Lecture VIII. The Sacred Books. 185
it is by passing through the hands of Nut, the sky, who stands
on the body of Osiris,“which encircles the other world.”Nor
is the serpent Apophis, the enemy of Ra, confounded with Set;
his overthrow by Tum takes place in the first hour, before the
tribunal of Osiris is reached.
The theology of the two books resembles the Taoism of China
in its identification of religion with the knowledge of magical
formulæ. The moral element which distinguished the Osirian
faith has disappeared, and salvation is made to depend on the
knowledge of a mystical apocalypse. Only the rich and cultivated
have henceforth a chance of obtaining it. And even for them
the prospect was dreary enough. A few—the innermost circle
of disciples—might look forward to absorption into the sun-god,
which practically meant a loss of individuality; for the rest there
was only a world of darkness and inaction, where all that made
life enjoyable to the Egyptian was absent. The author of the
Book of the Gates gives expression to the fact when he tells us
that as the last gate of the other world closes behind the sun-god,
the souls who are left in darkness groan heavily. To such an end
had the learned theology of Egypt brought both the people and
their gods!
We need not wonder that under the influence of such teaching
the intellectual classes fell more and more into a hopeless
scepticism, which saw in death the loss of all that we most
prize here below. On the one side, we have sceptical treatises [202]
like the dialogue between the jackal and the Ethiopian cat, where
the cat, who represents the old-fashioned orthodoxy, has by far
the worst of the argument;^162 on the other side, the dirge on the
death of the wife of the high priest of Memphis, which I have
quoted in an earlier lecture—
“The underworld is a land of thick darkness,(^162) Revue égyptologique, i. 4, ii. 3 (1880, 1881), where an account of the
demotic story is given by E. Révillout.