phenomena, but the phenomena were also spiritual as well as physical, the one god being ultimately worshipped as the holy spirit. Both categories of the gods and the glorified were, so to speak, combined and blended in the one person of Atum-Ra, who imaged the highest elemental power as soul of the sun in the mythology, and was divinized as Ra the holy spirit, the ghost of ghosts, in the Egyptian eschatology. The reappearing human spirit thus supplied the type of an eternal spirit that was divinized and worshipped as the Holy Ghost in Egypt and in Rome.

Maspero has said of Egypt that she never accepted the idea of the one sole god beside whom there is none other (The Dawn of Civilization, Eng. tr., p. 152). But here the "one god" is a phrase. What is meant by the phrase? Which, or who, is the one god intended? Every description applied to the one god in the Hebrew writings was pre-extant in the Egyptian. Atum-Ra declares that he is the one god, the one just or righteous god, the one living god, the one god living in truth. He is Unicus, the sole and only one (Rit., chs. 2 and 17), beside whom there is none other; only, as the later Egyptians put it, he is the only one from whom all other powers in nature were derived in the earlier types of deity. When Atum is said to be "the Lord of oneness," that is but another way of calling him the one god and of recognizing the development and unification of the one supreme god from the many, and acknowledging the birth of monotheism from polytheism, the culmination of manifold powers in one supreme power, which was in accordance with the course of evolution. In the Ritual (ch. 62) the Everlasting is described as Neb-Huhi Nuti Terui-f, the Eternal Lord, he who is without limit. And, again, the infinite god is portrayed as he who dilates without limit, or who is the god of limitless dilation, Fu-nen-tera, as a mode of describing the infinite by means of the illimitable. And it is this Nen-tera that we claim to be at the root of the word Nnuter or Nûter. Here the conception is nothing so indefinite or general as that of power. Without limit is beyond the finite, and consequently equal to the infinite. Teru also signifies time. The name, therefore, conveyed the conception of beyond time. Thus Nnuter (or Nuter) denoted the illimitable and eternal in one, which is something more expressive than mere power. Power is of course included, and the Nuter sign, the stone axe, is a very primitive sign of power.

Of this one supreme god it is said in the Hymn to the Nile or to Osiris, as "the water of renewal": "He careth for the state of the poor. He maketh his might a buckler. He is not graven in marble. He is not beheld. He hath neither ministrants nor offerings. He is not adored in sanctuaries. No shrine is found with painted figures. There is no building that can contain him. He doth not manifest his forms. Vain are all representations." (Records of the Past, vol. iv.) Also, in the hymn to the hidden god Amen-Ra, a title of Atum, he is saluted as "the one in his works," "the one alone with many hands, lying awake while all men sleep to seek out or consider the good of his creatures," the one maker of existence," "the one alone without a peer," "king alone, single among the gods" (Records of the Past, vol. ii., 129). Surely this is equivalent to the one god with none beside him, so far as language can go. The Egyptians had all

that ever went to the making of the one god, only they built on foundations that were laid in nature, and did not begin en l'air with an idea of the "sole god" in any abstract way. Their one god was begotten before he was conceived. Egypt did not accept the idea. She evolved and revealed it from the only data in existence, including those of phenomenal spiritualism which supplied the idea of a holy ghost that was divinized in the likeness of the human--the only data, as matter of fact, from which the concept could have ever been evolved; and but for the Egyptians, neither Jews nor Christians. would have had a god at all, either as the one, or three, or three-inone. There is no beginning anywhere with the concept of a "one god" as male ideationally evolved. But for thousands of years before the era called Christian the Egyptians had attained the idea, and were trying to express it, of the one god who was the one soul of life, the one self-generating, self-sustaining force, the one mind manifesting in all modes of phenomena; the self-existent one, the almighty one, the eternal one; the pillar of earth, the ark of heaven, the backbone of the universe, the bread of heaven and water of life; the Ka of the human soul, the way, the truth, the resurrection, and the life everlasting; the one who made all things, but himself was not made.

But, once more, what is the idea of the one god as a Christian concept? The one god of the Christians is a father manifesting through one historic son by means of a virgin Jewess. Whereas the father was the one god of the Egyptians in the cult of Atum-Ra which was extant before the monuments began ten thousand years ago. Only, the son of the one god in Egypt was not historic nor limited to an individual personality. It was the divine nature manifesting as the soul of both sexes in humanity. The one god of the Christians is a trinity of persons consisting of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and these three constituted the one god in the religion which is at least as old as the coffin of Men-Ka-Ra, who is called "Osiris living eternally, king of the double earth," nearly six thousand years ago.

Finally, in the Egyptian theology Osiris is Neb-Ua, the one and only lord. All previous powers were united in his power. Where Ra had seventy-two names denoting his attributes, Osiris has over hundred and fifty. All that was recognized as beneficent in nature was summarized in Osiris. All the superhuman powers previously extant were combined and blended in the final form of the all-in-one -the motherhood included. For in the trinity of Osiris, Horus, and Ra, which three are one, the first person is imaged in the likeness of both sexes. Osiris as male with female mammæ is a figure of the nourisher and source of life, who had been from the beginning when the mother was the "only one." The one god of the Egyptian theology culminated as the eternal power of evolution, reproduction, transformation, renewal, and rebirth from death to life, on earth in food, and to a life of the soul that is perpetuated in the spirit. The oneness of the godhead unified from all the goddesses and gods was finally compounded in this supreme one inclusive deity, in whom all others were absorbed-Horus and Sut, as twins of light and darkness; the seven elemental powers, as the seven souls;

Nnu, father of the celestial water, as the water of renewal in Osiris; Seb, the father of food on earth, as the father of divine food or bread of heaven in Amenta. The mother and father were combined in Ptah as the one parent. Atum-Horus assumed the form of man, as son of Seb on earth; Osiris-Sekeri that of the mummy in Amenta, as god the ever-living in matter; and Ra, bird-headed, as an image of the holy spirit. Horus the elder was the manifestor as the eternal child of Isis the virgin mother and his foster-father Seb, the god of earth; and at his second advent in Amenta Horus became the son of the father in heaven as a final character in the Osirian drama. Taht gave place to Osiris in the moon, Ptah to Osiris in the Tat, Anup to Osiris as the guide of ways at the pole. It is said in the Hymn to Osiris that "he contains the double ennead of the double land." He is "the principle of abundance in Annu"; he gives the water of renewal in the Nile, the breath of life in the blessed breezes of the north, the bread of life in the grain. And, lastly, he is the food that never perishes; the god who gives his own body and blood as the sacramental sustenance of souls; the Bull of Eternity who is reincorporated periodically as the calf, or, under the anthropomorphic type, as Horus the ever reincarnating, ever-coming child who rose up from the dead to image an eternal soul. Such was the god in whom the all at last was unified in oneness and as One.

EGYPTIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD AND THE MYSTERIES

OF AMENTA

BOOK IV

The Egyptian Book of the Dead contains the oldest known religious writings in the world. As it comes to us it is mainly Osirian, but the Osirian group of gods was the latest of all the divine dynasties, although these, as shown at Abydos (by Prof. Flinders Petrie), will account for some ten thousand years of time in Egypt. The antiquity of the collection is not to be judged by the age of the coffins in which the papyrus rolls were found. Amongst other criteria of length in time the absence of Amen, Maut, and Khunsu supplies a gauge. The presence and importance of Tum affords another, whilst the persistence of Apt and her son Sebek-Horus tells a tale of times incalculably remote.

As a key to the mysteries and the method of the book it must be understood at starting that the eschatology or doctrine of Last Things was founded in the mould of the mythology, and that the one can only be unravelled by means of the other. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence to prove that the Ritual was based on the mythology, and not the mythology upon the Ritual. The serpent, of darkness, was the evil reptile in mythology. In theology it becomes the deluder of mankind. Here the beginning was with darkness itself, which was the deceiver from the first. The serpent, being a figure of darkness, was continued by theology as the official adversary of souls in the eschatological domain. The eschatology of the Ritual, then, can only be comprehended by means of the mythology. And it is the mythos out of view that has made the Ritual so profoundly difficult to understand. Reading it may be compared with a dance seen by a deaf man who does not hear the music to which the motion is timed, and who has no clue to the characters being performed in the dumb drama. You cannot understand what they are doing and saying as Manes in another world without knowing what was thought and said by human beings in this concerning that representation of the nature powers, the gods and goddesses, which constitutes mythology.

Amenta is a huge fossil formation crowded with the dead forms of a past life in which the horny conspectuities of learned ignorance will only see dead shells for a modern museum. As a rule, Egypt is always treated differently from the rest of the world. No Egyptologist has ever dreamed that the Ritual still exists under the

source.

disguise of both the gnostic and canonical gospels, or that it was the fountain-head and source of all the books of wisdom claimed to be divine. In the mythology-that is, in the primitive mode of rendering the phenomena of external nature-Osiris as light-giver in the moon was torn in fourteen pieces during the latter half of the lunation by the evil Sut, the opposing power of darkness. He was put together again and reconstituted by his son, beloved Horus, the young solar god. This representation could not have been made until it was known that the lunar light was replenished monthly from the solar Then Horus as the sun god and the vanquisher of Sut, the power of darkness, could be called the reconstituter of Osiris in the moon. In that way a foundation was laid in natural fact according to the science of mythology, and a mystery bequeathed to the eschatology which is doctrinal. For as it had been with the dismembered, mutilated god in the mythos, so it is with the Osiris deceased, who has to be reconstructed for a future life and put together bit by bit as a spiritual body in one of the great mysteries of Amenta. In the mythos Har-Makhu was the solar god of both. horizons, or the double equinox, who represented the sun of to-day that rose up from the nether world as conqueror of darkness to join the west and east together on the Mount of Glory, as the connecting link of continuity in time betwixt yesterday and to-morrow. The type was continued in the eschatology, when Har-Makhu became the Horus of the greater mysteries, Horus of the religious legend who suffered, died, and was buried in Amenta, and who rose again from the dead like the winter sun, as Horus in spirit, lifting aloft the insignia of his sovereignty. This was he who made the pathway, not merely betwixt the two horizons, but to eternal life, as son of Ra, the holy spirit in the eschatology. The intermediate link in the mythos, which "connects the solar orb with yesterday," is now the intermediary betwixt the two worlds and two lives in time and eternity. This is he who exclaims, "I am the link! I am the everlasting one! I am Horus who steppeth onwards through eternity” (Rit., ch. 42.) This was he who, in the words of the gnostic Paul, "broke down the wall of partition" and "made both one," "that he might create in himself one new man" and "reconcile them both in one body," even as the double Horus, Har-Sam-Taui, was made one when blended and established as one person in another mystery of Amenta (Rit., ch. 42).

The mythology repeated in the Ritual is mainly solar and Osirian, but with glimpses of the lunar and the stellar mythos from the beginning. For example, Apt the ancient genetrix, as goddess of the Great Bear constellation, and leader of the heavenly host, was the kindler of the starry sparks by night in the mythology. In the eschatology she is continued as the mistress of divine protections for the soul, and she who had been the kindler of the lights in the darkness of night was now propitiated as rekindler of life from the spark in the dark of death (Rit., ch. 137B). Ra in the mythos is the solar god represented by the sun in heaven, and in the eschatology he became the god in spirit who is called the holy spirit and first person in the trinity which consisted of Atum the father god, Horus the son, and Ra the holy spirit; the three that were also one