New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology Introduction by Robert Graves CRESCENT BOOKS NEW YORK New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology Translated by Richard Aldington and Delano Ames and revised by a panel of editorial advisers from the Larousse Mvthologie Generate edited by Felix Guirand and first published in France by Auge, Gillon, Hollier-Larousse, Moreau et Cie, the Librairie Larousse, Paris This 1987 edition published by Crescent Books, distributed by: Crown Publishers, Inc., 225 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10003 Copyright 1959 The Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited New edition 1968 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the permission of The Hamlyn Publishing Group Limited. ISBN 0-517-00404-6 Printed in Yugoslavia Scan begun 20 November 2001 Ended (at this point Goddess knows when) LaRousse Encyclopedia of Mythology Introduction by Robert Graves Perseus and Medusa With Athene's assistance, the hero has just slain the Gorgon Medusa with a bronze harpe, or curved sword given him by Hermes and now, seated on the back of Pegasus who has just sprung from her bleeding neck and holding her decapitated head in his right hand, he turns watch her two sisters who are persuing him in fury. Beneath him kneels the headless body of the Gorgon with her arms and golden wings outstretched. From her neck emerges Chrysor, father of the monster Geryon. Perseus later presented the Gorgon's head to Athene who placed it on Her shield. Relief from Melos, British Museum (Frontpiece) Orestes and Iphigenia Orestes brought before the priestess of Artemis at Tauris, where he and Pylades were captured by the hostile people. Orestes is unaware that the priestess is his sister, Iphigenia, believed to have been sacrificed by his father Agamemmon at Aulis. Detail from a Pompeiian mural now in the Museo Nazionale, Naples INTRODUCTION By Robert Graves Mythology is the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student's experience that he cannot believe them to be true. Hence the English adjective 'mythical', meaning 'incredible'; and hence the omission from standard European mythologies, such as this, of all Biblical narratives even when closely paralleled by myths from Persia, Babylonia, Egypt and Greece; and of all hagiological legends. Otherwise, the New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology offers a comprehensive and compact Who's Who or Who Was Who of the better known gods, goddesses, heroes, monsters, demons, angels and saints from all over the world, including certain Moslem ones. It does not discuss philosophic theory or religious experience, and treats each cult with the same impersonal courtesy. Myth has two main functions. The first is to answer the sort of awkward questions that children ask, such as: 'Who made the world? How will it end? Who was the first man? Where do souls go after death?' The answers, necessarily graphic and positive, confer enormous power on the various deities credited with the creation and care of souls--and incidentally on their priesthoods. The second function of myth is to justify an existing social system and account for traditional rites and customs. The Erechtheid clan of Athens, who used a snake as an amulet, preserved myths of their descent from King Erichthonius, a man-serpent, son of the Smith-god Hephaestus and foster-son of the Goddess Athene. The Ioxids of Caria explained their veneration for rushes and wild asparagus by a story of their ancestress Perigune, whom Theseus the Erechtheid courted in a thicket of these plants; thus incidentally claiming cousinship with the Attic royal house. The real reason may have been that wild asparagus stalks and rushes were woven into sacred baskets, and therefore taboo. Myths of origin and eventual extinction vary according to the climate. In the cold North, the first human beings were said to have sprung from the licking of frozen stones by a divine cow named Audumla; and the Northern after-world was a bare, misty, featureless plain where ghosts wandered hungry and shivering. According to a myth from the kinder climate of Greece, a Titan named Prometheus, kneading mud on a flowery riverbank, made human statuettes which Athene - who was once the Eibyan Moon--Goddess Neith - brought to life, and Greek ghosts went to a sunless, flowerless underground cavern. These afterworlds were destined for serfs or commoners; deserving nobles could count on warm, celestial mead-halls in the North, and Elysian Fields in Greece. Primitive peoples remodel old myths to conform with changes produced by revolutions, or invasions and, as a rule, politely disguise their violence: thus a treacherous usurper will figure as a lost heir to the throne who killed a destructive dragon or other monster and, after marrying the king's daughter, duly succeeded him. Even myths of origin get altered or discarded. Prometheus' creation of men from clay superseded the hatching of all nature from a world-egg laid by the ancient Mediterranean Dove-goddess Eurynome - a myth common also in Polynesia, where the Goddess is called Tangaroa. A typical case-history of how myths develop as culture spreads: - Among the Akan of Ghana, the original social system was a number of queendoms, each containing three or more clans and ruled by a Queen-mother with her council of elder women: descent being reckoned in the female line, and each clan having its own animal deity. The Akan believed that the world was born from the-all-powerful Moon-goddess Ngame. who gave human beings souls, as soon as born, by shooting-lunar rays into them. At some time or other perhaps in the early Middle Ages, patriarchal nomads from the Sudan forced the Akans to accept a male Creator, a Sky-god named Odomankoma: hut failed to destroy Ngame's dispensation. A compromise myth was agreed upon: Odomankoma created the world with hammer and chisel from inert matter, after which Ngame brought it to life. These Sudanese invaders also worshipped the seven planetary powers ruling the week - a system originating in Babylonia. (It had spread to Northern Europe, by-passing Greece and Rome; which is why the names of pagan deities - Tuisto. Woden, Thor and Frigg- arc still attached to Tuesday, Wednesday. Thursday and Friday.) This extra cult provided the Akan with seven new deities, and the compromise myth made both them and the clan-gods bisexual. Towards the end of the fourteenth century A.D., a social revolution deposed Odomankoma in favour of a Universal Sun-god, and altered the myth accordingly. While Odomankoma ruled, a queendom was still a queendom, the king acting merely as a consort and male representative of the sovereign Queen-mother, and being styled 'Son of the Moon': a yearly dying, yearly resurrected, fertility godling. But the gradual welding of small queendoms into city-states, and of city-states into a rich and populous nation, encouraged the High King the king of the dominant city-state - to borrow a foreign custom. He styled himself 'Son of the Sun', as well as 'Son of the Moon', and claimed limitless authority. The Sun which, according to the myth, had hitherto been re-born every morning from Ngame, was now worshipped as an eternal god altogether independent of the Moon's life-giving function. New myths appeared when the Akan accepted the patriarchal principle, which Sun-worship brought in: they began tracing succession through the father, and mothers ceased to be the spiritual heads of households. This case-history throws light on the complex Egyptian corpus of myth. Egypt, it seems to have developed from small matriarchal Moon-queen-doms to Pharaonic patriarchal Sun-monarchy, Grotesque animal deities of leading clans in the Delta became city-gods, and the cities were federated under the sovereignty of a High King (once a "Son of the Moon"), who claimed to be the Son of Ra the Sun-god. Opposition by independent-mindcd city-rulers to the Pharaoh', autocratic sway appears in the undated myth of how Ra grew so old and feeble that he could not even control his spittle: the Moon-goddess Isis plotted against him and Ra retaliated by casting his baleful eye on mankind they perished in their thousands. Ra nevertheless decided to quit the ungrateful land of Egypt; whereupon Hathor. a loyal Cow Goddess flew him up to the vault of Heaven. The myth doubtless records a compromise that consigned the High King'; absolutist pretensions, supported by his wife, to the vague realm of philosophic theory. He kept the throne, but once more became, for all practical purposes, an incarnation of Osiris consort of the Moon-goddess Isis -- a yearly dying, yearly resurrected fertility godling. Indian myth is highly complex, and swings from gross physical abandon to rigorous asceticism and fantastic visions of the spirit world, Yet it has much in common with European myth, since Aryan invasions in the second millennium BC. changed the religious system of both continents. The invaders were nomad herdsmen, and the peoples on whom they imposed themselves as a military aristocracy were peasants. Hesiod, an early Greek poet, preserves myth of pre-Aryan 'Silver Age' heroes: 'divinely created eaters of bread, utterly subject to their mothers however long they lived, who never sacrificed to the gods, but at least did not make war against one another.' Hesiod put the case well: in primitive agricultural communities, recourse to war is rare, and goddess-worship the rule. Herdsmen, on the contrary, tend to make fighting a profession and, perhaps because bulls dominate their herds, as rams do flocks, worship a male Sky-god, typified by a bull or a ram. He sends down rain for the pastures, and they take omens from the entrails of the victims sacrificed to him. When an invading Aryan chieftain, a tribal rain-maker, married the Moon priestess and Queen of a conquered people, a new myth inevitably celebrated the marriage of the Sky-god and the Moon. But since the Moon-goddess was everywhere worshipped as a triad, in honor of the Moon's three phases - waxing, full, and waning - the god split up into a complementary triad. This accounts for three-bodied Geryon, the first king of Spain; three-headed Cernunnos, the Gallic god; the Irish triad, Brian, Iuchar, and Iucharba, who married the three queenly owners of Ireland; and the invading Greek brothers Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades who, despite great opposition, married the pre-Greek Moon-goddess in her three aspects, respectively as Queen of Heaven. Queen of the Sea, and Queen of the Underworld. The Queen-mother's decline in religious power, and the goddesses' continual struggle to preserve their royal prerogatives, appears in the Homeric myth of how Zeus ill-treated and bullied Hera, and how she continually plotted against him. Zeus remained a Thunder-god, because Greek national sentiment forbad his becoming a Sun God in Oriental style. But his Irish counterpart, a thunder-god named The Dagda, grew senile at last and surrendered the throne to his son Bodb the Red, a War God - in Ireland, the magic of rain-making was not so important as in Greece. One constant rule of mythology is that whatever happens among the gods above reflects events on earth. Thus a father-god named 'The Ancient One of the Jade' (Yu-ti) ruled the pre-revolutionary Chinese Heaven: like Prometheus, he had created human beings from clay. His wife was the Queen-mother, and their court an exact replica of the old Imperial Court at Pekin, with precisely the same functionaries: ministers, soldiers, and a numerous family of the god's sisters, daughters and nephews. The two annual sacrifices paid by the Emperor to the August One of the Jade - at the winter solstice when the days first lengthen and at the spring equinox when they become longer than the nights - show him to have once been a solar god. And the theological value given to the number 72, suggests that the cult started as a compromise between Moon-goddess worship and Sun-god worship: 72 means three-times-three, the Moon's mystical number, multiplied by two-times-two-times-two, the Sun's mystical number, and occurs in solar-lunar divine unions throughout Europe, Asia and Africa. Chinese conservatism, by the way. kept these gods dressed in ancient court-dress, making no concessions to the new fashions which the invading dynasty from Manchuria had introduced. In West Africa, whenever the Queen-mother, or King, appointed a new functionary at Court, the same thing happened in Heaven, by royal decree. Presumably this was also the case in China; and if we apply the principle to Greek myth, it seems reasonably certain that the account of Tirynthian Heracles' marriage to Hera's daughter Hebe, and his appointment as Celestial Porter to Zeus, commemorates the appointment of a Tirynthian prince as vizier at the court of the Mycenaean High King, after marriage to a daughter of his Queen, the High Priestess of Argos. Probably the appointment of Ganymede, son of an early Trojan king, as cup-bearer to Zeus, had much the same significance: Zeus, in this context, would be more likely the Hittite king resident at Hattusas. Myth, then, is a dramatic shorthand record of such matters as invasions, migrations, dynastic changes, admission of foreign cults, and social reforms. When bread was first introduced into Greece - where only beans, poppy-seeds, acorns and asphodel-roots had hitherto been known the myth of Demeter and Triptolemus sanctified its use; the same event in Wales produced a myth of 'The Old White One', a Sow-goddess who went around the country with gifts of grain, bees, and her own young; for agriculture, pig-breeding and bee-keeping were taught to the aborigines by the same wave of neolithic invaders. Other myths sanctified the invention of wine. A proper study of myth demands a great store of abstruse geographical, historical and anthropological knowledge; also familiarity with the properties of plants and trees, and the habits of wild birds and beasts. Thus a Central American stone-sculpture, a Toad-god sitting beneath a mushroom, means little to mythologists who have not considered the world-wide association of toads with toxic mushrooms or heard of a Mexican Mushroom-god, patron of an oracular cult: for the toxic agent is a drug, similar to that secreted in the sweat-glands of frightened toads, which provides magnificent hallucinations of a heavenly kingdom. Myths are fascinating and easily misread. Readers may smile at the picture of Queen Maya and her pre-natal dream of the Buddha descending upon her disguised as a charming white baby elephant he looks as though he would crush her to pulp when 'at once all nature rejoiced, trees burst into bloom, and musical instruments played of their own accord'. In English-speaking countries, 'white elephant' denotes something not only useless and unwanted, but expensive to maintain; and the picture could be misread there as indicating the Queen's grave embarrassment at the prospect of bearing a child. In India, however, the elephant symbolizes royalty - the supreme God Indra rides one - and white elephants (which are not albinos, but animals suffering from a vitiliginous skin-disease) are sacred to the Sun, as white horses were for the ancient Greeks, and white oxen for the British druids. The elephant, moreover, symbolizes intelligence, and Indian writers traditionally acknowledge the Elephant-god Ganesa as their patron; he is supposed to have dictated the Mahabharata. Again, in English, a scallop-shell is associated either with cookery or with medieval pilgrims returning from a visit to the Holy Sepulchre; but Aphrodite the Greek Love-goddess employed a scallop-shell for her voyages across the sea because its two parts were so tightly hinged together as to provide a symbol of passionate sexual love - the hinge of the scallop being a principal ingredient in ancient love-philtres. The lotus flower sacred to Buddha and Osiris has five petals, which symbolise the four limbs and the head; the five senses; the five digits: and, like the pyramid, the four points of the compass and the zenith. Other esoteric meanings abound: for myths are seldom simple, and never irresponsible. CONTENTS Robert Graves: Introduction G.-H. Luquet: Prehistoric Mythology The religion of the first men The cult of the dead J. Viaud: Egyptian Mythology The Ennead of Heliopolis and the family of Osiris Protective divinities of the Pharaohs and the kingdom Divinities of River and Desert Divinities of Birth and Death Men deified and the Pharaoh god The sacred animals F. Guirand: Assyro-Babylonian Mythology The Gods of Elam L. Delaporte: Phoenician Mythology The Gods of Carthage The Hittite gods F. Guirand: Greek Mythology Prehellenic mythology The mythology of classical Greece Sidereal and meteorological gods Orion: The Pleiades: The Hyades Gods of the winds Gods of the waters Divinities of the earth The life of man The underworld The heroes F. Guirand and A.-V. Pierre: Roman Mythology JohnX.W.P. Corcoran: Celtic Mythology E. Tonnelat: Teutonic Mythology - Germany and Scandinavia G. Alexinsky: Slavonic Mythology F. Guirand: Finno-Ugric Mythology P. Masson-Oursel and Louise Morin: Mythology of Ancient Persia Religion of the Zend-Avesta A Summary of Moslem Myths P. Masson-Oursel and Louise Morin: Indian Mythology The Brahmanic Dharma The Heretical Dharmas Mythology of Hinduism Ou-I-Tai: Chinese Mythology Odette Bruhl: Japanese Mythology The Great Legends The Gods Buddhism in Japan Max Fauconnet: Mythology of the Two Americas North America Mexico Central America South America Acknowledgments PREHISTORIC MYTHOLOGY THE RELIGION OF THE FIRST MEN Mythology, which will be examined in the following chapters by specific regions and epochs, implies a belief in supernatural forces, that is to say in beings who are both different from and superior to living men in that they exercise, either directly or through the intermediary of natural phenomena, a benign or harmful influence. It is the function of ritual practices or ceremonies to encourage the former influence and prevent or neutralise the latter. As an introduction to the study of the varied forms and the often poetic embellishments which these beliefs assumed among different peoples throughout the ages, it is appropriate to inquire into their origins: when in the life of mankind did such beliefs first appear? Supernatural beings, the objects of these beliefs, can be divided into two categories which, though in principle distinct, overlap in a number of cases. On the one hand there are the dead, ancestors or manes, who have been known to their contemporaries in the form and condition of normal men. On the other hand there are the divinities, strictly speaking, who never existed as ordinary mortals. Our information about the religious beliefs of peoples known to history can be derived from written documents; about primitive peoples who still exist we have the oral reports of travellers and ethnologists. But for prehistoric ages both of these sources of information are entirely lacking, and we never find ourselves in the actual presence of prehistoric religious beliefs. The only materials we possess are either physical traces of what appear to be vestiges of ritual practices or else pictorial representations of such practices from which can be inferred - with the aid of ethnological parallels - a belief in the existence of the supernatural beings to whom they were addressed. One cannot, therefore, insist too strongly on the hypothetical character of conclusions based on such material. We shall confine ourselves to the study of those people we call Palaeolithic because of their industry in chipped, not polished, stone, and who lived during the Pleistocene geological epoch. We shall retrace our way cautiously through the course of time and, ignoring facts which are too ambiguous, try to discover what may reasonably be conjectured about their religious beliefs. Mythology in the strict sense of the word. It is not impossible that the Magdalenians - the least ancient of Palaeolithic peoples - had a mythology in the strict sense of the word: that is to say, that they attributed to certain supernatural beings not only a specific form but specific acts. This at least is an acceptable interpretation of wall-drawings discovered in the cavern of the Trois-Freres in the Ariege department of southern France. There are three of them, and two at least seem to form an intentional group. Objectively the one on the right depicts a personage whose upright posture, legs and rump belong to a man. He has a horse's tail, a bison's head and the front legs of an animal, with one hoof distinctly cloven. He is perhaps dancing, and is certainly playing some kind of bowed musical instrument. He is preceded by an animal which turns its head towards him. To be sure, the human figure may be a magician in disguise who is charming the animal in front of him; but it would seem difficult to disguise the arms of an actual man with imitation hooved forelegs. Moreover, neither of the two animals who precede him is altogether real. The one nearest to him, a female whose sex is carefully accentuated, has the hind-quarters of the deer tribe and the forequarters of a bison. The forelegs of the reindeer in front terminate in the hooves of anything but a reindeer. We may thus suppose that this group of figures, of which not one entirely corresponds to reality, was intended to represent a mythological scene a sort of Palaeolithic Orpheus charming equally mythical animals by means of his music and dancing. The Magicians But this interpretation of the Trois-Frercs group is by no means the only one possible. Actually, the combination in the same animal of characteristics belonging to different species is found again elsewhere, not only in other drawings from the same cave. In the Trois-Freres cavern there are two bears, one with a wolf's head, the other with a bison's tail. A Solutrean bas-relief at Roc in the Charente shows a swine with a bull's back. Such figures, as we shall see, are connected with the magic of hunting and fertility and represent not mythological but real animals who are partially deformed in order to avert the hostility which might be aroused in them were their exact resemblance drawn. In addition, personages who combine human and animal characteristics occur elsewhere in Magdalenian art, both in wall-paintings and household possessions. Some of them also seem to be dancing and - according to ethnological parallels - may quite probably represent magicians in disguise. Such are, to cite only the least debatable specimens, another figure carved and painted on a wall of the same Trois-Freres cave a man with a bearded head, bull's ears, stag's antlers and a horse's tail - and the three personages with chamois heads carved on a staff found in the Mege shelter at Teyjat in the Dordogne. Though all these figures may equally be interpreted as either divinities or magicians, it would seem that the figure cut on one side of a limestone pebble from La Madeleine, in which human features are represented under a covering mask, must be that of a magician. On the other face of the same stone there is a feminine figure whose animal head is not so certainly a mask. If we assume that she also is a magician we reach the interesting conclusion that at least in the Lower Magdalenian period magic functions were not an exclusively masculine prerogative. Whether any of the figures mentioned above actually represented a hybrid deity or not, it is easy to see how the use of magic disguise contributed to the belief in such deities. The power of the magician was attributed to his disguise. It played the role of establishing a mystic communion, a fusion of essence, between him and the animals on which he proposed to act. Magic power and the magician's appearance were naturally associated. His aspect, simultaneously animal and human, naturally led to the conception of gods under the same hybrid form. The god possessed similar powers, and the magician, at least in the exercise of his functions, was in some way the god's incarnation. In any case, whether these figures rcprcsented divinities or magicians, they bear witness to the existence of religious beliefs. There can be no doubt that during the Magdalenian period many caverns, either wholly or at least in their lower depths were sanctuaries. Hunting Magic Food in Palaeolithic times depended primarily on hunting, and the essential role of magic was to assure its success. Mimetic magic with animal disguises must have contributed. But Magdaienian man certainly had recourse to sympathetic or homoeopathic magic, which relies on the theory that an operation performed on an image of a real being will produce the same effect on the being itself. Many of the drawings and clay figures of the cave of Montespan in the Haute-Garonne seem to have been made in order to be slashed or pierced with holes with the object of wounding real animals. Particularly remarkable is a statue of a bear cub, modelled in the round and placed on a stand, which seems to have been destined for this purpose. The statue never had a head. There is a cavity in the neck which seems to have been produced by a wooden peg supporting some object - and the skull of a bear cub was found on the ground between the statue's two front paws. This suggests that the headless statue, which is riddled with more than thirty holes, was completed by the head of an actual animal. There are other indications that it was perhaps covered with an animal's hide which also played a part in the magic ceremony. Also sculptured in the round at Isturitz in the Basses-Pyrenees is a feline creature, perforated in a manner which does not seem to suggest that the holes were made in order to hang up the figure. They must therefore represent wounds; and there are also arrows or harpoons scratched on the figure's thighs and spine. Another sculpture in the same grotto was even more obviously intended for sympathetic magic. This is a bison in sandstone. On its flank there is a deep vertical incision, at the side of which an arrow is cut. It is even possible that the original fracturing of the head and feet was the result of intentional mutilation which completed the magic ceremony. From these examples, in which the magic operation consists of actually wounding the animal's image, ancient man passed gradually to merely portraying the wounds or even simply evoking them by- drawing the weapons which were supposed to inflict them. This can he seen, among many other examples, in a wall-drawing of a bear at Trois-Freres. Its body is depicted as having been stoned. It bristles with arrows, and from the muzzle flow copious streams of blood. In these figures, and in others which seem to represent animals being hunted not with weapons but with snares, it is almost certain that the portrayal of a wished-for event was intended to bring about the event itself. Two drawings on limestone of animals pierced with arrows, a rhinoceros and a stag, found at La Colombicre in the Ain, must antedate the Magdaienian and correspond chronologically to the Solutrean period in a region to which this civilization did not penetrate. Fertility Magic Since hunting of necessity required the existence of game it is natural that Palaeolithic man, in order that game should be plentiful, also practiced fertility magic. In this case sympathetic magic could not, as with hunting magic, consist of performing in animal images the operations which would produce the desired result on the animals themselves. Fertility could only be caused artificially in effigy. We can therefore consider the representation of certain animal couples, and certain females, as examples of fertility magic. Such animal couples are the clay-modelled bisons of Tuc d'Audoubert, the reindeer sculptured in ivory of Bruniquel and the bull following a cow at Teyjat. To these may be added a wall-drawing of bison at Altamira. A female fertility figure is the drawing on a flagstone at La Madeleine of a doe accompanied by her fawn. All these specimens are of the Magdaienian period. But the older Solutrean frieze at Roc presents several bas-reliefs of female forms: the sow with cow's back already mentioned and some mares, one of which seems to be accompanied by the rough outline of a male. It is possible, though disputable, that certain figures of wounded men - for example a drawing in the shelter at Saltadora - were intended to bewitch an enemy, and thus correspond to a war magic similar to hunting magic. We consider it even more doubtful that representations of amorous scenes between human beings or the figurines of women with exaggerated bellies were intended to cause fertility among women. There is the Magdaienian 'Woman with a Reindeer' of Laugerie-Basse and the luxuriant females who are particularly abundant in, though not exclusive to, the Aurignacian period. But their role, we believe, was purely erotic. There is, however, a curious drawing on a blade of bone at Isturitz in which a woman, followed by a man, bears on her thigh a harpoon similar to those which in the picture on the opposite side of the blade have wounded a bison. This we are tempted to interpret as a love charm. To sum up, there seem to be no indications of hunting magic or fertility magic during Aurignacian times. They only appear with the Solutrean and continue into the Magdaienian period, reaching their apogee in its first phase. Pre-Mousterian Offerings Different religious practices are encountered in pre-Mousterian central Europe, a period which goes back to the last ice age. The most characteristic remains come from Drachenloch, above Vattis in the valley of the Tamina (canton of Saint-Gall, Switzerland), which is the highest known Palaeolithic cavern, over 7,500 feet above sea level. In two of the chambers there are low stone walls nearly three feet high, which were certainly made by the hand of man. They run along the cave wall, leaving between it and them a space about fifteen inches "wide. This space is filled with the bones of cave bears. These bones are chiefly skulls and are usually accompanied by the two first cervical vertebrae. There are also leg bones belonging, with rare exceptions, to different individual bears. At the entrance and in the forepart of one of these chambers similar bone-heaps were accumulated in half a dozen rectangular stone chests, covered by large slabs which form lids. In the far end of the same chamber three skulls were gathered together in an empty space between fallen blocks. Another skull had been carefully placed beneath a huge stone which was wedged in a manner to protect it against the pressure of the earth. It was encircled by a sort of stone crown adapted to the shape of the head. All these collections of bears' remains were certainly deliberate Since the skulls were generally attached to the first two vertebra they were not deposited there fleshless, but in a state to be eaten Moreover, the brain, like the legs with their meat and marrowbone represented the most succulent part of the animal. They were thus all probability offerings to some supernatural power. It is, of course arbitrary to see in this power a Supreme Being like our own God and more likely these choice morsels were offered to conciliate the spirits of the game, to give them thanks for the success of a hunting expedition and to solicit the continuance of their favor in the future. In any case we have here what may be the oldest known example of practices addressed to supernatural powers. THE CULT OF THE DEAD The dead, too, were considered to be supernatural power Corpses were the object of practices which give evidence not of deference but also, in the broad sense of the word, of a cult.' The skeletons which have been found in artificially dug trenches or surrounded and covered by durable materials, like stones or bones fragments, were incontestably buried with funerary intention. Many of them, moreover, were buried with funerary furnishings such as the jewels and ornaments which have been found on or around them. Doubtless these were objects which they had owned during their lifetimes. But even if they had not been presented with these ornaments on burial, at least the survivors had not, in spite of their considerable value, taken them away as they could have done. The fact that they belonged to the dead rendered them in some taboo. And then other objects found with the bodies could of have been placed there by the survivors, and constitute geniune funerary furnishings, destined for the use of the dead man in after life: utensils, works of art, food. In many cases red ochre (clay colored with haematite or iron peroxide) was sprinkled over the corpse's grave and has left traces of its colour on the skeleton and surrounding objects. Because of its color certain primitive peoples of today, in particular the Austrialian aborigines, liken red ochre to blood (even we call it haematite) and for this reason consider it a symbol of life and strength. It is reasonable to suppose that the ochre spread over the tombs and bodies of Palaeolithic man was intended, like the deposits of food to strengthen the dead one during his journey to the after-world and his sojourn in his new abode. Among numerous examples of these various funeral practices we shall call attention only to those that are particularly character-istic, and establish at which periods such practices were in force. The Magdalenian skeleton of Hoteaux in the Ain, covered with red ochre, was found in a small trench. Behind the head a large stone had been placed. Beside it were chipped flint instruments and a chieftain's staff in reindeer horn on which was engraved a stag. The skeleton of Sordes in the Landes had several slabs placed on its skull and had been covered with red ochre. Beside it was found about forty bears' and three lions' canine teeth, almost all carefuly pierced. Some twenty of them were carved with seals, fish and arrows. In view of their position they must have constitutited a necklace and a belt. The perforated shellfish which formed the adornment of 'the crushed man' of Laugerie-Basse belonged to two species which are native to the Mediterranean. Having come from such a distance they must have been especially valuable. Under the right hand of the skeleton of Solutre there were numerous flints chipped in the shape of laurel leaves and also a pierced scallop shell. Found with it were two crude statuettes of reindeer in stone. The skeleton of Klause in Bavaria was enclosed between boulders fallen from the ceiling. They had been arranged to make a place or the body. It was completely surrounded by a mass of red powder. Above and benoath the head was a great heap of fragments of mammoths' tusks. For the Aurignacian period a number of consonant facts have been established in the caverns of Grimaldi, near Menton. In the grotto 'des Enfanis' the two negroid skeletons lie in a trench about thirty inches deep. The head of the old woman was found in a tightly closed chest formed by two lateral blocks of stone, covered over by a horizontal slab. The young man was wearing a sort of crown made of four rows of pierced nassas. The same shellfish provided the two bracelets on the old woman's left arm. This tomb contained red powder in the rubble, around the head and on parts of the young man's skeleton. The two children, to whom the cave owes its name, were wearing a kind of apron made of thousands of perforated nassas. In the same cave a female skeleton was covered over with animal bones, the jawbones of a wild boar and some chips of flint. Under its head there was a white stone bearing traces of red coloring. It was literally lying in a bed of trochus shells. Not being pierced, these shells could not have been for adornment, but had been put near the body for food. At La Barma Grande the three bodies stretched side by side were placed in an obviously man-made trench and had a bed of red earth. They wore adornments composed of shells, teeth, fish vertebrae and artificial pendants in bone and ivory. Particularly remarkable is the young man's necklace, which was held in its original position by a coating of clay and, in the symmetry and rhythm of its arrangement, bears witness to a sense of artistry. These skeletons were accompanied by very beautiful flint instruments, and the woman's head reposed on the femur of an ox. The corpse of Paviland in Wales was powdered with iron oxide which stained the earth and burial objects, and in some places formed a coating on the bones. Although probably male, it has for this reason been christened 'The Red Lady'. Beside it was found the entire head of a mammoth complete with tusks. Near the thighs were found two handfuls of small shells drenched in red, and near the chest some fifty fragments of round ivory rings. At Predmosti in Moravia twenty human skeletons were gathered under a veritable lid of stones. A child's skeleton wore a necklace of fourteen pendants. Beside the skeleton of Brno there were more than six hundred fragments of fossilised shells, strung together to form conical tubes. Some were still inserted in each other and together they must have made a kind of breastplate for the body. Near it were also found large perforated stone disks, small disks decorated with incisions, three solid disks made of mammoth's or rhinoceros's ribs, some rhinoceros ribs, and finally an ivory statuette of a human being. The skeleton and some of the objects in the tomb were partially stained red. The skeleton of La Chapelle-aux-Saints belongs to the Mousterian period. It lay in a trench a little less than five feet long, about three feet wide and a foot deep. The head lay against a corner of the trench, propped by stones and covered over with broad slabs of bone. At La Ferrassie the two children at least were laid in artificial trenches. The man's skeleton was covered by rubble and protected by chips of bone. The skeleton of Moustier had its skull placed on a sort of pillow formed by a heap of flint fragments carefully adapted to the shape of the head. The nose seems to have been especially protected by two chips of flint. The bodies of both La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Moustier were provided with funerary furnishings, instruments and joints of game. The use of red ochre has not been observed in the Mousterian period, but burial rites are as apparent then as in later Magdalenian times. What, then, was their intention? Since they were performed for people whose earthly life was finished they imply a belief that the dead continue after death to lead some kind of existence. This posthumous life appears to have been conceived as similar to life on earth, with the same needs and the same means of satisfying them. This explains the ornaments left with the dead, the implements, the food (quarters of venison and piles of shellfish) and the red ochre. In thus providing for the posthumous needs of the dead, the survivors seem, however, to have acted less from disinterested affection than from self-interest. Their care seems to have been to encourage the deceased's favourable disposition towards themselves, to soften his possible hostility or to put him physically in a position where he could do no harm. Generally speaking, primitive people believe that death, like sickness, is the result of a magic operation. Deaths to which we assign natural causes are attributed by them to an evil spell, the author of which, whether unconscious or malevolent, they attempt to discover by various means. This being so, it can be understood that the dead were thought to harbour vengeance against their presumed murderers and, in consequence of the idea of collective responsibility, against all those who survived them. At the very least they would entertain sentiments of envy towards those who still enjoyed the earthly life of which they themselves had been deprived. It seems, then, that the basic attitude towards the dead was one of fear, and that burial rites were originally measures of protection against the deceased. This Palaeolithic trenches and tombs may have been intended less the shelter the dead than to imprison them. The statuette of Brno, was probably masculine and buried with a masculine corpse, could have played the role of a 'double', meant to keep the dead one in his tomb and prevent him from 'returning' to torment the living. This would account for the statuette's being made with neither leg nor right arm. Particularly remarkable is the trussed-up position in which made of these bodies were found. A typical example from the Magdalenian period is the old man of Chancelade in the Dordogne, covered with red ochre, with arms and legs folded and the vertical column bent to such a degree that the skeleton only occupies a space little more than two feet long and sixteen inches wide. In the grotto 'des Enfants', which is Aurignacian, the negroid young man's legs were completely drawn up to his thighs. The old woman's thighs were raised as far as possible so that her knees reached the level of her shoulders. The legs were sharply folded under the thighs and the feet nearly touched the pelvis. The forearms were bent upwards so that the left hand was just beneath the shoulder-blade. In the Mousterian period the woman of La Ferrassie had her legs doubled up; the bent right forearm rested along the thigh, the hand on a knee. This arm and the legs formed a letter 'N', the knee reaching a distance of only six inches from the shoulder. The legs of the skeleton of La Chapelle-aux-Saints were folded and raised so that the kneecaps were more or less on a level with the chest. This contracted condition which has been observed in so many skeletons from the Mousterian until the Magdalenian period could of course, only have been imposed on the body by those who buried it. In addition, it means that the body must have been tied up at the moment of death: for rigor mortis would later have prevented its being forced into such a position. It seems, then, that among Palaeolithic as among other primitive peoples who share similar burial customs, the doubled-up posture of the body was only a result of the trussing-up and binding - this beirig the essential operation, intended to prevent the dead from coming back to torment the living. This also explains the diversity of positions in which Palaeolithic bodies are found: provided that they were securely bound and could not leave their graves, the actual position of the body was of secondary importance and could be left to individual initiative. Although fear of the dead seems to have been the dominant sentiment it does not follow that in some cases at least there was not also a belief that the dead could be helpful and beneficent especially when funeral rites devised to assure their maximum well-being in the after-life had been performed. This seems to account for certain practices which differed from burial in the strict sense in that they tended not to set the dead apart from the living but on the contrary, to preserve their remains and keep them, as it were to hand. Such, notably, was the practice of stripping the flesh from the body before burial. This was done by various means, especially by natural putrefaction in a provisional grave. The object was to conserve the skeleton or its bones, which were sometimes worn by the survivors as amulets. The practice seems to have existed from Palaeolithic times. A Lower Magdalenian example is found in the grotto of Le Placard in the Charente. An entire skull of a woman complete with lower jawbone, was placed on a rock and surrounded by a hundred and seventy shells of different sorts, some pierced, some not. Skulls in the same cave, belonging to Lower Magdalenian and Upper Solutrean periods, show clear traces of deliberate flesh-stripping and have undoubtedly been cut and altered. In the Au-rignacian cave of Le Cavillon at Grimaldi three such bones were found: the broken radius of a child and two bones from a man's foot, coloured a vivid red. Scattered nearby was a set of pierced and unpierced shells. A tomb at Predmosti contained only a few bone-remains which had been scraped; the head was missing but must once have been there, for two teeth still remained. A Mous-terian skeleton, found in a trench at La Ferrassie, had its skull deprived of face and jawbone, placed nearly four feet away from the body. At Le Pech de I'Aze the skull of a five or six years old child was surrounded by deliberately broken animal bones, by teeth and by a quantity of implements. Finally, we must take into account many finds of isolated human bones from all periods, generally skulls or jawbones. Sinanthropus The deposits of Fu-Ku-Tien near Peking permit us to go back to the earliest Pleistocene times. They have yielded - together with abundant vestiges of fire, and work in bone and stone - the remains of a dozen human beings, halfway between Pithecanthropus man of Java and Neanderthal man of Mousterian Europe. For the moment these remains are confined to skull and lower jaw, without traces of cervical vertebrae, while the animals on which these men fed are represented by bones from all parts of the body. There can thus be no question of cannibalism or of the heads being cut from corpses immediately after death. To all appearances these skulls must have been preserved after the bodies had been stripped of flesh. Hence from the remotest times when, on the evidence of the skull which is all we have of his body, man was still closely related to the ape, it would seem that there are proofs of his industry and that, at least in the form of a cult of the dead, he revealed traces of religion. The Plates in this chapter (1) Part of the Relief Frieze of Le Roc, Charente (according to Dr. Henri Martin) Effigies of female animals connected with fertility magic (frontpiece back) (2) Engraved shaft from the Mege Shelter at Tejat, Dorfogne (according to H. Breuil). Men diguised as chamois. Hunting magic (Page 2) (3) Egyptian terracotta figurine. Fashioned from Nile mud, these female figures were probably fertility Goddesses or served as simple representations in magic rites. Prehistoric period (Page 2) (4) Wall Engraving in the Trois-Freres (according to H. Begouen and H. Breuil) Mythic scene or representation of some form of hunting magic (Page 3) (5) Negative handprint in red ochre A very early example of man expressing man, and leading to more complicated designs and to sympathic magic Grotto de Gargas (Hautes-Pyrenees) (Page 3) (6) Designs resembling symbolic suns deom their frequency in the later engraving period would appear to point to the existence of sun worship in this area. Cave in the Matopo Hills, Rhodesia (Page 4) (7) Male bison about to mount a female Representations of animals coupling are believed to been made as part of fertility rites. Clay figures of the Magladenian period Le Tuc d'Audoubert (Ariege) (Page 4) (8) Wall Engraving from the Trois-Freres (according to H. Begouen and H. Breuil) Bear stoned and pierced with arrows, vomitting blood Sympathic magic (Page 4) (9) Funeral scene The large reclining figure in the upper half is masked and bandaged body, probably of a chief or somebody of rank, wearing an antelope mask and ready for burial. The figure below with raised knees is possibly a wife mourning him, but she could possibly be ready for burial with him-- in effect to follow him into the next world. The curved lines in the lower part may represent a river, a frequent symbol among primative people for the barrier to be crossed before reaching the next world. Numerous other figures are shown and offerings of food. Rock painting believed to be about 5,000 years old at "Diana's Vow" Farm near Rusape, Rhodesia (Page 5) (10) Thutmoses II pours a libation to the God Amon-Ra The Pharoah stands before the seated God pouring a double libation with his right hand and holding burning incense in his left. The God is portrayed seated in a throne wearing his headdress of a crown surmounted by two tall plumes and holding a sceptre and the ankh or symbol of life. Originally a God of Thebes, Amon was raised by the conquests of Thutmoses III to the position of Supreme God of the known world. Tomb of Thutmoses III from Deir el-Behri Eighteen dynasty, 1580-1350 BC (Page 6) (11) Carved stone stele discovered near Avigone The face probably represents a deity and the stele itself would have been erected at a cult center. Neolithic period (Page 7) (12) Rock drawing of a woman giving birth, almost certainly an example of sympathic magic. The signs near the drawing are believed to be an early form of pictograph Sha'ib Samma in the Yemen (Page 7) (13) Spear thrower in carved bone The spear shaft fitted into the hole to provide additional leverage The figure of the horse suggests that wild horses were hunted for food Paleolithic period (Page 8) (14) Engraved bone from Isturitz (according to R. de Saint-Perier) On one side bison with arrows (hunting magic); on the other side, man following woman with an arrow in her thigh (possibly love charm) (Page 8) (15) Stone Age men armed with bows and arrows preparing for battle or the hunt. In the world of primitive magic success in either was sought by the formal representations such as these. From a cave painting at Teruel (Page 9) (16) Pottery figure discovered in Lake Maracaibo, Venezueka Of unknown date, it probably represents a primitive Mother Goddess The sun sign on the base would seem to anticipate the later sun cultures. (Page 9) 17 Two female figures with goats, probably engaged in some kind of ritual. Rock painting from Tanzoumaitak, Tassili N'Ajier (Page 9) 18 Ivory statuette from the Cave of Les Rideaux at Lepugne, Hte. Garonne (according to R. de Saint-Perier) Connected to fertility magic (Page 9) Egyptian Mythology (1) Isis, the sorrowing wife and eternal mother, Protectoress of the dead, the Goddess stands mourning with upraised arms at the foot of a sarcophagus. She bears a throne upon Her head, the ideogram of Her Name. Below is the djed (symbol of stability), which also represents Her husband, Osirsis Stone relief 2 Horus, in the form of a falcon, with a human arm, delivers six thousand captives to King Narmer, who is brandishing his mace over the defeated chief. First dynasty, (c) 3200 Cairo Introduction No one who strolls through the Egyptian galleries of a museum can fail to be struck by the multitude of divinities, who attract attention on all sides. Colossal statutes in sandstone, grantite, and basalt, minute statues in glazed composition, bronze even gold, portray gods and goddess frozen in hierarchical attitudes, seated or standing. Sometimes these male or female figures have heads with human features. More often they are surmounted by the muzzle of an animal or the beak of a bird. The same divinities are receiving adoration and offerings, or performing ritual gestures for the benefit of their worshippers, can be seen again on the bas-reliefs of massive sarcophagi or sculptured on funerary stelaw and stone blocks stripped from temple walls. They recur on mummy cases and in the pictures, which illumated the papyri of the Book of the Dead. In view of such amultipicity of divine images it may seem strange to suggest that the religion of Ancient Egypt is very imperfectly known to us. Such however is the case; though we know the names of all these Gods and Goddesses and the temples which They were worshipped, we understand little of their nature and seldom know even the legends concerning them. It is true that the innumerable religious texts which have survived often allude to mythological occurences. The full stories themselves, however, are almost never set down; for they were known to every Egyptian and handed down from generation-to-generation by word of mouth alone. Only the myths of Osiris--one of the greatest Gods in the Egyptian pantheon---has been transmitted in detail to us by Plutarch. Plutarch, though Greek and writing of times already long past, was evidently well-informed; for in the ancient texts we find frequent references ti the events he relates, notably in those texts, which, the old kings of the sixth dynasty had engraved inside their pyramids--25 centuries before him. It seems that the earliest representations of Eyptian deities appeared about the middle of the fourth millennium, long before the earliest hieroglyphs. In those days, the inhabitants of the Nile valley lived in tribes. Each tribe had its own God, which was incarnated in the form either of an animal, of a bird or of a simple fetish. There is a fragment of a palette for grinding malachite in the Louvre on which we see men of one of those early tribes setting forth to hunt. They are bearded, unlike the clean-shaven men of later historical epochs, and they wear only a belted loincloth. At the back of the belt is attached the bushy tail of an animal. At their head marches their chief. In one hand he brandishes a club. In the other he grasps the staff of a standard or totem pole, which bears a kind of perch for a falcon. On other objects of the same class the hawk is replaced by an ibis, a jackal, a scorpion, or perhaps by a thunderbolt, a bucranium, or two crossed arrows on a shield. These are the Gods of the tribe who led their followers into battle and, when necessary, fought for them. Often, indeed, one of the divine animal's paws is a human hand which grasps a weapon to slaughter the enemy or an implement to attack his fortress. These animal deities, however, gradually gave way to Gods in human form, and at the end of his anthropomorphic evolution nothing of the primitive animal is left except the head surmounting the body of a man or woman. Sometimes the head, too, has become human and all that remains are vestigial ears or horns. From the second dynasty on, the divine types seem to have become definitely fixed and to remain unchanged until the end of paganism. Like the hunters of the ancient tribes seen on the palette in the Louvre, the Gods of the historical epoch are shown "dressed in short loin-cloths ornamented by animals' tails. The Goddesses, like great ladies, wear a narrow robe, held at the shoulders by shoulder straps and falling nearly to their ankles. Gods and Goddesses alike often retain the head of the animal from which they were derived. They wear heavy wigs, thanks to which the transition between the snout of an animal or the beak of a bird and their human bodies takes place so smoothly that our aesthetic sense is scarcely violated and these hybrid beings seem almost real. At other times the head is human, and in this case the shaven chin of the God is adorned by an artificial plaited beard, which recalls the bearded faces of the first Egyptians. These divinities are distinguished and immediately identified by their different head-dresses and by various attributes inherited from the original fetish or from the primitive animal which surmounts their heads. Sometimes too their names are written in hieroglyphic signs. Like the ancient tribal chieftains, the Gods carry sceptres with one end forked and the other decorated by, say, the head of a greyhound. Goddesses bear in their hand a simple stalk of papyrus. By the time that the animals and fetishes of the prehistoric epoch had become divinities in human form the nomad warriors whom they once led into battle had long since settled down to till the soil. Their Gods were installed in the towns they built, and were thus transformed from tribal into local deities. Every town, village and district had its God who bore the title: 'Lord of the City.' There he resided and yielded priority of rank to no one. Conceived in the image of a man, but of a man infinitely strong and powerful, he possessed a vital fluid - the 'sa' - which he could renew at will by having another God, better provided, lay hands on him. But he could not defend himself for ever against old age, and sometimes he even died. He delighted in revealing himself to men, and he would become incarnate in the temple statue, in a fetish, or in a chosen animal which the initiated could recognise by certain signs. At first the God lived alone, jealous of his authority. But the Egyptian could not conceive of life without a family and soon he married off his God or Goddess and gave him or her a son, thus forming a divine triad or trinity in which the father, moreover, was not always the chief, contenting himself on occasion with the role of prince consort, while the principal deity of the locality remained the Goddess. This occurred at Dendera, where the sovereign was the Goddess Hathor. The God resided in the temple, which was his palace, with his family and sometimes with other Gods whom he permitted to surround him. Only Pharaoh, the king, whom he called his 'son' had the right to appear in his presence. But as the king naturally could not officiate everywhere at once he delegated high priests to each sanctuary to perform in his place the ceremonies of the cult, while numerous priests and priestesses composed the domestic staff of the God and administered his sometimes immense domains. On certain dates the 'Lord of the City' brought joy to his people by deigning to show himself to them in all his glory. Abandoning the deep shadows of the naos (the inner sanctuary of the temple) where only Pharaoh's representative had the privilege of worshipping him daily, he would emerge majestically and be borne through the streets in his golden barque on the shoulders of his priests. In addition to such local Gods, some of whom imposed their authority over several provinces at a time and even throughout the entire land, the Egyptians worshipped, though generally without cult, the great divinities of nature: the Sky, the Earth, the Sun the Moon and the mighty river which, in the words of Herodotus, created Egypt - the Nile. In the Egyptian language the word 'sky' is feminine. Thus the Egyptians made the sky a Goddess, Nut or Hathor, whom they represented either as a cow standing with her four feet planted on earth, or as a woman whose long, curved body touches the earth only with the tips of her toes and fingers. It was the starry belly of the Goddess which men saw shining in the night above them Sometimes also they imagined the sky as the head of a divine falcon whose eyes, which he opened and closed alternately, were the sun and the moon. The earth, on the contrary, is masculine. Thus it was a man lying prone, from whose back sprouted all the world's vegetation. They called him Geb, the earth-God. The sun had many names and gave rise to extremely vast interpretations. In his aspect of solar disk the sun was called Aten. Depending upon whether he rose, or climbed to the zenith, on he was given the names Khepri, Ra or Atum. He was also call Horus and it was under this name, joined with that of Ra, that later reigned over all Egypt as Ra-Harakhte. It was claimed that he was reborn every morning of the celestial cow like a suckling calf, or like a little child of the sky-Goddess. He was also said , be a falcon with speckled wings flying through space, or the right eye only of the great divine bird. Another conception of him was that of an egg laid daily by the celestial goose, or more frequently a gigantic scarab rolling before him the incandescent globe of the sun as, on earth, the sacred scarab rolls the ball of dung in which it has deposited its eggs. The moon, too, was called by different names: Aah, Thoth, Khons. Sometimes he was the son of Nut, the sky-Goddess. Sometimes he was a dog-headed ape, or an ibis; at others, the left eye of the great celestial hawk whose right eye was the sun. Not content with explaining the phenomena of the external world, the priests of the principal sanctuaries busied themselves in constructing cosmological systems to demonstrate how the Gods had successively appeared and how all that exists had been created. We have a fair knowledge of four of these systems which were taught in the four great religious centres of Hermopolis, Heliopolis, Memphis and Busiris. In each of these sanctuaries the priests attributed the work of creation to the great local God. In his own temple Thoth, Ra, Ptah and Osiris was each proclaimed to have created the world, but each in his own way. Sometimes it was taught that the Gods had issued from the mouth of Demiurge and that all had been created by his voice. Sometimes it was alleged that they were bora when the creator spat or performed an even cruder act. Again it was said that men had been engendered by his sweat or by a flood of tears gushing from his eyes. Another explanation was that men, together with the entire animal world, had emerged from the sun-dried mud of the Nile. It was also taught that the Demiurge had modelled them from the earth and fashioned them on a potter's wheel. Like all people in antiquity the Egyptians explained everything by the intervention of a God, and for them there was nothing which was not capable of containing supernatural power. Consequently the number of Gods worshipped in the Nile valley was considerable, and a list found in the tomb of Thuthmosis III enumerates no fewer than seven hundred and forty. Of most of them we know only the names and it would serve no useful purpose to mention them here. We shall limit ourselves in this study to those deities who enjoyed a genuine cult or who occupied a real place in Egyptian mythology, beginning with the study of the Gods and Goddesses associated with the Ennead (or company of Gods) of Heliopolis that is to say, with the cosmological system taught by the priests of Heliopolis. We shall then review the great protective divinities of the Pharaohs and the kingdom, enumerating them in chronological order when in the course of the royal dynasties they appeared particularly important. Afterwards we shall come to river Gods and desert Gods included in the above categories; then to the various divinities who concerned themselves with men's birth or death; and finally who deified humans among whom will be found the living Pharoah who was himself a veritable God. We shall conclude with a study of the sacred animals which towards the end of paganism, were without doubt the most popular divinities in Egypt. We append a list of quadrupeds, birds and even insects from whom the Gods and Goddesses borrowed either the features or the attributes. THE ENNEAD OF HELIOPOLIS AND THE FAMILY OF OSIRIS Nun (or Nu) is Chaos, The primordial ocean in which before the creation lay the germs of all things and all beings. The texts call him the 'father of the Gods,' but he remains a purely intellectual concept and had neither temples nor worshippers. He is sometimes found represented as a personage plunged up to his waist in water, holding up his arms to support the Gods who have issued from him. Atom (or Turn), whose name seems to come from a root which signified 'not to be' and 'to be complete,' was originally a local God of Heliopolis where his sacred animal was the bull Merwer (Greek Mneuis). From very early times his priests identified him with Ra, the great sun God. They taught that inside Nun, before the creation, there had lived a 'spirit, still formless, who bore within him the sum of all existence.' He was called Atum, and he manifested himself one day under the name of Atum-Ra and drew from himself Gods, men and all living things. Later, Atum was personified as the setting sun and the sun before its rising. His cult spread rather widely through Egypt, conjointly with that of Ra. Atum was ordinarily considered to be the ancestor of the human race. He is always represented with a man's head, wearing the double crown of the Pharaohs - the 'pschent.' Originally unmarried, Atum was supposed to have fathered the first divine couple without the aid of a wife. Only later was he given a spouse, indeed two - since at Memphis he was united sometimes with Iusaas and sometimes with Nebhet Hotep, who bore him the twin Gods Shu and Tefnut. Ra (or Re or Phra) Which probably signifies 'creator,' is the name of the sun, sovereign lord of the sky. He had his principal sanctuary at Heliopolis. The priests of this city affirmed that it was here Ra first manifested himself in the stone object in the form of an obelisk called benben, piously preserved in the temple named for this reason Het Benben - the 'palace of the obelisk.' Formerly, according to the priests of Heliopolis, the Sun God reposed, under the name of Atum, in the bosom of Nun, the primordial ocean. There, in order that his lustre should run no risk of being extinguished, he took care to keep his eyes shut. He enclosed himself in the bud of a lotus until the day when, weary of his own impersonality, he rose by an effort of will from the abyss and appeared in glittering splendour under the name of Ra. He then bore Shu and Tefnut who, in their turn, gave birth to Geb and Nut, from whom issued Osiris and Isis, Set and Nephthys. These are the eight great Gods who with their chief Ra - or more exactly Ra Atum, since Ra and Atum were identified with each other - form the divine company or Ennead of Heliopolis. Ra drew from himself and without recourse to woman the first divine couple. It is not until much later that he was given as his spouse Rat - which is only his own name feminised - or Iusaas, Eus-os, Uert-Hekeu, 'the great of magic.' As for men and all other living creatures, it was said that they came from Ra's tears - perhaps a play on words as 'tears' and 'men' sound the same in Egyptian. At the same time Ra had created a 'first' universe, different from the present world, which he governed from the 'Prince's Palace' in Heliopolis where he normally resided. The Books of the Pyramids minutely describe for us his royal existence and how, after his morning bath and breakfast, he would get into his boat and, in the company of his scribe, Weneg, inspect the twelve provinces of his kingdom, spending an hour in each. As long as Ra remained young and vigorous he reigned peacefully over Gods and men; but the years brought with them their ravages and the texts depict him as an old man with trembling mouth from which saliva ceaselessly dribbles. We shall see later how Isis took advantage of the God's senility, made him reveal his secret name and thus acquired sovereign power. Even men perceived Ra's decrepitude and plotted against him. These projects finally reached Ra's ears. Justly enraged, he summoned his council and, having consulted the Gods one by one on the measures which should be taken, he decided to hurl his divine Eye against his rebellious subjects. Farther on we shall tell how the divine Eye (taking the form of the Goddess Hathor) rushed upon the guilty and massacred them without pity until Ra, appeased, managed to put an end to the bloodshed; for his goodness would not permit him to allow the entire human race to be exterminated. The ingratitude of men had, however, inspired in him a distaste for the world and a desire to withdraw himself beyond reach. So on the orders of Nun, the Goddess Nut changed herself into a cow and took Ra on her back. She raised him high into the vault of heaven and at the same time, as we shall later relate, the present world was created. From the moment that the sun God left earth for heaven his life was immutably regulated. During the twelve daylight hours he rode in his boat from east to west across his kingdom. He took great care to avoid the attack of his eternal enemy Apep, the great serpent who lived in the depths of the celestial Nile and sometimes - for instance during total eclipses - succeeded in swallowing the solar barque. But Apep was always at last vanquished by Ra's defenders and cast back into the abyss. During the twelve hours of darkness the perils which Ra faced were even greater. But again they were overcome and at night he passed from cavern to cavern, receiving the acclamations of the inhabitants of the underworld who waited with impatience for the light he bore and after'his departure fell back into the agony of darkness. Ra, it was also taught, was born each morning in the guise of a child who grew until midday and afterwards fell into decline, to die that night an old man. We see him represented in many fashions: as a royal child resting on the lotus from which he sprang at his birth; as a man, -seated or walking, whose head is surmounted by the solar disk around which is wreathed the Uraeus, the terrible sacred asp who spits flame and destroys the God's enemies; as a man with a ram's head, Efu Ra, in whom the dead sun is embodied during his nocturnal transit. Often also we find a personage with the head of a falcon, surmounted by a disk with the Uraeus. This is Ra-Harakhte, the great solar God of Heliopolis, sovereign lord of Egypt. The forms and names of Ra are innumerable and the Litanies of the Sun, engraved at the entrance of the royal tombs, list no fewer than seventy-five. Universally recognised as the creator and ruler of the world, Ra, with whom all the other Gods were finally identified, became from the time of the Old Kingdom the divinity particularly revered by the Pharaohs, who called themselves 'sons of Ra.' One story tells us how the sun God came to Reddedet, the high priest's wife, in the guise of her husband and how from this union were born the three first kings of the fifth dynasty. Each time that a Pharaoh was conceived Ra was said to return to earth to espouse the queen. Of the celebrated sanctuary of Heliopolis, where the God was worshipped in the form of a gigantic obelisk - a petrified sun's ray - and where he used to take the form of the bull Merwer, or, at times, the bird Bennu, there remain to-day only shapeless ruins and an obelisk, the oldest in Egypt, erected during the twelfth dynasty by the king, Senusert I. Khepri (or Khepera) Signifies at the same time 'scarab' and 'he who becomes.' For the Heliopolitans he represented the rising sun, which, like the scarab, emerges from its own substance and is reborn of itself. Khepri was the God of the transformations which life, for ever renewing itself, manifests. He is represented as a scarab-faced man or as a man whose head is surmounted by this insect. Sometimes he appears simply as a scarab. Shu Who with Tefnut his twin sister comprised the first couple of the Ennead, was created by Ra without recourse to woman. His name derives from a verb which means 'to raise' and can be translated as 'he who holds up.' He is the Atlas of Egyptian mythology and supports the sky. It was told of him how, on the orders of Ra, he slipped between the two children, Geb the Earth God, and Nut, Goddess of the sky, who had until then been closely united. He threw them violently apart and elevated Nut high into the air, where he maintained her with his upraised arms. Shu is also the God of air: emptiness deified. But like the other great divinities of nature he enjoyed no especial cult. He is always represented in human form. On his head he normally wears, as a distinctive sign, an ostrich feather which is an ideogram of his name. Shu succeeded Ra as king on earth. But like his father he experienced the vicissitudes of power; for the children of Apep plotted against him and attacked him in his palace of At Nub. He vanquished them, but disease riddled him so that even his faithful followers revolted. Weary of reigning, Shu abdicated in favour of his son Geb and took refuge in the skies after a terrifying tempest which lasted nine days. Tefnut Seems to have been a theological conception rather than a real person. At Heliopolis she was said to be Shu's twin sister and wife, but she appears to have been paired in earlier times with a certain God Tefen of whom we know nothing but the name. Goddess of the dew and the rain, it seems, she also had a solar character. She was worshipped in the form of a lioness or of a woman with the head of a lioness, and the Greeks sometimes identified her with Artemis. She is depicted in the texts as a pale copy of Shu, whom she helps to support the sky and with whom each morning she receives the new-born sun as it breaks free from the eastern mountains. Anhur (The Greek rendering is Onouris) seems to signify 'he who leads what has gone away' but has also been translated as 'sky- bearer.' God of Sebennytus and This, it is believed that he symbolized the creative power of the sun. He was very soon identified with Shu and invoked under the name Anhur-Shu. He is assumed to be a warlike personification of Ra, and was identified by the Greeks as Ares, the God of battle. He is represented with the traits of a warrior wearing a headdress adorned with four tall straight plumes. He is covered by a long embroidered robe and often brandishes a lance. Sometimes he holds the cord by which he leads the sun. Legend recounts to an Eye of Ra which had fled from Egypt was brought back from Nubia by Anhur, and how this divine Eye became enraged upon seeing that another Eye had taken its place. Ra then set it on the forehead where it became the Uraeus which protected the God against his enemies. Anhur was very popular under the New Empire and was called 'the Saviour' and 'the Good Warrior.' He was fervently invoked against enemies and against noxious animals, whom he hunted without respite from his chariot. His popularity was of long duration; Herodotus speaks of the great festivals he saw celebrated at Papremis and of the innumerable cudgel blows which priests and the faithful enthusiastically exchanged in honor of their God. As a wife Anhur was given Mehit, who seems to be a mere double of Tefnut, the sister-wife of Shu. She was worshipped at This, and is pictured as a lion-headed Goddess. Geb (or Seb, Keb) Constituted with Nut the second pair in the Ennead. Plutarch identifies him with Cronus. In reality he was the earth-God, the physical foundation of the world; but in classic times he scarcely had anything resembling a cult. We have already seen how Geb had been separated by Shu from Nut, his sister-spouse. Since that time he had remained inconsolable and his lamentations could be heard night and day. Geb is often represented lying under the feet of Shu, again whom he had vainly struggled to defend his wife. Raised on one elbow, with one knee bent, he thus symbolizes the mountains and the undulations of the earth's crust. His body is sometimes covered with verdure. Geb is nearly always depicted as a man without special atributes, but on occasion his head is surmounted by a goose, which is an ideogram of his name. Certain legends, moreover, describe him as a, gander - the 'Great Cackler' - whose female has laid the Egg of the Sun. Others make him a vigorous bull who has fertilized the celestial cow. Most frequently, however, Geb was reputed to be the father and Nut the mother - of the Osirian Gods, and for this reason was known as the 'father of the Gods.' He was the third divine Pharaoh and succeeded Shu to the thronr His reign also was disturbed. One text tells us how Geb caused the golden box in which Ra's Uraeus was kept to be opened in his presence. Ra had deposited the box, together with his cane and lock of his hair, in a fortress on the eastern frontier of his empire as a potent and dangerous talisman. When opened, the breath of the divine asp within killed all of Geb's companions then and there, and gravely burned Geb himself. Only the lock of Ra's hair, applied to the wound, could heal Geb. So great, indeed, was the virtue of this divine lock of hair that years later when it was plunged for purification into the lake of At Nub it immediately turned into a crocodile. When he was restored to health Geb administered his kingdom wisely and drew up a careful report on the condition of every province and town in Egypt. Then he handed over his sovereignty to his eldest son, Osiris, and ascended to the heavens where at times he took the place of Thoth as Ra's herald and arbiter of the Gods. Nut Whom the Greeks sometimes identified with Rhea, was Goddess of the sky, but it is debatable if in historical times she was the object of a genuine cult. She was Geb's twin sister and, it was said, married him secretly and against the will of Ra. Angered, Ra had the couple brutally separated by Shu and afterwards decreed that Nut could not bear a child in any given month of any year. Thoth, Plutard tells us, happily had pity on her. Playing draughts with the Moon he won in the course of several games a seventy-second part of the Moon's light with which he composed five new days. As these few intercalated days did not belong to the official Egyptian calender of three hundred and sixty days, Nut was thus able to give birth successively to five children: Osiris, Haroeris (Horus), Set, Isis and Nephthys. The sky-Goddess is often represented as a woman with elongated body, touching the earth with toes and fingertips, while her star spangled belly is held aloft by Shu and forms the arch of the heaven. She also sometimes appears as a cow; for this is the form she assumed when, on the orders of Nun, she bore Ra on her back to the sky after Ra, as already related, decided to abandon his rebellious subjects. The dutiful cow rose obediently to her feet, rose higher and higher until she became dizzy and it was necessary to appoint a God to each of her four legs - which became the four pillars of the sky - in order to steady them. Shu, meanwhile, supported her belly, which became the firmament and to which Ra attached the stars and the constellations to light our earth. Though she was often qualified by the title 'Daughter of Ra,' Nut was also the mother of the sun, which, as we have already had occasion to see, was reborn in various fashions each morning from her womb. When she is pictured as a woman Nut often wears a rounded vase on her head, this being an ideogram of her name. She is protector of the dead and we frequently see her holding the deceased close in her arms. On the inner lid of sarcophagi her starry body stretches above the mummy, watching maternally over him. Osiris, Which is the Greek rendering of the Egyptian Ousir, was identified by the Greeks with several of their own Gods, but principally with Dionysus and Hades. At first Osiris was a nature God and embodied the spirit of vegetation which dies with the harvest to be reborn when the grain sprouts. Afterwards he was worshipped throughout Egypt as God of the dead, and in this capacity reached first rank in the Egyptian pantheon. Hieroglyphic texts contain numerous allusions to the life and deeds of Osiris during his sojourn on earth; but it is above all that to Plutarch that we know his legend so well. The first son of Geb and Nut, he was born in Thebes in Upper Egypt. At his birth a loud, mysterious voice proclaimed the coming of the 'Universal Lord,' which gave rise to shouts of gladness, soon followed by tears and lamentations when it was learned what misfortunes awaited him. Ra rejoiced at the news of his birth in spite of the curse he had pronounced against Nut; and, having Osiris brought into his presence, he recognized his great-grandson as heir to his throne. Osiris was handsome of countenance, dark-skinned and tall than all other men. When Geb, his father, retired to the heaven Osiris succeeded him as king of Egypt and took Isis, his sister as queen. The first care of the new sovereign was to abolish cannibalism and to teach his still half-savage subjects the art of fashioning agricultural implements. He taught them how to produce grain and grapes for man's nourishment in the form of bread, wine and beer. The cult of the Gods did not yet exist. Osiris instituted it. He built the first temples and sculptured the first divine images. He laid down the rules governing religious practice and even invented the two kinds of flute which should accompany ceremonial song. After this he built towns and gave his people just laws, thus meriting the name Onnophris - 'the Good One' - by which, as the fourth divine Pharaoh, he was known. Not satisfied with having civilised Egypt, he wished to spread the benefits of his rule throughout the whole world. He left his regency to Isis and set forth on the conquest of Asia, accompanied by Thoth, his grand vizier, and his lieutenants Anubis and Upuai. Osiris was the enemy of all violence and it was by gentleness alone that he subjected country after country, winning and disarming their inhabitants by songs and the playing of various musical instruments. He returned to Egypt only after he had travelled the whole earth and spread civilization everywhere. On his return Osiris found his kingdom in perfect order; for Isis had governed wisely in his absence. But it was not long before he became the victim of a plot organised by his brother Set, who was jealous of his power. Farther on we shall relate in detail (see Isis and Set) how on the 17th Athyr, in the twenty-eighth year of the reign, Osiris 'the Good One' fell under the blows of the conspirators and how his faithful wife found his body and bore it back to Egypt. For the moment it suffices to say that Isis, thanks to her powers of sorcery and the aid of Thoth, Anubis, and Horus, succeeded in restoring her husband's dead body to life. Osiris soon answered Set's accusations and vindicated himself before the tribunal of Gods, presided over by Geb. Resurrected and from thenceforward secure from the threat of death, Osiris could have regained his throne and continued to reign over the living. But he preferred to depart from this earth and retire to the 'Elysian Fields' where he warmly welcomed the souls of the just and reigned over the dead. Such is the legend of Osiris. What we can guess of his actual origin suggests that he was a fetish of a conquering clan which first installed its God at Busiris in Lower Egypt. There he took the place of the preceding Lord of the City, Andjeti, whose form he borrowed. Perhaps he borrowed his name also, since later in Abydos in Upper Egypt he became identified with Khenti Amenti, the wolf-God, and became the great God of the dead, sometimes known as Osiris Khenti Amenti, 'Lord of the Westerners' - that is, the dead, who dwell in the west where the sun sets. Here we can only indicate briefly the many cosmic interpretations which the myth of Osiris has been given. As a vegetation spirit that dies and is ceaselessly reborn, Osiris represents the corn, the vine and trees. He is also the Nile which rises and falls each year; the light of the sun which vanishes in the shadows every evening to reappear more brilliantly at dawn. The struggle between the two brothers is the war between the desert and the fertile earth, between the drying wind and vegetation, aridity and fecundity, darkness and light. It was as God of the dead that Osiris enjoyed his greatest popularity; for he gave his devotees the hope of an eternally happy life in another world ruled over by a just and good king. He was worshipped throughout Egypt in company with Isis, his wife, and with Horus, his posthumous son, who formed with him a trinity. But he was particularly venerated at Abydos where priests showed his tomb to the innumerable pilgrims who visited it. Happy were the favoured ones who were buried in the shadows of the august sanctuary or who at least had a stela erected nearby in their name to assure the benevolence of Osiris in afterlife. Osiris is represented sometimes standing, sometimes seated on his throne, as a man tightly swathed in white mummy wrappings. His greenish face is surmounted by the high white mitre flanked by two ostrich feathers which is called 'AteP, the crown of Upper Egypt. Around his neck he wears a kind of cravat. His two hands, freed from the winding sheet, are folded across his breast and hold the whip and the sceptre in the form of a crook, emblems of supreme power. The names and appellations of Osiris were countless."There are about a hundred in the litanies of the Book of the Dead. Like many other Gods he delighted in incarnations. He appeared not only in the form of various animals-the bull Onuphis, the sacred ram of Mendes, the bird Bennu - but also in the 'Djed,' a simple fetish which seems to have been his primitive form in the days when he led his prehistoric followers into battle. The 'Djed' was originally the trunk of a fir or some other conifer; but in classical times it was a kind of pillar with four capitals, which certain texts alleged to be the God's vertebral column, preserved in the famous sanctuary of Busiris. Space is lacking to describe the festivals which marked critical dates in the Osiris legend. They were publicly celebrated, and in the course of the Mysteries then presented priests and priestesses would mime the passion and resurrection of the God. Isis (A Greek rendering of Aset, Eset) was identified by the Greeks with Demeter, Hera, Selene and even - because of a late confusion between Isis and Hathor with Aphrodite. In later days the popularity of Isis became such that she finally absorbed the qualities of all the other Goddesses; but originally.she seems to have been a modest divinity of the Delta, the protective deity of Perehbet, north of Busiris, where she always retained a renowned temple. Very soon she was given as wife to Osiris, the God of the neighboring town. She bore him a son. Horus, who formed the third member of the trinity. Her popularity grew rapidly with that of her husband and son. This is her legend as Plutarch tells it to us: The first daughter of Geb and Nut was born in the swamps of the Delta on the fourth intercalary day. Osiris, her eldest brother chose her as his consort and she mounted to the throne with him. She helped him in his great work of civilising Egypt by teaching women to grind corn, spin flax and weave cloth. She also taught men the art of curing disease and, by instituting marriage, accustomed them to domestic life. When her husband departed on his pacific conquest of the world she remained in Egypt as regent. She governed wisely while awaiting his return. She was overwhelmed with grief at the news that Osiris had been assassinated by their brother, the violent Set. She cut off her tore her robes and at once set forth in search of the coffer in which the good Osiris had been enclosed and which the conspiratorstors had cast into the Nile. This coffer had been carried out to sea by the waters of the Nile and borne across the waves to the Phoenician coast where it came to rest at the base of a tamarisk tree. The tree grew with such astonishing rapidity that the chest was entirely enclosed within its trunk Now Malcandre, the king of Byblos, gave orders that the tamari should be cut down in order to serve as a prop for the root of his palace. When this was done the marvellous tree gave off so cxquisiste a scent that its reputation reached the ears of Isis. who immcdiatiely understood its significance. Without delay she went to Phoenica. There the queen. Astarte. confided to her the care of her newborn son. Isis adopted the baby and would have conferred immortality upon it had its mother not broken the charm by her scream of terror upon seeing the Goddess bathe the baby in purificatory flames. In order to reassure her, Isis revealed her true name and the reason for her presence. Then, having been presented with them of the miraculous tree, she drew forth the coffer of her husband's bathed it in tears, and bore it back in haste to Egypt where, to decieve Set. she hid it in the swamps of Buto. Set, however, regained possession of his brother's body by chance and in order to annihilalite forever cut it into fourteen pieces which he scattered far and wide. Isis, undiscouraged, searched for the precious fragments and found them all except the phallus which had been greedily dcvoured by a Nile crab, the Oxyrhynchid, forever accursed for this crime The Goddess reconstituted the body of Osiris, cunningly joined the fragments together. She then performed, for the first time in history, the rites of embalmment which restored the murdered God to eternal life. In this she was assisted by her sister Nephthys. tier nephew Anubis, Osiris' grand vizier Thoth and by Horus, the posthumous son whom she had conceived by union with her husband's corpse, miraculously re-animated by her charms. Afterwards she retired to the swamps of Buto to escape the wrath of Set and to bring up her son Horus until the day when he should be of an age to avenge his father. Thanks to her magic powers Horus was able to overcome every danger which threatened him. Isis. indeed, was a potent magician and even the Gods were not immune from her sorcery. It was told how, when she was still only a simple woman in the service of Ra, she persuaded the great God to confide to her his secret name. She had taken advantage of the fact that the sun God was now an old man with shaking head and dribbling mouth. With earth moistened with his divine spittle she fashioned a venomous snake which bit Ra cruelly. Ra was incapable of curing himself of a wound whose origin he did not understand, and had recourse to the spells of Isis. But Isis refused to conjure away the poison until Ra, overcome with pain and hiding himself from the other Gods, consented to reveal his true name, which he caused to pass directly from his own bosom into that of Isis. Isis in thc Osirian myth, represents the rich plains of Egypt, made fruitful by the annual inundation of the Nile which is Osiris, who is separated from her by Set, the arid desert. Her cult continued to grow in importance until it ultimately absorbed that of nearly all other Goddesses. It even crossed the frontiers of Egypt; seamen and merchants in the Oraeco-Roman era carried her worship as far as the banks of the Rhine - Isis, star of the sea. and patron divinity of travellers. In the Nile valley she kept her worshippers until well into Christian times. It was not until the middle of the sixth century, in the reign of Justinian, that the temple of Philae her chief sanctuary in the extreme south of the country was closed to her cult and turned into a church. Great festivals were celebrated in spring and autumn in honor of Isis. The splendors of the processions which then took place have been described to us by Apulcius. who was an initiate in the mysteries of Isis. Thanks to him we can raise a comer of the veil which conceals the secret ceremonies of initiation. Isis is normally represented as a woman who bears on her head a throne, the ideogram of her name. Occasionally, but later, her head-dress is a disk, set between cow's horns, occasionally flanked with two feathers. Finally we sometimes find her represented with a cow's head set on a human body. These homs and the cow's head merely prove that Isis was by then identified with Hathor; but Plutarch, though he says he does not believe it, gives us another explanation. Isis, he tells us, wished to intervene on behalf of Set who. though her husband's murderer, was also her own brother. She tried to cheat her son Horus of his just vengeance; but Horus turned in rage against his mother and cut off her head. Thoth then transformed it by enchantment and gave her the head of a cow. This cow is, on the other hand, the animal sacred to Isis who also possessed, as fetishes, the magic knot 'Tat,' called 'The Knot of Isis.' and the Sistrum. the emblem of Hathor. Sculpture and painting often represent her beside Osiris, whom she helps or protects - as she docs the dead with her winged arms. She may be seen mourning at the foot of sarcophagi or watching over canopic jars. She also frequently appears in the role of mother, suckling the infant Horus or joining him in his struggles with Set. Set (Seth, Sutekh), Whom the Greeks called Typhon, was the name of Osiris' evil brother who finally became the incarnation of the spirit of evil, in eternal opposition to the spirit of good. The son of Geb and Nut, he was, Plutarch tells us, prematurely born on the third intercalary day. He tore himself violently from his mother's womb. He was rough and wild, his skin was white and his hair was red - an abomination to the Egyptians, who compared it to the pelt of an ass. Set was jealous of Osiris, his elder brother, and secretly aspired to the throne. In order to seize it he availed himself of the great festivals which were celebrated at Memphis on the occasion of Osiris' victorious return to his kingdom. Having first assured himself of the presence of seventy-two accomplices he invited his brother to a banquet during the course of which he gave orders that a marvellously fashioned coffer should be brought in. This chest, he explained jokingly-, would belong to whomsoever fitted it exactly. Osiris, falling in with the pleasantry, lay down in the coffer without suspicion. The conspirators at once rushed forward, closed the lid and nailed it solidly down. They threw it into the Nile, whence it was carried to the sea and across to Byblos. We have already seen how Isis brought it back to Egypt and how Set, hunting by moonlight in the swamps of the Delta, found it again by chance, and how, when he had recognised his brother's corpse, he cut it up into fourteen pieces which he scattered far and wide. This time the usurper felt that the possession of the realm was assured, and it worried him little that his wife Nephthys had left him. Nephthys, indeed, had joined the party of Osiris as most of the other Gods had done, escaping from the cruelties of the tyrant by taking refuge in the bodies of various animals. Meanwhile Horus, son of Isis, was growing to maturity in the shelter of the Delta swamps, and we shall see how he avenged the murder of Osiris, his father, and reclaimed his heritage from Set. As we have already said, Set, in Osirian myth, figures as the eternal adversary, a personification of the arid desert, of drought and darkness in opposition to the fertile earth, life-bringing water and light. All that is creation and blessing comes from Osiris; all that is destruction and perversity arises from Set. In primitive times, however, the evil character of Set was not so accentuated. The old pyramid texts make him not the brother of Osiris, but the brother of Horus the Elder, and speak of terrible struggles between them which were terminated by the judgment of the Gods, who proclaimed Horus the victor and banished Set to the desert. It was only later, when the Osirian myth had grown and when the two Horuses had become confused, that Set was made the uncle of Horus and the eternal enemy of Osiris. Originally Set seems to have been the Lord of Upper Egypt who was overthrown by the worshippers of the falcon God. The legendary struggles between the brother Gods may thus reflect historical events. The bas-reliefs of the Old and the Middle Kingdoms show Set and Horus together leading prisoners to the king, or else together at the base of the royal throne binding the plants of Upper and Lower Egypt around the emblem which expresses the idea of union thus making the symbolic gesture of 'sam-taui,' the union of the two countries. Under the domination of the Hyksos, the new rulers identified Set with their own great warrior God Sutekh and had a temple built for him in Avaris, their capital. Under the New Empire Rameses II whose father was named Seti, the 'Setian,' did not hesitate to proclaim himself the 'Beloved of Set.' The worshippers of Osiris however, were indignant that a cult should be devoted to the murderer of the 'Good One,' and Seti caused the cursed image to be effaced from the engraved tablets on the walls of his tomb a proclaimed himself no longer the 'Setian' but the 'Osirian.' It is only towards the middle of the tenth century, under the king of the twenty-second dynasty, that the assassin of Osiris really began to undergo the punishment for his crime. His statues were broken and on the bas-reliefs his features were smashed with hammers. Anyone who wrote his name was forced to erase it. Finally he was driven from the Egyptian pantheon and made a God of the unclean. Set, the ancient Lord of Upper Egypt, ended up by becoming a kind of devil, enemy of all the Gods. Asses, antelopes and other desert animals were supposed to belong to Set, and also the hippopotamus, the boar, the crocodile and the scorpion, in whose bodies the God of evil and his partisans had sought refuge from the blows of the conquering Horus. Legend says that Set, in the guise of a black pig, had once wounded Horus in the eye. In this form each month he attacked and devoured the moon where, some said, the soul of Osiris had taken refuge. Set is represented as having the features of a fantastic beast with a thin, curved snout, straight, square-cut ears and a stiff forked tongue This creature cannot with certainty be identified and is commonly called the 'Typhonian animal.' Sometimes Set is depicted as a man with the head of this strange quadruped. Nephthys The Greek rendering of Nebthet and is called by Plutarch Aphrodite and Nike. She is pictured as a woman wearing on her head the two hieroglyphs with which her name, which signifies 'Mistress of the Palace,' was written: i.e., a basket (neb) placed on the sign for a palace (her). In origin a Goddess of the dead, Nephthys in the Osirian legend beomes the second daughter of Geb and Nut. Set, her second brother, took her for his wife, but she remained barren. She wanted a child by her eldest brother Osiris and with this object she made him drunk and drew him into her arms without his being aware of it. The friut of this adultery was Anubis. Nephthys, according to this legend, seems to represent the desert's edge, ordinarily arid but sometimes fruitful when the Nile floods are especially high. When Set committed fratricide his wife abandoned him in horror and, joining the party of Osiris' defenders, she helped her sister Isis to embalm the corpse of the murdered God, alternating with her in the funereal lamentations. A papyrus still survives for us the text of these lamentations. Just as Nephthys and Isis had protected the mummy of their brother so the 'twins,' as they are often called, also watched over the bodies of the dead who, by virtue of funeral rites, had become "Orises." On coffin-lids and the walls of sarcophagi we often see them represented, standing or kneeling, stretching forth their long, winged arms in a gesture of protection. Horus Is the Latin rendering of the Greek Horos and the Egyptian Hor. He was a solar God constantly identified with Apollo and is represented by a falcon or a falconheaded God. Under the name Hor which in Egyptian sounds like a word meaning 'sky' - the Egyptians referred to the falcon which they saw soaring high above their heads, and many thought of the sky as a divine falcon whose two eyes were the sun and the moon. The worshippers of this bird must have been numerous and powerful; for it was carried as a totem on prehistoric standards and from the earilies times was considered the pre-eminent divine being. The hieroglyph which represents the idea of 'God' was a falcon on its perch. Wherever the followers of the falcon settled, Horus was worshipped, but in the course of time and in the different sanctuaries which were dedicated to him his role and attributes varied. Thus we find in the Egyptian pantheon some twenty Horuses, among whom it is important to distinguish Horus the Elder, 'Haroeris,' and other falcons of a solar character such as Hor Behdetite, Horus of Edfu, from Horus, son of Isis, of the Osirian legend i.e., 'Harsiesis,' the infant avenger of his father. Haroeris Is the Greek rendering of Har Wer, which signifies Horus the Great, Horus the Elder. He was worshipped at Latopolis under the name Horkhenti Irti, 'Horus who rules the two eyes,' and at Pharboethos under the name Hor Merti, 'Horus of the two eyes.' He is the God of the sky itself and his two eyes are the sun and the moon, whose birth, according to Herodotus, was celebrated on the last day of Epiphi, when these two astral bodies are in conjunction. In the pyramid texts Haroeris is the son of Ra and brother of Set,and the eternal struggle between darkness and light is symbolized by the endless battles in which Set tears out the eyes of Horus while Horus emasculates his implacable enemy. We shall presently see how the tribunal of the Gods gave judgment in favour of Horus, who from the end of the second dynasty was considered to be the divine ancestor of the Pharaohs in whose records he is given the title Hor Nubti: 'Horus the Vanquisher of Set.' Behdety, 'He of Behdet' (or Hor Behdetite) is another name of the great celestial Horus. He was worshipped at Behdet, a district of ancient Edfu. The Greeks called it Apollinopolis Magna and recognised Apollo as Lord of the sanctuary. Behdety is usually represented in the form of a winged solar disk; his followers liked to sculpture his image above temple gates. He often appears in battle scenes hovering above the Pharaoh like a great falcon with outspread wings which clutches in its claws the mystic fly-whisk and the ring, symbolic of eternity. The bas-reliefs in the temple at Edfu portray him as a falcon-headed God leading into battle against Set the armies of Ra-Harakhte, the great God of whom we have already spoken (see Ra) who embodied in a single deity the union of Ra and a special form of Horus worshipped at Heliopolis. Harakhtes is the Greek rendering of Harakhte and means 'Horus of the Horizon.' He represents the sun on its daily course between the eastern and western horizon. Early confused with Ra, he successively usurped all of Ra's roles until Ra, in his turn, assumed all of Horus' epithets and became pre-eminent throughout Egypt under the name Ra-Harakhte. Harmakhis is the Greek rendering of Hor-m-akhet which means 'Horus who is on the Horizon.' The name has often been wrongly employed in the form of Ra Harmakhis for Ra-Harakhte. It is the proper name of the huge sphinx sixty feet high and more than a hundred and eighty feet long sculptured nearly five thousand years ago in the image of King Khephren in a rock near the pyramid which it guards. He is a personification of the rising sun and a symbol (for the comfort of Khephren) of resurrection. Raised on the edge of the desert, even its colossal size did not in ancient days protect it against the invading sands. A stela tells us how it appeared in a dream to the future Thuthmosis IV. Thuthmos was at the time a simple royal prince and not heir to the throne. While hunting he fell asleep in the shadow of the sphinx and dreamed that it spoke to him, ordering him to remove the covering sand and promising in return to heap favors upon him. 'Oh my son Thuhmosis,' it cried, 'it is I, thy father, Harmakhis-Khepri-Atum. The throne will be thine... so that thou shall do what my heart desires... Harsiesis Harsiesis is the Greek rendering of Hor-sa-iset, i.e. 'Horus, the son of Isis.' We have already seen how Isis was reputed to have conceived Horus without husband or lover and how the popularity of mother and son continued to increase, together with that of Osiris himself. This popularity became such that Harsiesis --originally a minor falcon-God from the neighborhood of Buto who was called Horus the Younger in order to distinguish him from the great Sky God Horus the Elder - ended up by eclipsing all the other Horuses whose roles and attributes he successively took over. The Osirian legend recounts the posthumous birth of the child which Isis obtained from Osiris by magical means, re-animating the corpse of the murdered God. It relates how she gave premature birth to Horus on the floating island of Chemmis, not far from Buto. In early youth he was frequently called 'the infant Horus' --Harpkhrad - or Harpokrates. Harpokrates Harpokrates is represented as a baby, nude or adorned only with jewelry. His head is shaved, except for the sidelock of youth that fell falls over his temple. Often he is seated on his mother's lap where she offers him her breast. He sucks his thumb like a baby, a gesture which was misinterpreted by the Greeks, who took it for a symbol of discretion, and won the young God fame as the divinity of silence For fear of the machinations of Set, Horus was brought up in selusion. He was extremely weak at birth and escaped from the numerous dangers which menaced him only by his mother's power of sorcery. He was bitten by savage beasts, stung by scorpions, burnt, attacked by pains in the entrails. The memory of these sufferings is preserved for us in the magic formulas which were employed by sorcerers to cure patients similarly afflicted. The child Horus grew, and Osiris appeared frequently to him and instructed him in the use of arms so that he should soon be able to make war on Set, reclaim his inheritance and avenge his father. This glorious action earned for Horus the epithet Harendotes, which is the Greek for Har-end-yotef, 'Horus, protector of his father.' The campaigns of the young God against the murderer of Osiris are sculptured on the walls of the temple at Edfu whose great God Behdety was, in this later epoch, identified with Horus, while Set was confused with Apep, the eternal enemy of the sun. In a long series of bas-reliefs we see him, under the name Hartomes, 'Horus the Lancer,' piercing his adversaries with his lance while his followers cut Set's followers - who vainly attempt to seek refuge in the bodies of crocodiles, hippopotami, antelopes and so on - into pieces. The war dragged on, and in order to terminate it a tribunal of the Gods summoned the two adversaries before it. Set pleaded that his nephew was a bastard, only the alleged son of Osiris; but Horus victoriously established the legitimacy of his birth. The Gods, after condemning the usurper, restored Horus' heritage and declared him ruler of the two Egypts, by which he then earned the two further titles: Harsomtus or Heru Sam Tarn ('Horus who unites the two countries') and Har-pa-neb-taui ('Horus, Lord of the two lands'). He now everywhere re-established the authority of Osiris and the solar cycle. He erected temples in which he was represented in the various forms he had assumed during the wars against his irreconcilable enemies, the followers of Set. He then reigned peacefully over Egypt, of which he always remained the national God, ancestor of the Pharaohs, who each took the title of 'the Living Horns.' With his father Osiris and his mother Isis, Horus was worshipped throughout Egypt. He figures in the triads or trinities of numerous sanctuaries, either as chief, as prince consort, or as divine infant. Thus at Edfu and at Ombos he is the great God with Hathor as his companion; while Hathor is the uncontested mistress at Dendera, and Horus, in his role of the sovereign's husband, only a privileged guest. Until the beginning of the New Kingdom, temple figures represent Horus acting in consort with Set to crown and purify the king. They show the king into the sanctuary or perform the symbolic gesture of 'sam-taui.' But later Thoth everywhere replaces Set. Elsewhere we see Horus fighting Set and his partisans, mourning Osiris and performing for him the burial duties. Finally in the next world Horus ushers the deceased into the presence of 'the Good One' and often presides over the weighing of his soul. Hathor (Athyr) Hathor is the name of the great Egyptian deity whom the Greeks identified with Aphrodite. As a Sky Goddess, she was originally described as the daughter of Ra and the wife of Horus. She was, however, sometimes called the mother of Horus; for her name can also signify 'the dwelling of Horus' and it was explained that within her the sun God resided, being enclosed each evening in her breast, to be bom again each morning. The texts also say that she was the great celestial cow who created the world and all that it contains, including the sun. She is in consequence represented as a cow - her sacred animal -or as a cow-headed Goddess. Still more often she is given a human head adorned either with horns or simply cow's ears and heavy tresses framing her face. Hathor also had a fetish in which she liked to embody herself: the sistrum, a musical instrument which drove away evil spirits. It was in a spirit of piety that the architect of Dendera conceived the columns of Hathor's temple as so many colossal sistrums. Hathor was the protectress of women and was supposed to preside at their toilet. She enjoyed immense popularity as the Goddess of joy and love. She was proclaimed mistress of merriment and sovereign of the dance, mistress of music and sovereign of song, of leaping and jumping and the weaving of garlands. Her temple was the 'home of intoxication and a place of enjoyment.' Hathor nourished the living with her milk. We see her giving her breast to the king whom she holds in her arms or on her knees and, again, in the form of a cow, suckling the Pharaoh. Although she was well disposed towards those who were alive she cherished the dead even more tenderly. Under the name 'Queen of the West' she was the protectress of the Theban necropolis. Vignettes in the Book of the Dead show the good cow half-emerged fan the Libyan Mountain - the westernmost limit of human habitation - to welcome the dead on their arrival in the other world. Those who understood how to beseech her aid by means of the prescribed formulas she would carry in safety on her back to the after world. She was also called 'the Lady of the Sycamore,' for she would sometimes hide in the foliage of this tree on the edge of the desert and appear to the dead with the bread and water of welcome. It was she, they believed, who held the long ladder by which the deserving could climb to heaven. More and more the Goddess specialised in her role of funerary deity until in the last epoch a dead person was no longer called 'an Osiris' but 'a Hathor.' Her principal sanctuary was at Dendera where she was worshipped in company with her husband, Horus of Edfu, who here osded first place to her, and with their son Ihi (Ahi), 'the Sistrum Player,' who is represented as an infant jingling the sistrum at her side. Great festivals were celebrated in this temple, above all on New Year's Day, which was the anniversary of her birth. Before dawn the priestesses would bring Hathor's image out on to the terrace to expose it to the rays of the rising sun. The rejoicing which followed was a pretext for a veritable carnival, and the day ended in song and intoxication. Hathor was also worshipped at Edfu with Horus, Lord of the temple, and their son Harsomtus, as well as at Ombos, where she took part in both trinities at the same time. Even beyond Egypt, on the coast of Somaliland, she was called 'Mistress of the land of Punt,' from which perhaps she had come in very ancient times. In the Sinai peninsula she was known as 'Mistress of the land of Mefket;' and in Phoenicia, where part of the Osirian legend had early taken root, as 'the Lady of Byblos.' Anuibis, The Greek rendering of Anpu, was identified with Hermes, Conductor of Souls. It was Anubis who opened for the dead the roads of the other world. He is represented as a black jackal with a bushy tail, or as a blackish-skinned man with the head of a jackal or the head of a dog, an animal sacred to Anubis. For this reason the Greeks called the chief city of his cult Cynopolis. From the earliest dynasties Anubis presided over embalmments. Funeral prayers, in which he was always to occupy a preponderant position, were in those days almost exclusively addressed to him. In the pyramid texts Anubis is the 'fourth son of Ra' and his daughter is Kebehut, the Goddess of freshness. But later he was admitted into the family of Osiris and it was said that Nephthys, left childless by her husband Set, bore him adulterously to Osiris. Abandoned by his mother at birth, he was, it is related, found by his aunt, Isis. Isis, feeling no rancour at the thoughtless infidelity of her husband, undertook to bring up the baby. When he had grown to man's estate Anubis accompanied Osiris on his conquest of the world, and when 'the Good One' was murdered he helped Isis and Nephthys to bury him. It was on this occasion that Anubis invented funeral rites and bound up the mummy of Osiris to preserve him from contact with the air and subsequent corruption. He was known, therefore, as 'Lord of the Mummy Wrappings.' From then on he presided over funerals and it is in this role that we often see him, first proceeding with the mummy's embalming and later receiving it at the door of the tomb. Anubis also makes sure that offerings brought by the deceased's heirs actually reach him. Afterwards we see Anubis take the dead by the hand and, in his capacity of Osiris' usher, introduce him into the presence of the sovereign judges before whom he then weighs the soul of the dead. This role of God of the dead won Anubis a universal cult and his admission into the circle of Osiris kept his worship alive until the latest epoch when, because of his identification with Hermes, Conductor of Souls, he was given the name Hermanubis. In the great procession in honour of Isis which Apuleius describes, it is the dog-headed God, bearing in his hands the caduceus and the palms, who marches at the head of the divine images. Upuaut (or Ophois Wepwawet) Is a wolf-headed or jackal-headed God who should not be confused with Anubis. Upuaut signifies 'he who opens the way.' In prehistoric representations we see the wolf-God, borne high upon his standard, guiding the warriors of his tribe into enemy territory. Similarly, during his principal procession, Upuaut, carried on his shield, leads the cortege at the festivals of Osiris. Sometimes he is also shown piloting the sun's boat during its nocturnal voyage and, if necessary, towing it along the edge of the southern and northern sky. A former warrior-God, he was also worshipped as God of the dead; and notably at Abydos, before Osiris deposed him, he was worshipped as Lord of the' Necropolis under the name Khenti Amenti 'he who rules the West.' Upuaut was feudal God of Siut, the Greek Lycopolis, and a later addition to the Osirian legend. He was an ally of Osiris and, with Anubis, one of his chief officers during the conquest of the world. As such, they both sometimes appear in later times dressed as soldiers. To this the form, which the name Djehuti or Zehuti had taken in Graeco-Roman times. He was identified by the Greeks with Hermes, Messenger of the Gods, and was worshipped throughout Egypt as a moon-God, patron of science and literature, wisdom and inventions, the spokesman of the Gods and their keeper of the records. Djehuti seems merely to mean 'he of Djehut,' the name of the old province in Lower Egypt whose capital, Hermopolis Parva, must have been the cradle of Thoth's cult before he had established his principal sanctuary at Hermopolis Magna in Upper Egypt, frhoth is ordinarily represented with the head of an ibis, often surmounted by a crescent moon, or simply as an ibis. He liked to appear as a bird of this sort, but also at times as a dog-headed ape, which makes us suspect that the God of historical ages may have been derived from a fusion, in very remote times, of two lunar divinities, one figured as a bird, the other as an ape. According to the theologians of Hermopolis, Thoth was tne true universal Demiurge, the divine ibis who had hatched the world-egg at Hermopolis Magna. They taught that he had accomplished the work of creation by the sound of his voice alone. When he first awoke in the primordial 'Nun' he opened his lips, and from the sound that issued forth four Gods materialised and then four Goddesses. For this reason the future Hermopolis was called Khnum, "City of the Eight.' Without real personality these eight Gods perpetuated the creation of the world by the word; and the texts tell us that they sang hymns morning and evening to assure the continuity of the sun's course. In the Books of the Pyramids, Thoth is sometimes the oldest son of Ra, sometimes the child of Geb and Nut, the brother of Isis, Set and Nephthys. Normally, however, he does not belong to the Osirian family and is only the vizier of Osiris and his kingdom's sacred scribe. He remained faithful to his murdered master and contributed powerfully to his resurrection, thanks to the trueness of his voice which increased the force of his magic incantations, and tb the thoroughness of the way in which he purified the dismembered body of Osiris. Afterwards he helped Isis to defend the child Horus against the perils which beset him. We are told how on the orders of the Gods he drove out the poison from the child's body when he had been stung by a scorpion. Later we see him intervene in the merciless struggle between Horus and Set, curing the former's tumour and the latter's emasculation by spitting on their wounds. Finally, when the two irreconcilable enemies were summoned to appear before the tribunal of the Gods sitting in Hermopolis, Thoth earned the title 'He who judges the two companions.' He decided between the two adversaries and condemned Set to return his nephew's heritage. As he had been the vizier of Osiris, so afterwards was he that of Horus. When Horus resigned earthly power Thoth succeeded him to the throne. During three thousand two hundred and twenty-six years Thoth remained the very model of a peaceful ruler. Endowed with complete knowledge and wisdom, it was Thoth who invented all the arts and sciences: arithmetic, surveying, geometry, astronomy, soothsaying, magic, medicine, surgery, music with wind instruments and strings, drawing and, above all, writing, without which humanity would have run the risk of forgetting his doctrines and of losing the benefit of his discoveries. As inventor of hieroglyphs, he was named 'Lord of Holy Words.' As first of the magicians he was often called 'The Elder.' His disciples boasted that they had access to the crypt where he had locked up his books of magic, and they undertook to decipher and learn 'these formulas which commanded all the forces of nature and subdued the very Gods themselves.' It is to this infinite power which his followers attributed to him that he owes the name Thoth - three times very, very great - which the Greeks translated as Hermes Trismegistus. After his long reign on earth Thoth ascended to the skies where he undertook various employments. First of all he was the moon-God, or at least the God in charge of guarding the moon; for this astral body had its own individuality and name: Aah-te-Huti. We have already recounted the legend (see Nut) which tells how Thoth played draughts with the moon and won a seventy-second part of its light from which he created the five intercalary days. Elsewhere we are told that the moon is the left eye of Horus, watched over by either an ibis or a dog-headed ape. On the other hand a passage in the Book of the Dead tells us that Ra ordered Thoth to take his own place in the sky whilst he himself 'lighted the blessed in the underworld.' The moon then appeared and in its boat began its nocturnal voyages, each month exposed to the attack of monsters who slowly devoured it but who, happily, were constrained by the moon's faithful champions to disgorge it. In his quality of lunar divinity Thoth measured the time, which he divided into months (to the first of which he gave his own name) and into years, which in turn were divided into three seasons. He was the divine regulative force and charged with all calculations and annotations. At Edfu we see him before the temple trinity presenting the register in which is recorded all that concerns the geographical division of the country, its dimensions and resources. At Deir el Bahri we see him proceeding scrupulously with an inventory of treasures brought to the Gods of Egypt by a naval expedition on its return from the land of Punt. Nekhebet, the Goddess, in the form of a vulture with outstretched wings, hovers protectively over the Pharaoh Mem-kau-Heru, of the Fifth Dynasty. Louvre. Thoth Was the keeper of the divine archives and at the same tin the patron of history. He carefully noted the succession oftk sovereigns and, on the leaves of the sacred tree at Heliopolis, wrot the name of the future Pharaoh whom the queen had just conceive! after union with the Lord of the Heavens. On a long palm shot he also inscribed the happy years of reign which Ra had accords to the king. He was the herald of the Gods and also often served as their clerl and scribe. 'Ra has spoken, Thoth has written,' we read. And during the awful judgment of the dead before Osiris we see Thoth, who has weighed the heart and found it not wanting, proclaim in a louf voice the verdict 'not guilty' which he has just registered onto tablets. He was invested with the confidence of the Gods and chosen them as arbiter. We have already seen him awarding judgmentt Horus and condemning Set. Also, at least from the time of theNei Empire, he everywhere replaces Set in coronation scenes, in sceiu in which libations are offered to the king, and in the symbol ceremony of 'sam-tauf.' The texts often couple him with Maat, the Goddess of Trull and Justice; but in no temple do we find them together. On the other hand two spouses of his were known, Seshat and Nehmaiiit 'she who uproots evil.' In Heliopolis they form with him two triad with, in the first instance, Hornub as divine son, and in the second Nefer Hor. Plutarch tells us that the chief festival of the ibis-headed gd was celebrated on the nineteenth of the month of Thoth, a few days after the full moon at the beginning of the year. His friends would then approached with the words, 'Sweet is the Truth,' and tte were presented with many gifts of sweetmeats, honey, figs and other dainties. Seshat (or Sesheta) Was Thoth's principal spouse. In reality she is in her quality of Goddess of writing and history, merely his double At first she was portrayed with the features of a woman weariij on her head a star inscribed in a reversed crescent, surmountedb| two long straight plumes, an ideogram of her name which signing 'the secretary.' Later, due probably to a misunderstanding on tin part of sculptors, the crescent was replaced by two long, turned down horns, from which the Goddess derived the title Safekh-Aubi i.e. 'she who wears (or, perhaps, raises) the two horns.' She was a stellar divinity who served to measure time; to her---as to Thoth - was ascribed the invention of letters. She was called 'mistress of the house of books.' She was also called 'mistress of the house of architects' and w represented as the foundress of temples, helping the king to determine the axis of a new sanctuary by the aid of the stars, and marking out the four angles of the edifice with stakes. As Goddess of history and record-keeper for the Gods, we see her, alone or in the company of her husband, writing the names of the sovereigns on the leaves of the sacred tree at Heliopolis, or ofregistering on a long palm-leaf the years of reign accorded to the Pharaoh and, on this occasion, drafting the minutes of jubilee celebrations. As mistress of the scribes she writes on a tablet the balance due to the king from captured enemy booty. When the great sovereign of the eighteenth dynasty, Queen Hatshepsut, sends an expedition to the land of Punt it is Seshat who, on the expedition's returnti Thebes, makes the inventory of the treasures brought back. 'Tho4 made a note of the quantity,' we are told, 'and Seshat verified to figures.' PROTECTIVE DIVINITIES OF THE PHARAOHS AND THE KINGDOM In the course of this study we have already met several Gods wht enjoyed the especial favour of the kings who considered them to be their divine ancestors. Such were Set, formerly Lord of Uppei Egypt, but later expelled from the Egyptian pantheon; Horus, of whom every Pharaoh boasted that he was the living incarnation; and Ra, whose son each Pharaoh from the fifth dynasty onwards, proclaimed himself to be. We shall now review, in the chronological order in which their dynastic importance appears most marked, certain other divinities. Nekhebet Who was identified by the Greeks as Eileithyia, pro-tetress of childbirth, was from the earliest times the protective Goddess of Upper Egypt. The centre of her cult was at El Kab, former Nekheb, which the Greeks called Eileithyiaspolis, apitalof the oldest kingdom in the South. In war and offertory scenes she often appears hovering over the Pharaoh's head in the form of a vulture, holding in her claws the fly-whisk and the seal. She is also sometimes portrayed as a divinity with the bald head ifa vulture, or as a woman wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt either on her head or on a headdress shaped like a vulture. As a mother Goddess Nekhebet suckled the royal children; often we see her suckling the Pharaoh himself. Buto A transcription of Per Uadjit, 'the dwelling of Uadjit,' was ihename which the Greeks gave to the Delta town and also to the Goddess who was worshipped there. She was the ancient protectress ofLower Egypt. The Osirian legend recounts that Buto, sovereign of the Delta, allied herself with Isis and helped protect her infant child. She gathered up the baby Horus from the floating island of Chemmis, for which reason she was afterwards identified with Eatona, the Bother of Apollo. Buto was a snake-Goddess, frequently represented in the form of a cobra, sometimes winged and sometimes crowned. She also often has the features of a woman wearing, either directly on her bdor on a head-dress in the form of a vulture, the red crown of the North, of which she was the official protectress as Nekhebet wasof the white crown of the South. The vulture-Goddess and the cobra-Goddess, known conjointly as Nebti - 'the two mistresses' - appear side by side on royal documents. Sometimes they embellish the Pharaoh's forehead in order to protect him against his enemies, though normally only the Uraeus- appears. Mont (Menthu) Was the Theban God of war whom the Greeks, because of his solar character, identified with Apollo. He appears atthe beginning of the Middle Kingdom when he was particularly venerated by the kings of the eleventh dynasty, many of whom took the name Menthu-hetep, 'Mont is satisfied.' He is usually represented as a personage whose falcon head is surmounted by the solar disk and two tall straight plumes. At a later period he also appears as a man with a bull's head embellished with the same attributes. The bull was actually the animal sacred to him. The bull in which he preferred to become incarnate was the celebrated Buchis which was piously tended at Hermonthis, the sun's residence in Upper Egypt. Hermonthis was the former capital of this region and Mont, the sun God, was for many long centuries its lord and master before he was demoted to second rank by his former vassal, Amon of Thebes, who became king of the Gods. Having ousted Mont, Amon, whose wife was barren, wished to adopt him as divine son in the Theban Triad; but the former sovereign of the entire region could not long be happy in such a subordinate position. Mont therefore chose to dwell apart at Hermonthis, of which he remained the uncontested master, and at Medamud, in the suburbs of Thebes, where numerous votaries came to worship him in company with his wife Rat-taui. A solar God of warlike character, Mont was represented as the God of war under the New Kingdom. He brandished the khepesh, which was a kind of very curved scimitar, and cut off the heads of the Pharaoh's enemies. We see him offering the Pharaoh his invincible weapon and leading his vanquished enemies in chains. Temple bas-reliefs also often show Mont, as sun God of the South, withAtum, sun God of the North, escorting the king into the sanctuary. Amon (Amun, Ammon) Is the name of the great Egyptian deity who was often given the title 'king of the Gods.' For this reason the Greeks identified him with Zeus. He was almost unknown in the time of the Old Kingdom. His name - which seems to be derived from a root meaning 'hidden' - only appears four times in the Helio-politah texts of the pyramids. Perhaps he originally belonged to the cosmological system of Hermopolis which we have already discussed, and was one of those 'eight Gods' who emerged from the mouth of Thoth. Thebes, which afterwards was to erect such gigantic temples in his honour, was at that time only a village in the fourth nome (or province) of Upper Egypt, the capital of which was Hermonthis, city of Mont, who was then Lord of all that region. It was with the first king of the twelfth dynasty, whose name, Amenemhat, signifies 'Amon leads,' that Thebes and its God began to take on an importance which was to become considerable under the great conquerors of the eighteenth dynasty - called Thuthmosis and Amenhotep and proudly proclaiming themselves to be 'sons of Amon.' Amon by this time had dispossessed Mont and become the great divinity of the whole country of which Thebes - which was called Nut Amon, the 'city of Amon,' or simply Nut, 'the city' - was henceforth the capital. Amon normally appears with bronzed human features wearing as a head-dress a kind of crown which supports two straight tall parallel plumes. Sometimes he is seated majestically on a throne. Sometimes he stands with a whip raised above his head, in the ithyphallic pose of the God Min. He is also at times represented with the head ofa ram with curled horns, and at Karnak an animal of this sort was religiously tended, a living incarnation of the God. They also kept a goose which was Amon's other sacred animal. The phallic Amon represented the forces of generation and reproduction. He was often called 'his mother's husband' and was supposed to initiate and then maintain the continuity of creative life. He was the God of fertility, and we see the king, in his presence, sowing grain and cutting the first sheaf. He was the patron of the most powerful Pharaohs; he acknowledged them as his sons and gave them victory over their enemies. It was, then, quite natural that the God of Thebes should become pre-eminently the national God. The faithful proclaimed him 'king of the Gods' under the name Amon-Ra; for when the theologians had obligingly identified him with Ra, the old sun God, Amon assumed Ra's position as universal Demiurge and chief of the great Ennead. Pictured in the royal tombs we see Amon-Ra enthroned in the sun's boat and, during the twelve hours of night, illuminating the underworld. Ra, however, had never abdicated his ancient authority, and under the name of Ra-Harakhte he always enjoyed his own distinct cult. Indeed, under the reign of Amenhotep III, there was a reaction in Ra's favour, no doubt encouraged by the priests of Heliopolis who were jealous of Amon's immense fortune and the omnipotence which this parvenu among the Gods claimed. The texts and bas-reliefs on the walls of the temple of Euxor glorify the divine birth of Amenhotep as a result of Amon's love for the queen-mother, wife of Thuthmosis IV. But on the death of Amenhotep the cult of Ra-Harakhte gained new importance. Under the already venerable name 'Aten of the Day' - i.e. The solar disk whence issues the light of day,' his visible form and true name - Ra-Harakhte, it would seem, engaged in a struggle against his rival Amon which was so successful that Amon was momentarily humbled. In the fourth year of his reign Amenhotep's son and successor proclaimed a great religious reform and decreed that only the religion of Aten was official. Full of zeal for his new God, the reforming Pharaoh began by changing his name Amenhotep ('Amon is satisfied') to Akhenaton ('The glory of Aten'). He hastened to abandon Thebes for a new capital city, Akhetaten - the present-day Tell-el-Amarna - which he had built in Middle Egypt to the glory of the solar disk. There were no statues of Aten. Bas-reliefs and paintings always represent him in the form of a great red disk from which fan out long rays tipped with hands which have seized offerings laid on altars, or which present to the king, the queen and their daughters the hieroglyphs of life and strength. The Pharaoh was his only priest, and his cult was celebrated in a temple resembling the ancient solar temples.of the Old Kingdom and called, like the celebrated sanctuary of Ra at Heliopolis, Het Benben, 'the Palace of the Obelisk.' There, at the extremity ofa vast courtyard, rose the obelisk of the sun. The ceremony consisted of an oblation of fruits and cakes and the recitation of hymns of great beauty, which were composed by the king himself, in honour of his God. In them the sun was glorified, as in olden days, as creator of mankind and benefactor of the world, but without those allusions to early mythological legends of which the ancient hymns to Ra had been full. The hymns could thus be sung and understood not only by the inhabitants of the Nile Valley but also by foreigners. All men, they proclaimed, were equally the children of Aten. In this modified attempt at monotheism we may suspect plans for an Empire-wide religion, especially if it is remembered that at this time Egyptian domination extended as far as Asia, where the Syrians worshipped Adonis and the Jews worshipped Adonai. As long as the king lived there was no official God in Egypt but Aten. The other Gods were proscribed and bitter war declared against them, especially against Amon and his trinity. Their temples were despoiled and their riches given to the solar disk. Their statues were broken and the bas-reliefs on which they appeared were mutilated, while Amon's name was harried from the most inaccessible places. It was chiselled off and removed from all the royal tablets, even from those of Amenhotep III, the Pharaoh's own father. The new religion, it is true, was ephemeral, and on the death of the reformer, or very shortly afterwards, his own son denied his father's name and restored the cult of Amon. He changed his heretical name Tut-ankh-Aten ('Living image of Aten') into the orthodox Tut-ankh-Amon ('Living image of Amon'). Wherever it was found, the old name was replaced by the new. But there were oversights, and on the magnificent throne of the young Pharaoh, recently removed from his celebrated tomb, we can still read the two names almost side by side - a silent witness to the prince's heresy and to its abjuration. Restored to all his former splendor by Horemheb and the kings of the nineteenth dynasty who heaped his temples with gifts, Amon, from thenceforth definitely incorporated with Ra, saw his fortune grow to such a point that it reached three-quarters of that of all the other Gods combined. An inventory of his wealth made under Rame-ses III tells us that he possessed, among other riches, 81,322 slaves and 421,362 head of cattle. His high priests, the first prophets of Amon, were chosen from among the most powerful lords. They soon became hereditary and, after playing the role of royal comptrollers to the weak sovereigns of the twentieth dynasty, finally seized the crown itself. Herihor, the priest, succeeded the last of the Rameses to the throne. During the troubles that ensued Thebes ceased to be the royal seat and political capital of Egypt. It remained from then on the exclusive property of Amon and became a kind of theocratic state where the God wielded power, either directly through his oracles or by the mediation, no longer as in the past of his chief prophet, but of his earthly spouse. This was normally the king's daughter, 'the God's wife,' 'the God's adorer.' She was paid the highest honor, ruled the town and administered the immen! domains of the God, her husband. Sovereign of Thebes, Amon extended his power beyond tk frontiers of Egypt into Ethiopia where, through his oracles I Napata and Meroe, he himself chose the kings. He deposed then and ordered their death, thus exercising a tyrannical dominatioi which only ended in the third century B.C. when Ergamenes thro off the priests' yoke and had them put to death. Amon's power over the desert tribes of Libya was equally gra and until the latest epoch pilgrims crowded in great numbers totb venerable oasis-temple of Amon - or of Jupiter Ammon - whs the celebrated oracle had, in 332 B.C., saluted Alexander the Gra and called him 'Son of Amon.' Amon's most magnificent sanctuaries were, however, at Thete on the right bank of the Nile, at Luxor and at Karnak, when ruins to-day still fill us with admiration, and where he was m shipped in company with Mut, his wife, and their son Khons.Oi the bas-reliefs which cover the walls and columns we see thekii| of the Gods on his throne, where he receives the perpetual adoratia of the Pharaoh, whom at times he embraces and whom he infus with the magic fluid 'sa.' Elsewhere he gives the breath of lifeli him and grants him long years of reign. He hands him the khepd of battle and, trampling the vanquished underfoot, delivers ow enemy towns. Finally Amon is shown holding on his knees tin queen with whom he will unite in order to produce the next Pharaol his son. Mut Being Amon-Ra's wife, was identified by the Greeks with Hera. She is a vague and ill-defined deity whose name signified 'Mother.' She is represented as a woman wearing a head-dressi the form of a vulture, an ideogram of her name. Again she wears a heavy wig surmounted by the pschent - the double crown to whid as wife of the king of the Gods, she had a right. She grew in stature along with her spouse and when he, under the name Amon-Ra, had become the great God of the heavens she al" became a solar deity. She was sometimes identified with Bast whose cat-form she assumed; and with Sekhmet, from whom she borrowed the head of a lioness. A text tells us that as a Sky Goddess she remained - in the form of a cow - behind Amon when he emerged from the waves and broke from the egg at Hermopolis. 'He mounted on her back, seized her horns, and dismounted where it pleased him so to do.'i Wen she had long been childless Mut first adopted Mont, then Khons. It is with Khons as child that she entered the celebrated Theban triad of which Amon was the chief. Khons (Khensu), Whose name means 'the Navigator' or 'He who crosses the sky in a boat,' seems originally to have been a moon-God, little known beyond the region of Thebes. It is a puzzle why the Greeks sometimes identified him with Hercules. Khons is ordinarily represented in the form of a personage swathed like Ptah, whose composite sceptre he holds before him. His head is completely shaven except for one temple which is adorned by the heavy tress of a royal child. He wears a skullcap mounted by a disk in a crescent moon. At first rather obscure, Khons rose to the ranks of the great Gods when he was adopted by Amon and Mut and replaced Mont as their son in the Theban triad. It is only under the New Kingdom, however, that he seems to have begun to enjoy great popularity as an exorcist and healer. The possessed and the sick from all over Egypt and even from abroad had recourse to him. In the case of those from abroad Khons delegated his powers to a statue in which he incarnated a double of himself, commanding it to go forth and cure his suppliants. Thus we see the great Khons Neferhotep of Karnak, whose aid the Syrian prince of Bakhtan had implored on behalf of his daughter, delegate a second Khons in Syria who was named 'He who executes the designs and who expels the rebels.' Space is lacking to recount in detail how the divine substitute accomplished his mission and drove from the princess's body the demon which had tormented her; how at the end of three years and nine months he appeared in a dream to her father in the form of a golden falcon who flew swiftly towards Egypt; and how the grateful prince then hastened to take back the divine statue with the greatest ceremony together with costly gifts which were deposited in the temple of Karnak at the feet of the great Khons Neferhotep. Khons was much venerated at Thebes and also worshipped at Ombos where he formed the third person in the triad of Sebek under the name Khons Hor, who was represented as a man with a falcon's head surmounted with a disk in a crescent moon. In conclusion it may be remarked that one of the months of the year was named Pakhons, which means 'the month of Khons.' Sebek (in Greek, Suchos) Is the name of a crocodile divinity who figured among the patrons of the kings of the thirteenth dynasty, many of whom were called Sebekhotep, 'Sebek is satisfied.' The God was represented either as a man with the head of a crocodile or simply as a crocodile. In a lake attached to his chief sanctuary an actual crocodile was kept. It was called Petesuchos, 'He who belongs to Suchos' (or to Sebek), and it was said that the God was incarnate therein. We know little of the origins of Sebek. A pyramid text calls him the son of Neith. But, as Maspero has pointed out, it is easy to conceive that the presence nearby of a swamp or a rock-encumbered rapid could have suggested to the inhabitants of the Fayyum of Ombos that the crocodile was the supreme God who must be appeased by sacrifice and prayers. To his worshippers no doubt Sebek was none other than the Demiurge who, on the day of creation, issued from the dark waters where until then he had reposed, in order to arrange the world - as the crocodile emerges from the river to deposit her eggs on the bank. Possibly because the name Sebek sounds in Egyptian a little like Geb he was sometimes given Geb's titles. Sebek was especially venerated in the Fayyum. The whole province was under his protection and his principal sanctuary was in the former Shedet, the Crocodilopolis of the Greeks. We shall have occasion to speak further of this when we study the animals sacred to the Egyptians. Sebek was the object of a cult in Upper Egypt also. One can still see to-day at Kom Ombo - the former Ombos - ruins of the temple where Sebek's triad was worshipped, as was a second triad of which Horus was the chief. Perhaps here Sebek really replaced the former Lord, Set the Ombite, whom the pious worshippers of Horus would not tolerate. What is certain is that Sebek often shared Set's evil reputation. He was reproached with having aided the murderer of Osiris when Set, to escape punishment for his crime, took refuge in the body of a crocodile. That was why these animals, worshipped in certain provinces, were hunted down and destroyed in others. Ptah of Memphis In his aspect ot protector of artisans and artists, was identified by the Greeks with Hephaestus. He is normally represented as a mummified figure, often raised on a pedestal inside the naos of a temple, his skull enclosed in a tight head-band and his body swathed in mummy-wrappings. Only his hands are free and hold a composite sceptre uniting the emblems of life, of stability and of omnipotence. He was worshipped from the earliest times at Memphis where, south of the ancient 'White Wall' of Menes, he possessed the celebrated temple of Ptah-Beyond-the-Walls. Ptah must always have been of first importance as sovereign God of the old capital of the North, the city where the Pharaohs were crowned. But little is known of his role before the advent of the nineteenth dynasty, whose great kings, Seti I and Rameses II, held him in particular devotion, while one soveregin of the same dynasty even bore the name Siptah, which signified 'Son of Ptah.' It was, however, after the extinction of the last of the Rameses, when the political role of the Delta had become predominant, that the God of Memphis attained his full glory. Of all the Gods of Egypt he was then third in importance and wealth, yielding only to Amon and Ra; and not even to them in the estimation of hisom priest, who proudly proclaimed him to be the Universal Demiurge who had with his own hands fashioned the world. Ptah was the patron of artisans and artists and the inventor of the arts. He was at the same time designer, smelter of metal and builder, His high priest at Memphis bore a title analogous to the 'Master Builder' of our medieval cathedrals. It was he who during tht construction of a temple directed architects and masons. Today there remain only shapeless ruins of the celebrated temple,' of Memphis where priests showed Herodotus the ex-votos commemorating the great miracles performed by Ptah. Among others was the occasion on which he had saved Pelusium from Sennacherib's attacking Assyrians by raising an army of rats, who forced the assailants to retreat by gnawing their bowstrings, quivers, and the leather thongs of their shields. In this temple Ptah was worshipped in company with his consort Imhotep, a human hero deified. Near the sanctuary was piously tended the celebrated bull Apis, a living incarnation of the God. We shall speak of Apis in the final section of this study. Although Ptah was apt to be called 'fair of face' he is sometimes depicted as a deformed dwarf with twisted legs, hands on hips and a huge head, shaved except for the childish lock. Thus represented, Ptah plays the role of protector against noxious animals and against all kinds of evils. He was early identified with the very ancient and obscure earth-God Tenen and also with Seker, of whom we shall write briefly below. He was frequently invoked under the names Ptah Tenen, Ptah Seker and even Ptah Seker Osiris. Seker (the Greek rendering is Sucharis) Was doubtless a vegetation God before he became the God of the dead in the Memphis necropolis. There, in the form of a greenish hawk-headed mummy, he was worshipped in a sanctuary called Ro Stau ('the doors of the corridors'), which communicated directly with the underworld. He was early identified with Osiris and brought to Osiris all his own local worshippers. It was under the name Seker Osiris that the God of the dead was usually worshipped in Memphis. In the end the great funerary divinity became Ptah Seker Osiris. Sekhmet (rendered in Greek as Sakhmis) Is the name of the terrible Goddess of war and battle who is usually represented as a lioness or a woman with the head of a lioness. Her name, which means 'the Powerful,' is simply a title of Hathor which was given to Hathor on the occasion when in the form of a lioness she hurled herself on the men who had rebelled against Ra. As we have already seen she attacked them with such fury that the sun God, fearing the extermination of the human race, begged her to arrest the carnage. 'By thy life,' she answered him, 'when I slay men my heart rejoices,' and she refused to spare her victims. For this reason she was later given the name Sekhmet and represented in the form of a savage lioness. In order to save what remained of the human race Ra had recourse to a stratagem. He spread across the bloody battlefield seven thousand jugs containing a magic potion composed of beer and pomegranate juice. Sekhmet, who was thirsty, mistook this red liquid for human blood and drank it so avidly that she became too drunk to continue the slaughter. The human race was saved; but to appease the Goddess, Ra decreed that 'on that day there should be brewed in her honour as many jugs of the philtre as there were priestesses of the sun.' This was henceforth done annually on the feast day of Hathor. The great massacre had taken place on the twelfth day of the first month of winter; thus the calendar of lucky and unlucky days carefully notes: 'Hostile, hostile, hostile is the 12th Tybi. Avoid seeing a mouse on this day; for it is the day when Ra gave the order to Sekhmet.' The Goddess was called 'the beloved of Ptah;' for, though originally a divinity of Latopolis, she joined the Memphis Triad as Ptah's wife, bearing him a son, Nefertum. Attached to her cult were bone-setters who, with her intercession, cured fractures. Nefertum Which the Greeks rendered as Iphtimis, is the name of the original divine son of the Memphis Triad. The Greeks identified him with Prometheus, perhaps because his father was said to be Ptah Hephaestus, the discoverer of fire. He is habitually represented as a man armed with the curved sabre called the khepesh. His head is surmounted by an open lotus flower from which springs a horned stalk, and he often appears standing on a crouched lion. Sometimes he has the head of this lion, which he doubtless owes to his mother, the lion-Goddess Sekhmet. His name, which signifies 'Atum the Younger,' clearly indicates that he was at first an incarnation of Atum of Heliopolis, a rejuvenated Atum who at dawn sprang from the divine lotus, asylum of the sun during the night. A native of Lower Egypt, he was considered as the son of Ptah, and his mother became that God's spouse. He therefore occupied - before Imhotep - the third place in the oldest Memphis Triad. Bast (Bastet) Was identified by the Greeks with Artemis, probably by confusion with the lioness-headed Goddess Tefnut. She was local Goddess of Bubastis, capital of the eighteenth nome or pro- race of Lower Egypt. Bubastis is a transcription of Per Bast, i.e. the House of Bast.' She became the great national divinity ihen, about 950 B.C., with Sheshonk and the Libyan Pharaohs tfthe twenty-second dynasty, Bubastis became the capital of the kingdom. Though in origin a lioness-Goddess, personifying the fertilising t nnnth of the sun, her sacred animal later became the cat, and she , (represented as a cat-headed woman holding in her right hand either a sistrum or an aegis, composed of a semi-circular breastplate amounted with the head of a lioness. In her left hand she carries tbasket. She was related to the sun God whom some called her father and others her brother-spouse; and she became - like Sekhmet, with rtom she is frequently confused in spite of their very dissimilar characters - the wife of Ptah of Memphis and with him formed a itriad in which Nefertum was the third person. Although, as patron of the kings of Bubastis, Bast had already tome one of the great divinities of Egypt, it was in the fourth ctntury B.C. that she achieved her greatest popularity. She existed ilso in secondary forms as Pekhet, the cat or lion-headed Goddess ofSpeos Artemidos, to the east of Beni Hasan. LikeHathor she was a Goddess of pleasure and loved music and the dance. She would beat time with the sistrum, often decorated with the figure of a cat, which she grasped in her hand. In her benevolence she also protected men against contagious disease and evil spirits. Great and joyful festivals were periodically celebrated in her temple at Bubastis. Herodotus tells us that it was one of the most elegant in Egypt and recounts how the devout came in hundreds ofthousands from all over the country for the huge annual fair.The journey took place by barges to the sound of flutes and castanets. Buffoonery and jokes were bandied between the pilgrims and the women on the banks of the river who watched the barges as they passed, and everything was a pretext for pleasantry and masquerade. On the appointed day a splendid procession wound through the town and festivities followed during which, it seems, more wine was drunk than during all the rest of the year. To please the cat-Goddess her devotees consecrated statues of this animal in great numbers, and in the shadow of her sanctuaries it was a pious custom to bury the carefully mummified bodies of cats who during their lifetime had been venerated as animals sacred to Bast. (See Sacred Animals.) Neith (Neit) Whom the Greeks identified with their Pallas Athene, is the name of a Delta divinity. She was protectress of Sais, which became capital of Egypt towards the middle of the seventh century B.C. when Psammetichus I, founder of the twenty-sixth dynasty, mounted the throne, thus assuring the wealth and importance of his local Goddess. She was, in fact, an extremely ancient divinity; for her fetish --two crossed arrows on an animal skin -- was carried on the standard of a prehistoric clan, and two queens of the first dynasty derived their names from hers. Her epithet Tehenut, 'the Libyan,' suggests that she probably originated in the west. She always remained important in Sais after having been, in very early times perhaps, considered to be the national divinity of Lower Egypt whose red crown she habitually wears. The crown was called 'Net,' which sounds like her own name. In the beginning she was worshipped in the form of a fetish composed of two crossed arrows on a shield or the mottled skin of an animal. Later she was represented with the features of a woman wearing the crown of the North and holding in her hand a bow and arrows. Still later her attribute became a weaver's shuttle, an ideogram of her name, which she sometimes wears on her head as a distinguishing emblem. Neith, indeed, appears in a double role: as a warrior-Goddess and as a woman skilled in the domestic arts. This is why she was identified with Athene, who also played this double role. When, with the advent of the Sais dynasty, her preponderance was established, she played a part in many cosmogonic myths. She was made a sky-Goddess like Nut and Hathor, and she was proclaimed to be mother of the Gods in general and of Ra in particular 'whom she bore before childbirth existed.' She was the great weaver who wove the world with her shuttle as a woman weaves cloth. Under the name Mehueret she was the Celestial Cow who gave birth to the sky when nothing existed. She was introduced into the Osirian cult and confounded with Isis; she became protectress of the dead and we sometimes see her offering them the bread and water on their arrival in the other world. Just as Isis and Nephthys are frequently found together in pictures and texts, so Neith often appears with Selket, either as guardian of the mummy and viscera of the dead, or as protectress of marriage. Today nothing remains of her celebrated temple at Sais where, Plutarch tells us, could be read the following inscription: 'I am all that has been, that is, and that will be. No mortal has yet been able to lift the veil which covers me.' To this sanctuary was annexed a school of medicine, 'The House of Life,' directed by the priests. Later, under the Persians, Darius' Egyptian doctor boasted that he had reorganized this medical school under royal protection. DIVINITIES OF RIVER AND DESERT Khnum (Khneinu) Which was rendered in Greek as Khnoumis, was a God of the region of the Cataracts. He is portrayed as a ram-headed man with long wavy horns, unlike the curved horns of the ram-headed Amon. He was a God of fecundity and creation and was originally worshipped under the form of a ram or a he goat. Like all Gods of this sort he doubtless, according to Maspero, symbolized the Nile which comes from the heavens to fertilise the earth and make it fruitful. His chief sanctuary was near the Cataracts, not far from the spot where the earliest Egyptians placed the source of their great river, on that Isle of Elephantine of which Khnum was proclaimed sovereign lord. From his temple, where he received offerings in company with his two wives, Sati and Anukis - who were, as far as we know, childless - Khnum watched over the sources of the Nile. Khnum means 'the Moulder' and it was taught that he had formerly fashioned the world-egg on his potter's wheel. At Philae, moreover, he was called 'the Potter who shaped men and modelled the Gods.' We see him moulding the limbs of Osiris; for it was he, they said, who 'shaped all flesh,' the procreator who engendered Gods and men.' In this quality he presided over the formation of children in their mothers' wombs. Temple bas-reliefs show him fashioning the body of the young Pharaoh on his sculptor's turntable. At Armant this young Pharaoh is none other than the son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, here identified with the divine child Harsomtos. The celebrity of Khnum soon crossed the nearby frontier and penetrated Nubia, whose God Doudoun was also a ram, or a ram-headed God. This facilitated the identification of the two Gods and attracted new and numerous worshippers to the Isle of Elephantine. Harsaphes Harsaphes, the Greek rendering of Hershef ('He who is on his lake'), was the name of another ram-headed God identified by the Greeks with Hercules. His principal sanctuary was at Heracleopolis Magna in the Fayyum. Probably a Nile God, like all ram-headed Gods according to Maspero, Harsaphes was from the earliest times the object of great veneration; for already under the first dynasty we see King Ousaphais consecrating a naos to him. Sati (Satet) Sati was one of Khnum's two wives and as such a guardian Goddess of the Cataracts. According to Maspero her name signifies 'She who runs like an arrow.' She is the Archer who lets fly the river's current with the force and rapidity of an arrow. She is represented as a woman wearing the white crown of the South, flanked by two long horns. Like Neith she often holds arrows and a bow in her hands. She was worshipped in the extreme south of Egypt, where her favourite abode was on the island of Seheil. She gave her name to the first nome of Upper Egypt which was called Ta Setet, the 'Land of Sati.' Its capital was Abu, 'City of the Elephant,' the Elephantine of the Greeks, where Sati took her place in the temple of Khnum in company with Anuket. Anuket (Anquet) Anuket, the Greek for which was Anukis, was Khnum's second wife. She is represented as a woman wearing a tall plumed crown. Her name seems to mean 'the Clasper' - she who clasps the river bank and presses the Nile between the rocks of Philae and Syene. She was worshipped at Elephantine with Khnum and Sati as a regional Goddess of the Cataracts. She liked to reside on the island of Seheil, whieh was consecrated to her. Min Min whom the Greeks identified with Pan, was a very ancient God whose totem, a thunderbolt apparently, appeared at the top of old prehistoric standards. Wearing a crown surmounted by two tall straight plumes which seem to have been borrowed from Arnon, Min is always represented standing with a flail raised in his right hand behind his head and always with phallus erect. This latter trait seems to indicate that Min was originally considered by his priests to be the creator of the world. He is often identified with Horus; and we may wonder if his name was not in earlier days simply a special name for the sun God. Be this as it may, Min was in the classical epoch chiefly worshipped as God of the roads and protector of travellers in the desert. The principal centre of his cult was Coptos, 'the town of caravancers,' a point of departure for commercial expeditions. Their leaders, before risking themselves in the deserts, never failed to invoke the great local God Min, God of the Eastern desert and 'Lord of Foreign Lands.' He was worshipped also as a God of fertility and vegetation and protector of crops. On temple walls we see scenes from the ceremonies which were celebrated in his honour as harvest-God during the king's enthronement. We see the Pharaoh offering him the first sheaf which he has just eut and we see the homage which is rendered to the white bull, sacred to Min. As well as in Coptos he was worshipped in Akhmin, the former Chemmis, known as Panopolis to the Greeks, who identified Min with Pan. There in his honour gymnastic games were celebrated, and it is perhaps for this reason that the Greek historian Herodotus praised the inhabitants of Panopolis for being the only Egyptians who liked Greek customs. Hapi Hapi was the name of the deified Nile. He is given the figure of a man, vigorous but fat, with breasts developed like those of a woman, though less firm and hanging heavily on his chest. He is dressed like the boatmen and fishermen, with a narrow belt which sustains his massive belly. On his head he wears a crown made of aquatic plants - of lotus if he is the Nile of Upper Egypt, of papyrus if he represents the river in Lower Egypt. Hapi, in fact, played the two parts of Southern Nile and Northern Nile. There were two corresponding Goddesses who personified the river banks and they are sometimes seen standing with outstretched arms, as though begging for the water which will render them fertile. The Egyptians thought of the Nile as flowing from Nun, the primordial ocean which waters the visible as well as the invisible world. It was also said that Hapi resided near the First Cataract, on the Isle of Bigeh, in a cavern where he poured water to heaven and earth from his urns. Towards the middle of June the Nile would rise and the devotees of Osiris affirmed that the inundation - on the height of which depended the year's prosperity - was caused by Isis weeping for her husband, treacherously slain by his wicked brother Set. The suitable height of the inundation was, in Graeco-Roman times, fixed at sixteen cubits - as the sixteen infants which decorate the famous statue of the Nile in the Vatican indicate. In order that the river should attain this height the Egyptians in June would make offerings to Hapi, imploring him with fervour and singing hymns, often of great poetic quality. Apart from this, Hapi scarcely played a part in religion as such, and he was not connected with any theological system. In temples he occupied a secondary role, and appears as a servant offering his river products to the great Gods. On the foundations of buildings we often find long processions of alternate Gods and Goddesses who resemble Hapi and are known as 'Niles.' They represent the sub-divisions of the two Egypts bringing, in tribute to the Lord of the sanctuary, the products of all the provinces. DIVINITIES OF BIRTH AND DEATH Taueret (Apet, Opet) 'the Great' Taueret (Apet, Opet) 'the Great' was a popular Goddess of childbirth and symbolized maternity and suckling. She is represented as a female hippopotamus with pendant mammae, standing upright on her back legs and holding the hieroglyphic sign of protection, 'sa,' a plait of rolled papyrus. She was especial worshipped in Thebes where, under the New Kingdom, sheenjojti great popularity among people of the middle class, who often ga". her name to their children and decorated their houses with ft images. As well as her role of protectress Taueret sometimes fulfilled th of an avenging deity: then she would appear as a Goddess with til body of a hippopotamus but the head of a lioness who brandishd a dagger in a menacing manner. Heket Heket was a frog-Goddess or a frog-headed Goddess who, it seem symbolized the embryonic state when the dead grain decompose! and began to germinate. A primitive Goddess, it was taught at Abydos that she came will Shu from the mouth of Ra himself and that she and Shu were tin ancestors of the Gods. She was, they also said, one of the midwivs who assisted every morning at the birth of the sun. In this aspffl she figures, like Nekhebet and others whom we shall mention among the patrons of childbirth. , Meskhent is sometimes represented as a woman wearing on ta head two long palm shoots, curved at their extremities. She was a Goddess of childbirth and personified the two bricks on which,j the moment of delivery, Egyptian mothers crouched. Sometimes we see Meskhent in the form of one of these bricks, terminated in a human head. She appeared beside the expectant mother at the precise moment the baby was born and she was said to go from house to hoiia bringing relief to women in labor. Often, too, she played the roll of fairy Godmother and pronounced sentence on the newly born and predicted its future. The old story in which the birth of the three first kings of the fifth dynasty is described permits us to determine the roles which the various divinities played during childbirth. When, we read, Reddedet approached the term of her confinement, Ra, the true father of the child she bore in her womb, ordered Isis, Nephthys, Heketani Meskhent to go to her bedside. The four Goddesses, disguised as dancers and accompanied by Khnum who carried their luggage, set forth. When the moment had come Isis placed herself in from of Reddedet, Nephthys, behind her, while Heket helped her. fa received the child. The Goddesses then washed it and placed itoi a bed of bricks. Finally Meskhent approached the newborn bab; and said: 'It is a king who will rule over all the land.' Khnumtho put health and strength into its body. The Hathors The Hathors were kinds of fairy Godmothers who sometimes ap peared at the birth of the young Egyptian to prophesy his destinj, much as we have seen Meskhent do. There were seven or even nine of them and we see them, in the form of young women, at the confinement of Ahmes at Deir el Bahri, of Mutemuia at Luxor andof Cleopatra at Armant. Their predictions were sometimes favorable sometimes not; but no one escaped the fate they foretold. Shai Shai was 'Destiny,' and was sometimes made a Goddess: Snail Ht was born at the same moment as the individual, grew up with hi and shadowed him until his death. Sha'i's decrees were inescapable After death, when the soul was weighed in the presence of Osiris Shai could be seen in the form of a God without special attributed attending the trial in order - Maspero says - 'to render exact accouil before the infernal jury of the deceased's virtues and crimes, ori\ order to prepare him for the conditions of a new life.' Renent Renenet was the Goddess who presided over the baby's sucklinf She nourished him herself and also gave him his name - and, ii consequence, his personality and fortune. At his death we see ha with Sha'i when his soul is weighed and judged. She is variouslj represented: as a woman without attributes, as a snake-headd woman, as a woman with the head of a lioness, or as a uraeus. dressti and with two long plumes on her head. As a nursing Goddess sk symbolized nourishment in general and sometimes appears asi harvest Goddess with the title. 'Lady of the Double Granary.' Ski gives her name to the month of Pharmuti, 'the month of Renenet' which was, in later epochs, the eighth month of the Egyptiai calendar. } Renpet Renpet was the Goddess of the year, the Goddess of springtide anl of youth. As a deity of time's duration she was called 'Mistres of Eternity.' She is represented as wearing above her head a long palm-shoot, curved at the end an ideogram of her name. Bes Bes often appeared at birth, but chiefly he was a marriage-God ' mdpresided over the toilet of women. Bes was a popular God who perhaps originated in the land of Punt of which he was sometimes called the Lord. He appears in ikformofarobust dwarf of bestial aspect. His head is big, his eyes huge, his cheeks prominent. His chin is hairy and an enormous tongue hangs from his wide-open mouth. For headdress he has a bunch of ostrich feathers; he wears a leopard skin whose tail falls Wundhim and is visible between his bandy legs. In bas-reliefs and paintings he is frequently represented full-face, contrary to the old Egptian usage of drawing only in profile. He is normally immobile, hands on hips; though occasionally he skips cheerfully but clumsily and plays the harp or tambourine or, again, brandishes a broad diggerwith a terrible and menacing air. At once jovial and belligerent, fond of dancing and lighting. Be was the buffoon of the Gods. They delighted in his grotesque shape and contortions, just as the Memphite Pharaohs of the Old Kingdom enjoyed the antics of their pygmies. At first Bes was relegated to the lowest rank among the host of genii venerated by the common people, but his popularity grew; ud under the New Kingdom the middle classes liked to place his Satuein their houses and name their children after him. From this epoch we often see Bes represented in the mammisi of temples - that is to say, in the birth houses where divine accouchements took place. He thus presided over child caring and at Deir el Bahri he appears with Taueret and other tutelary genii beside the queen's bed as a protector of expectant mothers. He also presided over the toilet and adornment of women, who were fond of having his image carved on the handles of their mirrors, rouge boxes and scent bottles. Bedheads are also frequently found ornamented with various representations of Bes; for he was the guardian of sleep who chased away evil spirits and sent the sleeper sweet dreams. He was moreover an excellent protector not only against evil spirits but against dangerous beasts: lions, snakes, scorpions, crocodiles. Against their bite or sting the whole family could be preserved by taking care to place in the house a little stela or pillar, covered with magic formulas, on which was sculpted Bes' menacing mask above a figure of the infant Horus. standing on two crocodiles. At the end of paganism Bes was even supposed to be the protector of the dead, and for this reason became as popular as Osiris. After the triumph of Christianity Bes did not immediately vanish from the memory of man; for we are told of a wicked demon named Bes whom the holy Moses had to exorcise because he was terrorising the neighbourhood. To this day, it would seem, the monumental southern gate of Karpak serves as a dwelling-place for a knock-kneed dwarf whose gross head is embellished with a formidable beard. Woe to the stranger who. coming across him in the dusk of evening, laughs at his grotesque figure! I or the monster will leap at his throat and strangle him. He is the Bes of Ancient Egypt who, after long centuries, is not yet resigned to abandoning altogether the scenes which once witnessed his greatness. Selket Selket (Selquet) is the name of the old scorpion-Goddess who was depicted as a woman wearing on her head a scorpion, the animal sacred to her. She was also at times a scorpion with a woman's head. According to certain texts she was a daughter of Ra. She often played the role of guardian of conjugal union. At Deir el Bahri she appears with Ncith supporting the hieroglyph of the sky, above which Amon is united with the queen-mother. The two Goddesses protect the couple from all annoyance. Selket played an especial part in the ceremony of embalming. She protected the entrails and, as we shall later explain, guarded the canopic vase which contained the intestines. As we have already noticed, Selket is often found in company will I Neith, as Isis is with Nephthys. Like the other three Goddesses, Selket protected the dead, and like them we see her extending winged arms across the inner walls of sarcophagi. The Four Sons of Horus The four sons of Horus, who were members of the Third Ennead, were supposed to have been born to Isis; but it was also said that Sebek, on Ra's orders, caught them in a net and took them from the water in a lotus flower. It is on a lotus flower that they stand before the throne of Osiris during the judgment of the dead. They were appointed by their father, Horus, to guard the four cardinal points. He also charged them to watch over the heart and entrails of Osiris and to preserve Osiris from hunger and thirst. From then on they became the official protectors of viscera. Since the time of the Old Kingdom it had been usual to remove tin viscera from the corpse, to separate them and preserve them in cases or jugs called - wrongly - 'canopic' jars. Each of these was confided to the care not only of one of the four genii but also of a Goddess. Thus the human-headed Imsety watched with Isis over the vase containing the liver. The dog-headed Hapi guarded the lungs with Nephthys. The jackal-headed Duamutef with Neith protected the stomach. And the hawk-headed Qebhsnuf with Selket had chargeof the intestines. Ament Ament, whose name is a simple epithet meaning 'the Westerner,' was represented as a Goddess wearing an ostrich feather on her head or [untunes an ostrich plume and a hawk. His feather, the normal ornament of Libyans, who wore it fixed in their hair, was also the sign for the word 'Western' and was naturally suitable to Ament, who was originally the Goddess of the Libyan province to the west of Lower Egypt. Later 'the West' came to mean the Land of the Dead, and the less of the West became the Goddess of the dwelling-place Nthedead. At the gates of the World, at the entrance of the desert, one often sees the dead being welcomed by a Goddess who half-emerges the foliage of the tree she has chosen to live in to offer him bread and water. If he drinks and eats he becomes the 'friend of the Gods'and follows after them, and can never return. The deity who thus welcomes the dead is often Ament, though she may frequently ' It Nut, Hathor, Neith or Maat, who take their turn in replacing the Goddess of the West. Mertseger Mertseger (Merseger), whose name signifies 'the Friend of Silence' or'the Beloved of Him who makes Silence' (i.e. Osiris), was the . name of a snake-Goddess of the Theban necropolis. More accurately she pertained to one part of the funerary mountain at Thebes -the peak, shaped like a pyramid, which dominated the mountain chain and earned Mertseger the epithet Ta-dehnet, 'the peak.' She is represented as a human-headed snake or even as a snake ' with three heads: namely, a human head surmounted by a disk flanked by two feathers between two others: a snake's head similarly embellished and a vulture's head. Although Mertseger was beneovent she could also punish. We have the confession of Neferabu, a modest employee at the necropolis, who admitted having sinned and been justly stricken with illness. Afterwards he proclaims that he has been cured by 'the Peak of the West,' having first repented and ardently besought her forgiveness. The Judges of the Dead and the Weighing of the Soul When, thanks to the talismans placed on his mummy and especially to the passwords written on the indispensable Book of the Dead with which be was furnished, the deceased had safely crossed the terrifying stretch of country between the land of the living and the kingdom of the dead, he was immediately ushered into the presence of his sovereign judge, either by Anubis or by Horus. After he had kissed the threshold he penetrated into the 'Hall of Double Justice.' This was an immense room at the end of which sat Osiris under a naos, guarded by a frieze of coiled uraeus: Osiris, 'the Good One,' redeemer and judge who awaited his 'son who came from earth.' In the centre was erected a vast scale beside which stood Maat, Goddess of truth and justice, ready to weigh the heart of the deceased. Meanwhile Amemait, 'the Devourer' - a hybrid monster, part lion, part hippopotamus, part crocodile - crouched nearby, waiting to devour the hearts of the guilty. All around the hall, to the right and to the left of Osiris, sat forty-two personages. Dressed in their winding-sheets, each held a sharp-edged sword in his hand. Some had human heads, others the heads of animals. They were the forty-two judges, each corresponding to a province of Egypt; and each was charged with the duty of examining some special aspect of the deceased's conscience. The deceased himself began the proceedings and without hesitation recited what has been called 'the negative confession.' He addressed each of his judges in turn and called him by name to prove that he knew him and had nothing to fear. For, he affirmed, he had committed no sin and was truly pure. Then followed the weighing of his soul, or psychostasia. In one of the pans of the balance Anubis or Horus placed Maat herself, or else her ideogram, the feather, symbol of truth. In the other he placed the heart of the deceased. Thoth then verified the weight, wrote the result on his tablets and announced it to Osiris. If the two pans of the balance were in perfect equilibrium Osiris rendered favorable judgment. 'Let the deceased depart victorious. Let him go wherever he wishes to mingle freely with the Gods and the spirits of the dead.' The deceased, thus justified, would lead from then on a life of eternal happiness in the kingdom of Osiris. It is true that it would be his duty to cultivate the God's domains and keep dykes and canals in good repair. But magic permitted him to avoid all disagreeable labor. For at burial he would have been furnished with ShabtLi (Ushabtis) or 'Answerers' - those little statuettes in stone or glazed composition which have been found in tombs by the hundreds and which, when the dead man was called upon to perform some task, would hasten to take his place and do the job for him. Maat Maat is depicted as a woman standing or sitting on her heels. On her head she wears the ostrich feather which is an ideogram of her name - truth or justice. She was the Goddess of law, truth and justice. The texts describe her as the cherished daughter and confidante of Ra, and also the wife of Thoth, the judge of the Gods who was also called 'the Master of Maat.' She formed part of the retinue of Osiris, and the chamber in which the God held his tribunal was named the 'Hall of Double Justice,' for Maat was often doubled into two absolutely identical Goddesses who stood one in each extremity of the vast hall. As we have just seen, Maat also took her place in one pan of the balance opposite the heart of the dead in order to test its truthfulness. In reality Maat was a pure abstraction, deified. The Gods, it was taught, loved to nourish themselves on truth and justice. Thus, in the ritual of the cult, it was the offering of Maat which genuinely pleased them; and in the temples we see the king, at the culminating point of divine office, presenting to the God of the sanctuary a tiny image of Maat - an offering which was more agreeable to him than all the others he had received, no matter how rich they were. Neheh Neheh (Heh), 'Eternity,' is another deified abstraction. The God of eternity is represented as a man squatting on the ground in the Egyptian manner and wearing on his head a reed, curved at the end. We often see him thus, carved on furniture and other horaelj objects, holding in his hands the sign for millions of years and various emblems of happiness and longevity. MEN DEIFIED AND THE PHARAOH GOD Imhotep Imhotep, in Greek Imuthes, signifies 'He who comes in peace' Imhotep was by far the most celebrated among those ancient. sages who were admired by their contemporaries during their (tm) lifetime and after their death finally worshipped as equals of the Gods. Imhotep lived at the court of the ancient King Zoser of the third dynasty. He was Zoser's greatest architect and Zoser was the constructor of the oldest of the pyramids. During his reign, as recent discoveries have revealed, the stone column seems to have been employed for the first time in the history of architecture. By the time of the New Kingdom Imhotep was already very famous. He was reputed to have written the 'Book of Temple Foundations,' and under the Pharaohs of Sais his popularity increased from year to year. Some time later, during the Persian domination, it was claimed that Imhotep was born not of human parents but of Ptah himself. He was introduced into the Triad of Memphis with the title 'Son of Ptah,' thus displacing Nefertum. He is represented with shaven head like a priest, without the divine beard, crown or sceptre and dressed simply as a man. He is generally seated or crouching, and seems to be attentively reading from a roll of papyrus laid across his knees. He was patron of scribes and the protector of all who, like himself, were occupied with the sciences and occult arts. He became the patron of doctors. Then - for ordinary people who celebrated his miraculous cures - he became the God or, more accurately, the demi-God of medicine. He was thus identified by the Greeks with Asclepius. Towards the end of paganism Imhotep seems even to have relegated his father Ptah to second rank, and to have become the most venerated God in Memphis. Amenhotep Amenhotep, son of Hapu, whom the Greeks called Amenophis, was a minister of Amenhotep III and lived in Thebes in the fifteenth century B.C. 'A sage and an initiate of the holy book,' we are told, 'Amenhotep had contemplated the beauties of Thoth.' No man of his time better understood the mysterious science of the rites. He was remembered by the Thebans for the superb edifices he had had built. Among these, one of the most imposing was the funeral temple of the king, his master, of which to-day there remain only the two statues that embellished the facade. They are gigantic statues and one of them was renowned throughout antiquity under the name of the Colossus ofMemnon. Throughout the centuries the renown of Amenhotep continued to grow. In the Saite epoch he was considered to be a man 'who, because of his wisdom, had participated in the divine nature.' Magic books were attributed to him and miraculous stories told about him. In the temple of Karnak there vtfere statues of Amenhotep, son of Hapu, to which divine honoure were paid; but he never became a real God like Imhotep, son of Ptah. He was, however, venerated in company with the great divinities in the little Ptolemaic temple of Deir el Medineh. The old sage is generally portrayed as a scribe, crouching and holding on his knees a roll of papyrus. Pharoah Pharaoh must also be named among the Gods of Egypt; for the king's divinity formed part of the earliest dogmas. To his subjects, moreover, he was the Sun God, reigning on earth. He wore the Sun God's uraeus which spat forth flame and annihilated his enemies. All the terms which were used in speaking of him, of his palace and of his acts could apply equally to the sun. It was taught that he actually perpetuated the solar line; for, whenever there was a change of king, the God Ra married the queen, who then bore a son who, in his turn, mounted the throne of the living. In temples, and particularly those of Nubia, many ancient kings and the living king himself were often worshipped in company with the great Gods. Thus we sometimes see pictures of the reigning Pharaoh worshipping his own image. Among the countless sacred animals which, especially in later times, were worshipped in the Nile Valley we shall here give details of only the most celebrated, those who were worshipped under their own names in the temples. THE SACRED ANIMALS Apis Apis is a Greek rendering of Hapi. As the 'Bull Apis' he is to-day the best known of the sacred animals. Very popular and honoured throughout Egypt, he was tended and worshipped at Memphis, where he was called 'the Renewal of Ptah's life.' He was Ptah's sacred animal and believed to be his reincarnation. Ptah in the form of a celestial fire, it was taught, inseminated a virgin heifer and from her was himself born again in the form of a black bull which the priests could recognise by certain mystic marks. On his forehead there had to be a white triangle, on his back the figure of a vulture with outstretched wings, on his right flank a crescent moon, on his tongue the image of a scarab and, finally, the hairs of his tail must be double. As long as he lived Apis was daintily fed in the temple which the kings had had built for him in Memphis opposite the temple of Ptah. Every day at a fixed hour he was let loose in the courtyard attached to his temple, and the spectacle of his frolics attracted crowds of the devout. It also drew the merely curious; for a visit to the sacred animals was a great attraction for the tourists who were so numerous in Egypt during the Graeco-Roman era. Each of his movements was interpreted as foretelling the future; and when Germanicus died it was remembered that the bull, shortly before this, had refused to eat the delicacies which Germanicus had offered him. Normally Apis was allowed to die of old age. Ammianus Marcel-linus, however, tells us that if he lived beyond a certain age he was drowned in a fountain. During the Persian tyranny the sacred bull was twice assassinated, by Cambyses and by Ochus. Space is lacking to describe how the Egyptians mourned the death of Apis, and their transports of joy at the announcement that his successor had been found. We should also have liked to describe the vast subterranean chambers discovered in 1850 at Saqqarah where the mummified bodies of the sacred bulls were, after splendid funeral services, buried in immense monolithic sarcophagi of sandstone or pink granite. Above these underground galleries arose a great temple of which to-day nothing remains. In Latin it was called the Serapeum. Here the funeral cult of the dead bull was celebrated. He had become, like all the dead, an 'Osiris' and was worshipped under the name Osiris Apis. This in Greek was Osorapis, which caused him quickly to be confused with the foreign God Serapis, who was worshipped according to a purely Greek ritual in the great Serapeum at Alexandria. A God of the underworld, Serapis was confused at Memphis with Osorapis and was worshipped with Osorapis in his funerary temple. Due to this confusion the temple was thenceforth called Serapeum. Other Sacred Bulls To be brief we shall only enumerate the three other important bulls of Egypt. Mneuis Mneuis is the Greek rendering of Merwer, the Bull of Meroe also called Menuis. He was the bull sacred to Ra Atum at Heliopolis. It seems that he was of a light colour, although Plutarch speaks of his black hide. Buchis Buchis, the Greek for Bukhe, was the bull sacred to Menthu at Hermonthis. According to Macrobius, the hair of his hide, which changed colour every hour, grew in the opposite direction from that of an ordinary animal. The great vaults where the mummies of Buchis were buried were discovered near Armant by Robert Mond, who in 1927 had already found the tombs of the cows which bore these sacred bulls. Onuphis Onuphis, the Greek rendering of Aa Nefer, 'the very good,' ' was the bull in which the soul of Osiris was said to be incarnated, as Ra Atum re-appeared in Mneuis and Mont was re-embodied in Buchis. Petesuchos Petesuchos is the Greek rendering of an Egyptian word meaning 'he who belongs to Suchos' (or Sebek). He was the sacred crocodile in which was incarnated the soul of Sebek, the great God of the Fayyum who had his chief sanctuary in Crocodilopolis, the capital of the province, which was called Arsinoe from the time of the second Ptolemy. At Crocodilopolis, in a lake dug out near the great temple, Petesuchos was venerated. He was an old crocodile who wore * golden rings in his ears. His devotees riveted bracelets to his forelegs. Other crocodiles, also sacred, composed his family and were fed nearby. In the Graeco-Roman era the crocodiles of Arsinoe were a great attraction for tourists. Strabo tells us how in the reign of Augustus he paid a visit to Petesuchos. 'He is fed,' Strabo writes, 'with the bread, meat and wine which strangers always bring when they come to see him. Our friend and host, who was one of the notabilities of the place and who took us everywhere, came to the lake with us, having saved from our luncheon a cake, a piece of the roast and a small flagon of honey. We met the crocodile on the shore of the lake. Priests approached him and while one of them held open his jaws another put in the cake and the meat and poured in the honey-wine. After that the animal dived into the lake and swam towards the opposite shore. Another visitor arrived, also bringing his offering. The priests ran round the lake with the food he had * brought and fed it to the crocodile in the same manner..' For many centuries no one has worshipped Petesuchos, but in the center of Africa those who dwell on the southern shores of Lake Victoria-Nyanza today still venerate Lutembi, an old crocodile who for generations has come to the shore each morning and evening at the call of the fishermen to receive from their hands the fish they offer him. Like Petesuchos of old, the crocodile Lutembi has become a profitable source of revenue for his votaries. For, since many people come to see him out of curiosity, the natives demand a fee for calling him to the shore and make the visitor pay well for the fish they give him. Sacred Rams were also very popular in Egypt. Chief among them was Ba Neb Djedet, 'the soul of the lord of Djedet,' a name which in popular speech was contracted into Banaded and in Greek rendered as Mendes. In him was incarnated the soul of Osiris, and the story which Herodotus brought back about the ram - which he wrongly calls 'the He-goat of Mendes' - confirms the veneration in which this sacred animal was held. Thoth himself, said his priests, had formerly decreed that the kings should come with offerings to the 'living ram.' Otherwise infinite misfortune would spread among men. When Banaded died there was general mourning; on the other hand immense rejoicing greeted the announcement that a new ram had been discovered, and great festivals were held in order to celebrate the enthronement of this king of Egyptian animals. Bennu The Bird Bennu must also be mentioned among the sacred animals; for, though he was purely legendary, the ancients did not doubt his reality. Worshipped at Heliopolis as the soul of Osiris, he was also connected with the cult of Ra and was perhaps even a secondary form of Ra. He is identified, though not with certainty, with the Phoenix who, according to Herodotus' Heliopolitan guides, resembled the eagle in shape and size, while Bennu was more like a lapwing or a heron. The Phoenix, it was said, appeared in Egypt only once every five hundred years. When the Phoenix was born in the depths of Arabia he flew swiftly to the temple of Heliopolis with the body of his father which, coated with myrrh, he there piously buried. CONCLUSION Much more remains to be said on the subject of the sacred animals. In most sanctuaries the God or Goddess of the locality was supposed to be incarnate in the animal kept: a cat in the temple of Bast, a falcon or an ibis in the temple of Horus or Thoth. In addition, popular superstition in later times so grew that every individual of the species of animal in whose body the provincial God was incarnate was regarded as sacred by the inhabitants of that province. It was forbidden to eat them, and to kill one was a heinous crime. Since, however, different nomes venerated different animals it could happen that a certain species which was the object of a cult in one province was mercilessly hunted in the neighbouring province. This sometimes gave rise to fratricidal wars such as that which, in the first century of the Christian era, broke out between the Cynopolitans and the Oxyrhynchites. The latter had killed and eaten dogs to avenge themselves on the former for having eaten an oxyrhynchid. a kind of spider crab. Plutarch writes: 'In our days, the Cynopolitans having eaten a crab, the Oxyrhynchites took dogs and sacrificed them and ate their flesh like that of immolated victims. Thus arose a bloody war between the two peoples which the Romans put an end to after severely punishing both.' Certain animals - cats, hawks, ibis were venerated all over Egypt and to kill them was punishable by death. 'When one of these animals is concerned,' writes Diodorus, 'he who kills one. be it accidentally or maliciously, is put to death. The populace flings itself on him and cruelly maltreats him, usually before he can be tried and judged. Superstition towards these sacred animals is deeply rooted in the Egyptian's soul, and devotion to their cult is passionate. In the days when Ptolemy Auletes was not yet allied to the Romans and the people of Egypt still hastened to welcome all visitors from Italy and, for fear of the consequences, carefully avoided any occasion for complaint or rupture, a Roman killed a cat. The populace crowded to the house of the Roman who had committed this "murder"; and neither the efforts of magistrates sent by the king to protect him nor the universal fear inspired by the might of Rome could avail to save the man's life, though what he had done was admitted to be accidental. This is not an incident which I report from hearsay, but something I saw myself during my sojourn in Egypt.' Cats, indeed, were so venerated that when a building caught fire the Egyptians, Herodotus tells us, would neglect the fire in order to rescue these animals whose death to them seemed more painful than any other loss they might sustain. When one of the sacred animals died it was considered an act of great merit to provide for its funeral; and in certain cases, such as the bull Apis, the king himself made it his duty to take charge of the obsequies. Pity for dead animals reached an almost unbelievable degree. To give an idea of this it may be mentioned that crocodile ccmeteries have been discovered where the reptiles were carefully mummified and buried with their newly bom and even with their eggs. Animals, birds, fish, reptiles of all kinds that were venerated by the ancient inhabitants of the Nile valley were interred by the hundreds of thousands. An example of the abundance of these corpses can be found at Beni Hasan, where the cats' cemetery has been commercially exploited for the extraction of artificial fertiliser. Herodotus did not exaggerate when he wrote that the Egyptians were the most religious of men. A LIST OF ANIMALS WHOSE HEADS APPEAR ON EGYPTIAN DIVINITIES The following is a table, in alphabetical order, of those animals whose heads were borne by certain Gods. Only the Gods mentioned in this study are listed. We have omitted the countless genii and lesser divinities who on tomb decorations and in illustrations of funerary papyri were also represented with animal heads. Bull: Osorapis See also: Apis, Mont Cat: Bast perhaps, Mut Cow: Hathor, Isis when identified with Hathor See also Nut Crocodile: Sebek Dog-faced ape: Hapi, Thoth at times Donkey: Set (in later times) Falcon: Ra-Harakhte, Horus, Mont, Khons Hor, Qebhsnuf Frog: Heket Hippopotamus: Taueret Ibis: Thoth. Jackal: Anubis, Duamutef. Lion: Nefertum, sometimes Lioness: Sekhmet, Tefnut (sometimes Mut and Renenet) Ram with curved horns: Amon Ram with wavy horns: Khnum, Hershef or Harsaphes Scarab: Khepri. Scorpion: Selket Serpent: Buto See also Mertseger and Renenet Uracus: See Serpent Vulture: Nekhebet Wolf: Upuaut, Khenti Amenti Indeterminate animal called the Typhonian Animal: Set i Bnk note: sounds like rape to me, but then it is coming from the perspective of male historians.