Lecture VIII. The Sacred Books. 181
living sun-god of day that he voyages along the infernal river,
but as“the flesh of Ra”—that is to say, as that mortal part of
his nature which alone could die and enter the realm of the dead.
The river is a duplicate of the Nile, with its strip of bank on
either side, its fields and cities, even its nomes, wherein the god,
like the Pharaoh, assigns land and duties to his followers. For
the followers of Ra have a very different lot before them from
that which awaited the followers of Osiris. There was no land of
everlasting light and happiness to which they could look forward, [197]
nor was their destiny hereafter dependent on their conduct in this
life. Their supreme end was to accompany the sun-god in his
bark as he passed each night through the twelve regions of the
dead, and this could be attained only by a knowledge of the ritual
of Am Duat and the mystic formulæ it contained. Few, however,
of those who started with the sun-god on his nocturnal voyage
remained with him to the last; most of them were stopped in
the regions through which he passed, where fields were granted
them whose produce they might enjoy, and where each night for
a single hour they formed as it were a bodyguard around the god
and lived once more in the light. Even the kings of Upper and
Lower Egypt were condemned to dwell for ever in this gloomy
Hades, along with Osiris and the Khû or luminous souls of an
earlier faith. Those who were happy enough by virtue of their
knowledge and spells to emerge with Ra into the dawn of a
new day, henceforth had their home in the solar bark, and were
absorbed into the person of the god.
But it was not only the friends and followers of Ra who thus
accompanied him in his journey through the other world; his
enemies were there also, and the horrible punishments they had
to endure, as depicted on the walls of the royal tombs, were
worthy of the imagination of a Dante. The banks of the infernal
river were lined with strange and terrible monsters, some of them
the older deities and spirits of the popular creed, others mere
creations of symbolism, others creatures of composite form to