55
laid down that“if an ox gore a man or a woman that they die,
then the ox shall be surely stoned”; and similar penalties were
enforced against animals which had injured man, not only in the
Middle Ages, but even in the eighteenth century. Thus a pig was
burned at Fontenay-aux-Roses, in 1266, for having devoured a
child; and in 1389 a horse was brought to trial at Dijon for the
murder of a man, and condemned to death. In Brazil, in 1713, an
action was brought against the ants who had burrowed under the
foundations of a monastery, and, after counsel had been heard
on both sides, they were solemnly condemned to banishment by
the judge; while, in 1685, the bell of the Protestant chapel at
La Rochelle was first scourged for having abetted heresy, then
catechised and made to recant, and finally baptized.^22
The early Egyptians were not more enlightened than the
orthodox theologians of La Rochelle. For them, too, action must
have implied life, and the distinction between object and subject
had not yet been realised. Hence the belief that objects as well
as persons had each its Ka, a belief which was strengthened by
the fact that they all alike cast shadows before them, as well as
the further belief that the nature of the Ka was in either case the
same. Hence it was, moreover, that theushebti-figures and other
sepulchral furniture were broken in order that their Kas might be
released from them, and so accompany the Ka of the dead man [058]
in his wanderings in the other world. As life and the power of
movement deserted the corpse of the dead man as soon as his Ka
was separated from it, so too the Ka of theushebtipassed out of
it when its form was mutilated by breakage. The life that was in
it had departed, as it were, into another world.
It is even possible that the very wordKahad originally a
connection with a root signifying“to live.”At any rate, it was
identical in spelling with a word which denoted“food”; and
that the pronunciation of the two words was the same, may be
(^22) Baring Could,Curiosities of Olden Times, 2nd ed., p. 57 sqq.