a half yards. He was born at Thebes in the first of the additional days, and straightway a mysterious voice announced that the Lord of all, Nibbou or Xeru, had appeared. The good news was hailed with shouts of joy, followed by tears and lamentations when it became known with what evils he was menaced. The echo reached raw in his far-off dwelling, and his heart rejoiced, notwithstanding the curse which he had laid upon Nuit. He commanded the presence of his great-grandchild in Zeus, and unhesitatingly acknowledged him as the heir to his throne. Osiris had married his sister Isis, even so it was said, while both of them were still within their mother's womb, and when he became king he made her queen regent and the partner of all his undertakings. The Egyptians were as yet but half-civilized. They were cannibals, and though occasionally they lived upon the fruits of the earth, they did not know how to cultivate them. Osiris taught them the art of making agricultural implements, the plough and the hoe, field labor, the rotation of crops, the harvesting of wheat and barley, and vine culture. Isis weaned them from cannibalism, healed their diseases by means of medicine or of magic, united women to men in legitimate marriage, and showed them how to grind grain between two flat stones and to prepare bread for the household. She invented the loom, with the help of her sister Nephthys, and was the first to weave and bleach linen. There was no worship of the gods before Osiris established it, appointed the offerings, regulated the order of ceremonies, and composed the text and melodies of the liturgies. He built cities, among them thieves itself, according to some, though others declared that he was born there. As he had been the model of a just and pacific king, so did he desire to be that of a victorious conqueror of nations, and placing the regency in the hands of Isis, he went forth to war against Asia, accompanied by thought, the ibis, and the jackal anubis. He made little or no use of force of arms, but he attacked men by gentleness and persuasion, softened them with songs in which voices were accompanied by instruments, and taught them also the arts which he had made known to the Egyptians. No country escaped his beneficent action, and he did not return to the banks of the Nile until he had traversed and civilized the world from one horizon to the other. Sit Typhon was red-haired and white-skinned, of violent, gloomy, and jealous temper. Secretly he aspired to the crown, and nothing but the vigilance of Isis had kept him from rebellion during the absence of his brother. The rejoicings which celebrated the king's return to Memphis provided Sit with his opportunity for seizing the throne. He invited Osiris to a banquet along with seventy-two officers whose support he had ensured, made a wooden chest of cunning workmanship, and ordered that it should be brought into him in the midst of the feast. As all admired its beauty, he sportively promised to present it to any one among the guest whom it should exactly fit. All of them tried it, one after another, and all unsuccessfully, but when Osiris laid down within it, immediately the conspirators shut the lid, nailed it firmly down, ordered it together with melted lead, and then threw it into the tenetic branch of the Nile which carried it to the sea. The news of the crime spread terror on all sides. The gods friendly to Osiris feared the fate of their master, and hid themselves within the body of animals to escape the malignity of the new king. Isis cut off her hair, rent her garments, and set out in search of the chest. She founded a ground near the mouth of the river, under the shadow of a gigantic acacia, deposited it in a secluded place where no one ever came, and then took refuge in Bhutto, her own domain and her native city, whose marshes protected her from the designs of Typhon, even as in historic times they protected more than one pharaoh from the attacks of his enemies. There she gave birth to the young Horus, nursed and reared him in secret among the reeds, far from the machinations of the wicked one. But it happened that Sit, when hunting by moonlight, caught the side of the chest, opened it, and, recognizing the corpse, cut it up into fourteen pieces, which he scattered abroad at random. Once more Isis set forth on her woeful pilgrimage. She recovered all the parts of the body, accepting one only, which the oxy-rincus had greedily devoured, and with the help of her sister Nephthys, her son Horus, Anubis, and Thot, she joined together and embalmed them, and made of this collection of his remains an imperishable mummy, capable of sustaining forever the soul of a god. On his coming of age Horus called together all that were left of the loyal Egyptians, and formed them into an army. His followers, Shosu-U-U-Huru, defeated the accomplices of Sit, Samu-Sit, who were now driven in their turn to transform themselves into gazelles, crocodiles, and serpents, animals which were henceforth regarded as unclean and Typhonian. For three days the two chiefs had fought together under the forms of men and of hippopotamie, when Isis, apprehensive as to the issue of the duel, determined to bring it to an end. Lo! she caused chains to descend upon them, and made them to drop upon Horus. Thereupon Horus prayed aloud, saying, I am thy son Horus. Then Isis spake unto the fetters, saying, Break, and unloose yourselves from my son Horus. She made other fetters to descend, and let them fall upon her brother Sit. Worthwith he lifted up his voice, and cried out in pain, and she spake unto the fetters, and said unto them, Break, yea, when Sit prayed unto her many times, saying, Wilt thou not have pity upon the brother of thy son's mother? Then her heart was filled with compassion, and she cried to the fetters, Break, for he is my eldest brother, and the fetters unloosened themselves from him, and the two foes again stood face to face, like two men who will not come to terms. Horus, furious at seeing his mother deprive him of his prey, turned upon her like a panther of the South. She fled before him on that day when battle was waged with Sit the violent, and he cut off her head. But thought transformed her by his enchantments, and made a cowshead for her, thereby identifying her with her companion, Hathor. The war went on, with all its fluctuating fortunes, till the gods at length decided to summon both rivals before their tribunal. According to a very ancient tradition, the combatants chose the ruler of a neighboring city, thought, Lord of Hermopolis Parva, as the arbitrator of their quarrel. Sit was the first to plead, and he maintained that Horus was not the son of Osiris, but a bastard, whom Isis had conceived after the death of her husband. Horus triumphantly vindicated the legitimacy of his birth, and thought condemned Sit to restore, according to some, the whole of the inheritance which he had wrongfully retained, according to others, part of it only. The gods ratified the sentence, and awarded to the arbitrator the tile of U'apira Hu Hu'i, he who judges between two parties. A legend of more recent origin, and circulated after the worship of Osiris had spread over all Egypt, affirmed that the case had remained within the jurisdiction of Sibu, who was father to the one, and grandfather to the other party. Sibu, however, had pronounced the same judgment as thought, and divided the kingdom into halves, Pasui. Sit retained the valley from the neighborhood of Memphis to the first cataract, while Horus entered into possession of the delta. Egypt henceforth consisted of two distinct kingdoms, of which one that of the north recognized Horus, the son of Isis, as its patron deity, and the other, that of the south, placed itself under the protection of Sit Nubiti, the god of Ambos. The moiety of Horus, added to that of Sit, formed the kingdom which Sibu had inherited, but his children failed to keep it together, though it was afterwards reunited under pharaohs of human race. CHAPTER III The three gods who preceded Osiris upon the throne had ceased to reign, but not to live. Ra had taken refuge in heaven, disgusted with his own creatures. Shu had disappeared in the midst of a tempest, and Sibu had quietly retired within his palace when the time of his sojourning upon earth had been fulfilled. Not that there was no death, for death too, together with all other things and beings, had come into existence in the beginning, but while cruelly persecuting both man and beast had for a while respected the gods. Osiris was the first among them to be struck down, and hence to require funeral rites. He was also the first for whom family piety sought to provide a happy life beyond the tomb. Though he was king of the living and the dead at Mendes, by virtue of the rites of all the feudal gods and their own principalities, his sovereignty after death exempted him no more than that of the meanest of his subjects from that painful torpor into which all mortars fell on breathing their last. But popular imagination could not resign itself to his remaining in that miserable state for ever. What would it have profited him to have Isis the great sorceress for his wife, the wise Horus for his son, two master magicians, thought the Ibis and the jackal Anubis for his servants if their skill had not availed to ensure him a less gloomy and less lamentable afterlife than that of men? Anubis had long before invented the art of mummifying, and his mysterious science had secured the everlasting existence of the flesh, but at what a price? For the breathing, warm, flesh-coloured body, spontaneous in movement and function, was substituted an immobile, cold and blackish mass, a sufficient basis for the mechanical continuity of the double, but which that double could neither raise nor guide, whose weight paralyzed and whose inertness condemned it to vegetate in darkness, without pleasure and almost without consciousness of existence. Thought Isis and Horus applied themselves, in the case of Osiris, to ameliorating the discomfort and constraint entailed by the more primitive embalment. They did not dispense with the manipulations instituted by Anubis, but endued them with new power by means of magic. They inscribed the principal bandages with protective figures and formulas. They decorated the body with various amulets of specific efficacy for its different parts. They drew numerous scenes of earthly existence and of the life beyond the tomb upon the boards of the coffin and upon the walls of the sepulchre chamber. When the body had been made imperishable, they sought to restore, one by one, all the faculties of which their previous operations had deprived it. The mummy was set up at the entrance to the vault, the statue representing the living person was placed beside it, and semblance was made of opening the mouth, eyes and ears, of loosening the arms and legs, of restoring breath to the throat and movement to the heart. The incantations by which these acts were severally accomplished were so powerful that the gods spoke and ate, lived and heard, and could use his limbs as freely as though he had never been steeped in the bath of the embalmer. He might have returned to his place among men, and various legends proved that he did occasionally appear to his faithful adherents. But as his ancestors before him, he preferred to leave their towns and withdraw into his own domain. The cemeteries of the inhabitants of Bucyrus and of Mendys were called Sochit Ialu, the Meadow of the Reeds, and Sochit Hotpu, the Meadow of the Best. They were secluded amid the marches, in small archipelagos of sandy islets where the dead bodies, piled together, rested in safety from the incantations. This was the first kingdom of the dead Osiris, but it was soon placed elsewhere, as the nature of the surrounding districts and the geography of the adjacent countries became better known, at first, perhaps, on the Phoenician shore beyond the sea, and then in the sky, in the milky way, between the north and the east, but nearer to the north than to the east. This kingdom was not gloomy and mournful like that of the other dead gods, Socharis or Contamentit, but was lighted by sun and moon, the heat of the day was tempered by the steady breath of the north wind, and its crops grew and throve abundantly. Thick walls served as fortifications against the attacks of Sit and Evil Genie, a palace like that of the Pharaoh stood in the midst of delightful gardens, and there among his own people Osiris led a tranquil existence, enjoying in secession all the pleasures of earthly life without any of its pains. The goodness which had gained him the title of Onophris, while he sojourned here below, inspired him with the desire and suggested the means of opening the gates of his paradise to the souls of his former subjects. Those did not enter into it unexamined, nor without a trial. Each of them had first to prove that during its earthly life it had belonged to a friend, or as the Egyptian text have it, to a vassal of Osiris, Amakku Kira Osirai, one of those who had served Horus in his exile, and had rallied to his banner from the very beginning of the Typhonian Wars. These were the followers of Horus, Shosu-u Horu, so often referred to in the literature of historic times. Horus, their master, having loaded them with favors during life, decided to extend to them after death the same privileges which he had conferred upon his father. He convoked around the corpse the gods who had worked with him at the embalment of Osiris, Anubis and Thot, Isis and Neptis, and his four children, Hapai, Kabsonuf, Amsit, and Tiamat, to whom he had entrusted the charge of the heart and viscera. They all performed their functions exactly as before, repeated the same ceremonies, and recited the same formulas at the same stages of the operations, and so effectively that the dead man became a real Osiris under their hands, having a true voice, and henceforth combining the name of the god with his own. He had been Sak Omka, or Mankari, he became Osiris Sak Omka, or the Osiris Mankari, true of voice. Horus and his companions then celebrated the rites consecrated to the opening of the mouth and the eyes, animated the statue of the deceased, and placed the mummy in the tomb, where Anubis received it in his arms. Recalled to life and movement, the double re-assumed, one by one, all the functions of being, came and went and took part in the ceremonies of the worship which was rendered to him in his tomb. Here he might be seen accepting the homage of his kindred, and clasping to his breast his soul under the form of a great human-headed bird, with features the counterpart of his own. After being equipped with the formulas and amulets wherewith his prototype Osiris had been furnished, he set forth to seek the field of wreaths. The way was long and arduous, strewn with perils to which he must have succumbed at the very first stages, had he not been carefully warned beforehand and armed against them. A papyrus placed with the mummy in its coffin contained the needful, topographical directions and passwords, in order that he might neither stray nor perish by the way. The wiser Egyptians copied out the principal chapters for themselves, or learned them by heart while yet in life, in order to be prepared for the life beyond. Those who had not taken this precaution studied after death the copy with which they were provided, and since few Egyptians could read, a priest or relative of the deceased, preferably his son, recited the prayers in the mummy's ear, that he might learn them before he was carried away to the cemetery. If the double obeyed the prescriptions of the Book of the Dead to the letter, he reached his goal without fail. On leaving the tomb he turned his back on the valley, and staff in hand climbed the hills which bounded on the west, plunging boldly into the desert, where some bird, or even a kindly insect such as a praying mantis, a grasshopper, or a butterfly, served as his guide. Soon he came to one of those sycamores which grow in the sand far away from the Nile, and are regarded as magic trees by the Felaen. Out of the foliage a goddess, Nuit, Athor, or Nit, half emerged, and offered him a dish of fruit, loaves of bread, and a jar of water. By accepting these gifts he became the guest of the goddess, and could nevermore retrace his steps without special permission. Beyond the sycamore were lands of terror, infested by serpents and ferocious beasts, furrowed by torrents of boiling water, intersected by ponds and marshes where gigantic monkeys cast their nets. Ignorant souls, or those ill-prepared for the struggle, had no easy work before them when they imprudently entered upon it. Those who were not overcome by hunger and thirst at the outset were bitten by a uracus, or horned viper, hidden with evil intent below the sand, and perished in convulsions from the poison, or crocodiles seized as many of them as they could lay hold of at the fords of rivers, or senosephaly netted and devoured them indiscriminately along with the fish into which the partisans of Typhon were transformed. They came safe and sound out of one peril only to fall into another, and infallibly succumbed before they were half through their journey. But on the other hand, the double who was equipped and instructed, and armed with the true voice, confronted each foe with the fill actory and the incantation by which his enemy was held in check. As soon as he caught sight of one of them he recited the appropriate chapter from his book. He loudly proclaimed himself Ra, Tumu, Horus, or Capri, that God whose name and attributes were best fitted to repel the immediate danger, and flames withdrew at his voice, monsters fled or sank paralyzed, the most cruel of genie drew in their claws and lowered their arms before him. He compelled crocodiles to turn away their heads. He transfixed serpents with his lance. He supplied himself at pleasure with all the provisions that he needed, and gradually ascended the mountains which surrounded the world, sometimes alone, and fighting his way step by step, sometimes escorted by beneficent divinities. Halfway up the slope was the good Cal Hathor, the Lady of the West, in meadows of tall plants where every evening she received the sun at his setting. If the dead man knew how to ask it according to the prescribed rite, she would take him upon her shoulders and carry him across the accursed countries at full speed. Having reached the north he paused at the edge of an immense lake, the Lake of Ka, and saw in the far distance the outline of the islands of the blessed. One tradition, so old as to have been almost forgotten in ramicide times, told how thought the ibis there awaited him and bore him away on his wings. Another, no less ancient but of more lasting popularity, declared that a ferryboat plied regularly between the solid earth and the shores of paradise. The God who directed it questioned the dead, and the bark itself proceeded to examine them before they were admitted on board, for it was a magic bark. Tell me my name, cried the mast, and the travelers replied, He who guides the great goddess on her way is thy name. Tell me my name, repeated the braces. The spine of the jackal, Ua Pu'a Itu, is thy name. Tell me my name, proceeded the mast head. The neck of Amsit is thy name. Tell me my name, asked the sail. Nuit is thy name. Each part of the hull and of the rigging spoke in turn and questioned the applicant regarding its name, this being generally a mystic phrase by which it was identified, either with some divinity as a whole, or else with some part of his body. When the double had established his rite of passage by the correctness of his answers, the bark consented to receive him and to carry him to the further shores. There he was met by the gods and goddesses of the court of Osiris, by Anubis, by Hathor the lady of the cemetery, by Nit, by the two Ma'its who preside over justice and truth, and by the four children of Horus, stiff sheathed in their mummy wrappings. They formed, as it were, a guard of honour to introduce him and his winged guide into an immense hall, the ceiling of which rested on light graceful columns of painted wood. At the further end of the hall Osiris was seated in mysterious twilight within a shrine, through whose open doors he might be seen wearing a red necklace over his close-fitting case of white bandaging. His green face surmounted by the tall white diadem flanked by two plumes, his slender hands grasping flail and crook, the emblems of his power. Behind him stood Isis and Nephthys watching over him with uplifted hands, bare bosoms, and bodies straightly cased in linen. Forty-two jurors who had died and been restored to life like their lord, and who had been chosen, one from each of those cities of Egypt which recognized his authority, squatted right and left, and motionless, clothed in the wrappings of the dead, silently waited until they were addressed. CHAPTER III. The soul first advanced to the foot of the throne, carrying on its outstretched hands the image of its heart or of its eyes, agents and accomplices of its sins and virtues. It humbly smelt the earth, then arose, and with uplifted hands recited its profession of faith. Hale unto you, ye lords of truth! Hale to thee, great God, lord of truth and justice! I have come before thee, my master, I have been brought to see thy beauties. For I know thee, I know thy name. I know the names of thy forty-two gods who are with thee in the hall of the two truths, living on the remains of sinners, gorging themselves with their blood, in that day when a count is rendered before onofris, the true of voice. Thy name, which is thine, is the God whose two twins are the ladies of the two truths. And I, I know you, ye lords of the two truths. I bring unto you truth. I have destroyed sins for you. I have not committed iniquity against men. I have not oppressed the poor. I have not made defocations in the necropolis. I have not laid labour upon any free man beyond that which he wrought for himself. I have not transgressed. I have not been weak. I have not defaulted. I have not committed that which is an abomination to the gods. I have not caused the slave to be ill-treated of his master. I have not starved any man. I have not made any to weep. I have not assassinated any man. I have not caused any man to be treacherously assassinated. And I have not committed treason against any. I have not, in ought, diminished the supplies of temples. I have not spoiled the showbread of the gods. I have not taken away the loaves and the wrappings of the dead. I have done no carnal act within the sacred enclosure of the temple. I have not blasphemed. I have not curtailed the sacred revenues. I have not pulled down the scale of the balance. I have not falsified the beam of the balance. I have not taken away the milk from the mouths of sucklings. I have not lassoed cattle on their pastures. I have not taken with nets the birds of the gods. I have not fished in their ponds. I have not turned back the water in its season. I have not cut off a water-channel in its course. I have not put out the fire in its time. I have not defrauded the nine gods of the choice part of the victims. I have not ejected the oxen of the gods. I have not turned back the god at his coming forth. I am pure. I am pure. I am pure. I am pure. Pure as this great bono of Heracliopolis is pure. There is no crime against me in this land of the double truth. Since I know the names of the gods who are with thee in the hall of the double truth, save thou me from them." He then turned towards the jury and pleaded his case before them. They had been severally appointed for the cognizance of particular sins, and the dead man took each of them by name to witness that he was innocent of the sin which that one recorded. His plea ended. He returned to the supreme judge, and repeated, under what is sometimes a highly mystic form, the ideas which he had already advanced in the first part of his address. Hail unto you ye gods who are in the great hall of the double truth, who have no falsehood in your bosoms, but who live on truth in Naunu, and feed your hearts upon it before the Lord God who dwelleth in his solar disk. Deliver me from the typhon who feedeth on entrails, O chiefs. In this hour of supreme judgment, grant that the deceased may come unto you, he who hath not sinned, who hath neither lied, nor done evil, nor committed any crime, who hath not borne false witness, who hath done not against himself, but who liveth on truth, who feedeth on truth. He hath spread joy on all sides, men speak of that which he hath done, and the gods rejoice in it. He hath reconciled the God to him by his love, he hath given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothing to the naked. He hath given a boat to the shipwrecked, he hath offered sacrifices to the gods, sepulchral meals unto the mains. Deliver him from himself, speak not against him before the Lord of the dead, for his mouth is pure, and his two hands are pure. In the middle of the hall, however, his acts were being weighed by the assessors. Like all objects belonging to the gods, the balance is magic, and the genius which animates it sometimes shows its fine and delicate little human head on the top of the upright stand which forms its body. Everything about the balance recalls its superhuman origin. A synocephalus, emblematic of thought, sits perched on the upright and washes the beam. The cords which suspend the scales are made of alternate cruises ansato and tuts. Truth squats upon one of the scales. Thought, ibis-headed, places the heart on the other, and always merciful, bears upon the side of truth that judgment may be favourably inclined. He affirms that the heart is light of offence, inscribes the verdict of the proceeding upon a wooden tablet, and pronounces the verdict aloud. Thus say a thought, Lord of the Divine Discourse, scribe of the great Aeneid, to his Father Osiris, Lord of Eternity. Behold the deceased in this hall of the double truth. His heart hath been weighed in the balance in the presence of the great genie, the lords of Hades, and been found true. No trace of earthly impurity hath been found in his heart. Now that he leveth the tribunal true of voice, his heart is restored to him, as well as his eyes, and the material cover of his heart, to be put back in their places each in its own time. His soul in heaven, his heart in the other world, as is the custom of the followers of Horus. Henceforth let his body lie in the hands of Anubis, who presideth over the tombs. Let him receive offerings at the cemetery in the presence of Anophris. Let him be as one of those favourites who follow thee. Let his soul abide where it will in the necropolis of his city, he whose voice is true before the great Aeneid. In this negative confession, which the worshippers of Osiris taught to their dead, all is not equally admirable. The material interests of the temple were too prominent, and the crime of killing a sacred goose or stealing a loaf from the bread offerings was considered as abominable, as columnary, or murder. But although it contains traces of priestly cupidity, yet how many of its precepts are untarnished in their purity by any selfish ulterior motive. In it is all our morality in germ, and with refinements of delicacy often lacking among peoples of later and more advanced civilizations. The God does not confine his favour to the prosperous and the powerful of this world. He bestows it also upon the poor. His will is that they be fed in clothed and exempted from tasks beyond their strength, that they be not oppressed, and that unnecessary tears be spared them. If this does not amount to the love of our neighbour as our religions preach it, at least it represents the careful solicitude due from a good Lord to his vassals. His pity extends to slaves. Not only does he command that no one should ill-treat them himself, but he forbids that their masters should be led to ill-treat them. This profession of faith, one of the noblest bequeathed to us by the Old World, is of very ancient origin. It may be read in scattered fragments upon the monuments of the first dynasties, and the way in which its ideas are treated by the compilers of these inscriptions proves that it was not then regarded as new, but as a text so old and so well known that its formulas were current in all mouths, and had their prescribed places in epitaphs. Was it composed in mendes, the God's own home, or in Heliopolis, when the theologians of that city appropriated the God of mendes and incorporated him in their Aeneid? In conception it certainly belongs to the Osirin priesthood, but it can only have been diffused over the whole of Egypt after the general adoption of the Heliopolitan Aeneid throughout the cities. As soon as he was judged, the dead man entered into the possession of all his rights as a pure soul. On high he received from the Universal Lord all that kings and princes here below bestowed upon their followers, rations of food and a house, gardens and fields to be held subject to the usual conditions of tenure in Egypt, i.e. taxation, military service, and the Corvée. If the island was attacked by the partisans of Sitt, the Osirin doubles hastened in body to repulse them, and fought bravely in its defense. Of the revenues sent him by his kindred on certain days and by means of sacrifices, each gave tithes to the heavenly storehouses. But this was but the least part of the burdens laid upon him by the laws of the country, which did not suffer him to become enervated by idleness, but obliged him to labor as in the days when he still dwelt in Egypt. He looked after the maintenance of canals and dykes, he tilled the ground, he sowed, he reaped, he garnered the grain for his Lord and for himself. Yet to those upon whom they were incumbent, these posthumous obligations, the sequel and continuation of feudal service, at length seemed too heavy, and theologians exercised their ingenuity to find means of lightening the burden. They authorized the mains to look to their servants for the discharge of all manual labor, which they ought to have performed themselves. Barely did a dead man, no matter how poor, arrive unaccompanied at the eternal cities. He brought with him a following proportionate to his rank and fortune upon earth. At first they were real doubles, those of slaves or vassals killed at the tomb, and who had departed along with the double of the master to serve him beyond the grave as they had served him here. A number of statues and images, magically endued with activity and intelligence, was afterwards substituted for this retinue of victims. Originally of so large a size that only the rich or noble could afford them, they were reduced little by little to the height of a few inches. Some were carved out of alabaster, granite, diorite, fine limestone, or molded out of fine clay and delicately modeled. Others had scarcely any human resemblance. They were endowed with life by means of a formula recited over them at the time of their manufacture, and afterwards traced upon their legs. All were possessed of the same faculties. When the God who called the Osirons to the Corvée pronounced the name of the dead man to whom the figures belonged, they arose and answered for him, hence their designation of respondents, Ashibiti. Equipped for agricultural labor, each grasping a hoe and carrying a seed-bag on his shoulder, they set out to work in their appointed places, contributing the required number of days of forced labor. Up to a certain point they thus compensated for those inequalities of condition which death itself did not afface among the vassals of Osiris, for the figures were sold so cheaply that even the poorest could always afford some for themselves, or bestow a few upon their relations, and in the islands of the blessed, Fela, artisan, and slave were indebted to the Ashibiti for a release from their old routine of labor and unending toil. While the little peasants of stone or glazed wear dutifully toiled and tilled and sewed, their masters were enjoying all the delights of the Egyptian paradise in perfect idleness. They sat at ease by the waterside, inhaling the fresh north breeze, under the shadow of trees which were always green. They fished with lines among the lotus-plants, they embarked in their boats, and were towed along by their servants, or they would sometimes deign to paddle themselves slowly about the canals. They went fouling among the reed-beds, or retired within their painted pavilions to read tales, to play at drafts, to return to their wives who were forever young and beautiful. It was but an ameliorated earthly life, divested of all sufferings under the rule and by the favour of the true-voiced onofris. The feudal gods promptly adopted this new mode of life. Each of their dead bodies, mummified and afterwards reanimated in accordance with the Osirin myth, became an Osiris, as did that of any ordinary person. Some carried the assimilation so far as to absorb the god of mendes, or be absorbed in him. At Memphis, Ptas Okaris became Ptas Okar Osiris, and at Thinus Kodomenific became Iris Kodomenetit. The sun god lent himself to this process with comparative ease, because his life is more like a man's life, and hence also more like that of Osiris, which is the counterpart of a man's life. Born in the morning he ages as the day declines, and gently passes away at evening. From the time of his entering the sky to that of his leaving it, he reigns above as he reigned here below in the beginning, but when he has left the sky and sinks into Hades he becomes as one of the dead, and is, as they are, subjected to Osirin embalment. The same dangers that men as their human souls threaten his soul also, and when he has vanquished them, not in his own strength, but by the power of amulets and magical formulas, he enters into the fields of Lalu, and ought to dwell there forever under the rule of Onaphris. He did nothing of the kind, however, for daily the sun was to be seen reappearing in the east twelve hours after it had sunk into the darkness of the west. Was it a new oar of each time, or did the same sun shine every day? In either case the result was precisely the same. The God came forth from death and re-entered into life. Having identified the course of the sun-god with that of man, and raw with Osiris for a first day and a first night, it was hard not to push the matter further, and identify them for all succeeding days and nights, affirming that man and Osiris might, if they so wished, be born again in the morning, as raw was, and together with him. If the Egyptians had found the prospect of quitting the darkness of the tomb for the bright meadows of Oalu a sensible alleviation of their lot, with what joy must they have been filled by the conception which allowed them to substitute the whole realm of the sun for a little archipelago in an out-of-the-way corner of the universe. Their first consideration was to obtain entrance into the divine bark, and this was the object of all the various practices and prayers, whose text, together with that which already contained the Osirian formulas, ensured the unfailing protection of raw to their possessor. The sole desirous of making use of them went straight from his tomb to the very spot where the God left earth to descend into Hades. This was somewhere in the immediate neighborhood of Abidos, and was reached through a narrow gorge or cleft in the Libyan range, whose mouth opened in front of the temple of Osiris Contamentet, a little to the northwest of the city. The sole was supposed to be carried thither by a small flotilla of boats, manned by figures representing friends or priests, and laden with food, furniture, and statues. This flotilla was placed within the vault on the day of the funeral, and was set in motion by means of incantations recited over it during one of the first nights of the year at the annual feast of the dead. The bird or insect which had previously served as guide to the soul upon its journey now took the helm to show the fleet the right way, and under this command the boats left Abidos and mysteriously passed through the cleft into that western sea which is inaccessible to the living, there to await the daily coming of the dying sun god. End of Section 21, read by Professor Heather Mbye. For more free audio books or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org