By accepting these gifts he became the guest of the goddess, and could never more 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 urasus, 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 cynocephali 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 phylactery 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 Râ, Tûmû, Horus, or Khopri—that god whose name and attributes were best fitted to repel the immediate danger—and flames withdrew at his voice, monsters fled or sank paralysed, the most cruel of genii 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 surround the world, sometimes alone, and fighting his way step by step, sometimes escorted by beneficent divinities. Halfway up the slope was the good cow Hâfchor, 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 Kha, and saw in the far distance the outline of the Islands of the Blest. One tradition, so old as to have been almost forgotten in Rames-side times, told how Thot the ibis there awaited him, and bore him away on his wings;[***] another, no less ancient but of more lasting popularity, declared that a ferry-boat 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 travellers 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 Ûapûaîtû is thy name." "Tell me my name," proceeded the mast-head.

"The Neck of Amsît is thy name." "Tell me my name," asked the sail. "Nûît 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 right of passage by the correctness of his answers, the bark consented to receive him and to carry him to the further shore. There he was met by the gods and goddesses of the court of Osiris: by Anubis, by Hathor the lady of the cemetery, by Nît, by the two Màîts 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 straitly 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. 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. "Hail unto you, ye lords of Truth! hail 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 account is rendered before Onnophris, 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 defalcations 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 aught diminished the supplies of temples! I have not spoiled the shrewbread 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 in nought 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 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 Bonû of Heracleopolis 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 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 manes to look to their servants for the discharge of all manual labour 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 moulded out of fine clay and delicately modelled; 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 Osirians 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 "—Ûashbîti. Equipped for agricultural labour, 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 labour.

Up to a certain point they thus compensated for those inequalities of condition which death itself did not efface 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 Blest, fellah, artisan, and slave were indebted to the Uashbîti for release from their old routine of labour and unending toil. While the little peasants of stone or glazed ware dutifully toiled and tilled and sowed, their masters were enjoying all the delights of the Egyptian paradise in perfect idleness. They sat at ease by the water-side, 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 fowling among the reed-beds, or retired within their painted pavilions to read tales, to play at draughts, to return to their wives who were for ever young and beautiful.[**]

It was but an ameliorated earthly life, divested of all suffering under the rule and by the favour of the true-voiced Onnophris. The feudal gods promptly adopted this new mode of life.

Each of their dead bodies, mummified, and afterwards reanimated in accordance with the Osirian 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 to be absorbed in him. At Memphis Phtah-Sokaris became Phtah-Sokar-Osiris, and at Thinis Khontamentîfc became Osiris Khontamentît. 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 Osirian embalmment. The same dangers that menace 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 lalû, and ought to dwell there for ever under the rule of Onuophris. 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 orb 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 Râ 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 Râ was, and together with him. If the Egyptians had found the prospect of quitting the darkness of the tomb for the bright meadows of Ialû 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 Râ to their possessor. The soul 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 neighbourhood of Abydos, and was reached through a narrow gorge or "cleft" in the Libyan range, whose "mouth" opened in front of the temple of Osiris Khontamentît, a little to the north-west of the city. The soul 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 Abydos 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.

As soon as his bark appeared at the last bend of the celestial Nile, the cynocephali, who guarded the entrance into night, began to dance and gesticulate upon the banks as they intoned their accustomed hymn. The gods of Abydos mingled their shouts of joy with the chant of the sacred baboons, the bark lingered for a moment upon the frontiers of day, and initiated souls seized the occasion to secure their recognition and their reception on board of it.[*] Once admitted, they took their share in the management of the boat, and in the battles with hostile deities; but they were not all endowed with the courage or equipment needful to withstand the perils and terrors of the voyage. Many stopped short by the way in one of the regions which it traversed, either in the realm of Khontamentît, or in that of Sokaris, or in those islands where the good Osiris welcomed them as though they had duly arrived in the ferry-boat, or upon the wing of Thot. There they dwelt in colonies under the suzerainty of local gods, rich, and in need of nothing, but condemned to live in darkness, excepting for the one brief hour in which the solar bark passed through their midst, irradiating them with beams of light.[**]

The few persevered, feeling that they had courage to accompany the sun throughout, and these were indemnified for their sufferings by the most brilliant fate ever dreamed of by Egyptian souls., Born anew with the sun-god and appearing with him at the gates of the east, they were assimilated to him, and shared his privilege of growing old and dying, only to be ceaselessly rejuvenated and to live again with ever-renewed splendour. They disembarked where they pleased, and returned at will into the world. If now and then they felt a wish to revisit all that was left of their earthly bodies, the human-headed sparrow-hawk descended the shaft in full flight, alighted upon the funeral couch, and, with hands softly laid upon the spot where the heart had been wont to beat, gazed upwards at the impassive mask of the mummy.

This was but for a moment, since nothing compelled these perfect souls to be imprisoned within the tomb like the doubles of earlier times, because they feared the light. They "went forth by day," and dwelt in those places where they had lived; they walked in their gardens by their ponds of running water; they perched like so many birds on the branches of the trees which they had planted, or enjoyed the fresh air under the shade of their sycamores; they ate and drank at pleasure; they travelled by hill and dale; they embarked in the boat of Râ, and disembarked without weariness, and without distaste for the same perpetual round.

This conception, which was developed somewhat late, brought the Egyptians back to the point from which they had started when first they began to speculate on the life to come.

The soul, after having left the place of its incarnation to which in the beginning it clung, after having ascended into heaven and there sought congenial asylum in vain, forsook all havens which it had found above, and unhesitatingly fell back upon earth, there to lead a peaceful, free, and happy life in the full light of day, and with the whole valley of Egypt for a paradise.

The connection, always increasingly intimate between Osiris and Râ, gradually brought about a blending of the previously separate myths and beliefs concerning each. The friends and enemies of the one became the friends and enemies of the other, and from a mixture of the original conceptions of the two deities, arose new personalities, in which contradictory elements were blent together, often without true fusion. The celestial Horuses one by one were identified with Horus, son of Isis, and their attributes were given to him, as his in the same way became theirs. Apopi and the monsters—the hippopotamus, the crocodile, the wild boar—who lay in wait for Râ as he sailed the heavenly ocean, became one with Sît and his accomplices. Sit still possessed his half of Egypt, and his primitive brotherly relation to the celestial Horus remained unbroken, either 'on account of their sharing one temple, as at Nûbît, or because they were worshipped as one in two neighbouring nomes, as, for example, at Oxyrrhynchos and at Heracleopolis Magna. The repulsion with which the slayer of Osiris was regarded did not everywhere dissociate these two cults: certain small districts persisted in this double worship down to the latest times of paganism. It was, after all, a mark of fidelity to the oldest traditions of the race, but the bulk of the Egyptians, who had forgotten these, invented reasons taken from the history of the divine dynasties to explain the fact. The judgment of Thot or of Sibû had not put an end to the machinations of Sît: as soon as Horus had left the earth, Sît resumed them, and pursued them, with varying fortune, under the divine kings of the second Ennead. Now, in the year 363 of Harmakhis, the Typhonians reopened the campaign. Beaten at first near Edfû, they retreated precipitately northwards, stopping to give battle wherever their partisans predominated,—at Zatmîfc in the Theban nome,[*] at Khaîtnûtrît to the north-east of Denderah, and at Hibonû in the principality of the Gazelle.

Several bloody combats, which took place between Oxyrrhynchos and Heracleopolis Magna, were the means of driving them finally out of the Nile Valley; they rallied for the last time in the eastern provinces of the Delta, were beaten at Zalû, and giving up all hope of success on land, they embarked at the head of the Gulf of Suez, in order to return to the Nubian Desert, their habitual refuge in times of distress. The sea was the special element of Typhon, and upon it they believed themselves secure. Horus, however, followed them, overtook them near Shas-hirît, routed them, and on his return to Edfu, celebrated his victory by a solemn festival. By degrees, as he made himself master of those localities which owed allegiance to Sit, he took energetic measures to establish in them the authority of Osiris and of the solar cycle. In all of them he built, side by side with the sanctuary of the Typhonian divinities, a temple to himself, in which he was enthroned under the particular form he was obliged to assume in order to vanquish his enemies. Metamorphosed into a hawk at the battle of Hibonû, we next see him springing on to the back of Sit under the guise of a hippopotamus; in his shrine at Hibonû he is represented as a hawk perching on the back of a gazelle, emblem of the nome where the struggle took place. Near to Zalû he became incarnate as a human-headed lion, crowned with the triple diadem, and having feet armed with claws which cut like a knife; it was under the form, too, of a lion that he was worshipped in the temple at Zalû. The correlation of Sit and the celestial Horus was not, therefore, for these Egyptians of more recent times a primitive religious fact; it was the consequence, and so to speak the sanction, of the old hostility between the two gods.

Horus had treated his enemy in the same fashion that a victorious Pharaoh treated the barbarians conquered by his arms: he had constructed a fortress to keep his foe in check, and his priests formed a sort of garrison as a precaution against the revolt of the rival priesthood and the followers of the rival deity. In this manner the battles of the gods were changed into human struggles, in which, more than once, Egypt was deluged with blood. The hatred of the followers of Osiris to those of Typhon was perpetuated with such implacability, that the nomes which had persisted in adhering to the worship of Sit, became odious to the rest of the population: the image of their master on the monuments was mutilated, their names were effaced from the geographical lists, they were assailed with insulting epithets, and to pursue and slay their sacred animals was reckoned a pious act. Thus originated those skirmishes which developed into actual civil wars, and were continued down to Roman times. The adherents of Typhon only became more confirmed in their veneration for the accursed god; Christianity alone overcame their obstinate fidelity to him.[*]

The history of the world for Egypt was therefore only the history of the struggle between the adherents of Osiris and the followers of Sît; an interminable warfare in which sometimes one and sometimes the other of the rival parties obtained a passing advantage, without ever gaining a decisive victory till the end of time. The divine kings of the second and third Ennead devoted most of the years of their earthly reign to this end; they were portrayed under the form of the great warrior Pharaohs, who, from the eighteenth to the twelfth century before our era, extended their rule from the plains of the Euphrates to the marshes of Ethiopia. A few peaceful sovereigns are met with here and there in this line of conquerors—a few sages or legislators, of whom the most famous was styled Thot, the doubly great, ruler of Hermopolis and of the Hermopolitan Ennead. A legend of recent origin made him the prime minister of Horus, son of Isis; a still more ancient tradition would identify him with the second king of the second dynasty, the immediate successor of the divine Horuses, and attributes to him a reign of 3226 years. He brought to the throne that inventive spirit and that creative power which had characterized him from the time when he was only a feudal deity. Astronomy, divination, magic, medicine, writing, drawing—in fine, all the arts and sciences emanated from him as from their first source. He had taught mankind the methodical observation of the heavens and of the changes that took place in them, the slow revolutions of the sun, the rapid phases of the moon, the intersecting movements of the five planets, and the shapes and limits of the constellations which each night were lit up in the sky. Most of the latter either remained, or appeared to remain immovable, and seemed never to pass out of the regions accessible to the human eye. Those which were situate on the extreme margin of the firmament accomplished movements there analogous to those of the planets.

Every year at fixed times they were seen to sink one after another below the horizon, to disappear, and rising again after an eclipse of greater or less duration, to regain insensibly their original positions. The constellations were reckoned to be thirty-six in number, the thirty-six decani to whom were attributed mysterious powers, and of whom Sothis was queen—Sothis transformed into the star of Isis, when Orion (Sâhû), became the star of Osiris. The nights are so clear and the atmosphere so transparent in Egypt, that the eye can readily penetrate the depths of space, and distinctly see points of light which would be invisible in our foggy climate. The Egyptians did not therefore need special instruments to ascertain the existence of a considerable number of stars which we could not see without the help of our telescopes; they could perceive with the naked eye stars of the fifth magnitude, and note them upon their catalogues.[*] It entailed, it is true, a long training and uninterrupted practice to bring their sight up to its maximum keenness; but from very early times it was a function of the priestly colleges to found and maintain schools of astronomy. The first observatories established on the banks of the Nile seem to have belonged to the temples of the sun; the high priests of Râ—who, to judge from their title, were alone worthy to behold the sun face to face—were actively employed from the earliest times in studying the configuration and preparing maps of the heavens. The priests of other gods were quick to follow their example: at the opening of the historic period, there was not a single temple, from one end of the valley to the other, that did not possess its official astronomers, or, as they were called, "watchers of the night."[**]