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The Khu thus forms a link between men and the gods, and
participates in the divine nature. It is the soul regarded as a
godlike essence, as coming down from heaven rather than as
mounting up towards it. It is not only disembodied, but needs the
body no longer; it belongs to the Ka, which still lives and moves,
and not to the mummified corpse from which the vital spark has
fled. It waits on the god of the dead, not on the dead themselves.
It seems probable, therefore, that in the part of Egypt in
which the doctrine of the Khu grew up, mummification was not
practised; and the probability is strengthened by the fact that,
before the rise of the Third Dynasty, embalming was apparently [062]
not frequent in Upper Egypt, even in the case of the kings. But,
however this may be, one thing is certain. The conception of the
Khu cannot have originated in the same part of the country, or
perhaps among the same element in the population, as a parallel
but wholly inconsistent conception which eventually gained the
predominance. According to this conception, the imperishable
part of man which, like the Ka, passed after death into the other
world, was the Ba or“soul.”Like the Khu, the Ba was pictured as
a bird; but the bird is usually given a human head and sometimes
human hands.^29 But, while the Khu was essentially divine, the Ba
was essentially human. It is true that the Ba, as well as the Khu,
was assigned to the gods—Ra of Heliopolis was even credited
with seven; but whereas man possessed a Khu or luminous soul
because he was likened to the gods, the gods possessed a Ba
because they were likened to men.
The relation between the two is brought out very clearly in the
philosophy of the so-called Hermetic books, which endeavoured
to translate the theology of Egypt into Greek thought. There
we are told that the Khu is the intelligence (Ωøʬ), of which
the Ba or soul (»≈«u) is as it were the envelope. As long as
(^29) From the fifteenth to the eleventh centuryB.C.{FNS, it was fashionable to
substitute for the bird a beetle with a ram's head, the phonetic value of the
hieroglyph of ram beingba, and that of the beetlekheper,“to become.”