Lecture VIII. The Sacred Books. 183
were too stereotyped to be ignored or altered, and the solar bark
is accordingly made to pass above the primitive Hades, the [199]
voices of whose inhabitants are heard rising up in an indistinct
murmur though their forms are concealed from view. A memory
is preserved even of the sandy desert of Giza and Saqqâra, where
the inhabitants of Memphis were buried, and over which Sokaris
ruled as lord of the dead. The realm of Sokaris is pictured as an
enclosure of sand, flanked on either side by a half-buried sphinx.
The author of the Book of Am Duat has dealt with the heaven
of Osiris as he has done with the Hades of Sokaris. Osiris and his
paradise have been transported bodily to the nocturnal path of the
sun-god, and condemned to receive what little light is henceforth
allowed them from the nightly passage of the solar bark. Thoth
guides the bark to the city which contains the tomb of Osiris,
that mysterious house wherein are the four human forms of the
god. On the way the serpent Neha-hir has to be overcome; he
is but another form of the serpent Apophis, the enemy of Ra,
who thus takes the place of Set, the enemy of Osiris. When
the sixth region is passed, which is a sort of vestibule to the
“retreat”of Osiris in the seventh, other enemies of Osiris—of
whom, however, the Osirian doctrine knew but little—are being
put to death in true solar fashion. Perhaps the most noteworthy
fact in this description of the kingdom of Osiris is, that not only
all the gods of the Osirian cycle are relegated to it, including the
hawk Horus, but also the Khû or luminous manes and the ancient
kings of Upper and Lower Egypt. The fact points unmistakably
to the great antiquity of the Osirian creed. It went back to a
time when as yet the Egyptian monarchy was not united, and
when thekhûor luminous soul held the same place in Egyptian
thought as had been held at an earlier time by thekaand later by
the soul orba. So undoubted was the fact that the old Pharaohs [200]
of primeval Egypt had died in the Osirian faith, that the author
of the Book of Am Duat could not disregard it; he was forced
to place the predecessors of a Seti or a Ramses, for whom the