The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

208 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

Inside the shrine is a picture of the two relics, the cobra
which adorned the head-dress of the Pharaoh, and theaartor
lock of hair which was supposed to give its name to the temple.
They were doubtless preserved at At-Nebes, and shown to the
faithful as the veritable objects which had proved the bane and
the antidote of the god Seb. They introduce us to a side of
Egyptian religion which, though essentially characteristic of the
popular faith, had also received the sanction of the official creed.
The belief in amulets and charms was too deeply engrained in
the popular mind to be ignored; they were consequently taken
under the patronage of the gods, and a theory was invented to
explain their efficacy. Already the later chapters of the Book
of the Dead are concerned with the various amulets which were
[227] necessary to the preservation or resuscitation of the body; and
even if the latter were regarded as symbolic, they were concrete
symbols—symbols, that is to say, which actually possessed the
virtues ascribed to them. Just as the name was a concrete entity,
expressive of the very essence of the thing to which it was applied,
so too the symbol was an entity with a concrete existence of its
own. The materialistic tendency of Egyptian thought, added to
the fetishism of the earlier stratum of native religion, produced
this result. The doctrine of the Ka furnished a theory by which the
educated classes could explain the efficacy of the amulet and the
active virtues of the symbol. It was the Ka, the spiritual and yet
materialised double, of the amulet that worked the charm—that
made the scarab, for instance, a substitute for the living heart,
or thedad—the symbol of stability—a passport to the other
world.^181

(^181) Cf. the 155th chapter of the Book of the Dead: “These words must be
spoken over a gildeddad, which is made from the heart of a sycamore and
hung round the neck of the dead. Then shall he pass through the gates of
the other world.”When this chapter was written, however, the real origin of
thedad—a row of four columns—had been forgotten, and it was imagined to
represent the backbone of Osiris. We are transported by it into the full bloom
of religious symbolism.