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individualized on earth. This was the man of flesh who was born, not begotten; the man who descended from the mother only—that is, totemic man, who was shaped by the apprentice hands of the seven powers, together with their mother, and who preceded the supreme being. The first-formed Adam was of the earth earthy, of the flesh fleshly, the man of matter the mother. This was the origin of an opposition betwixt the flesh and spirit, the man of earth and the man from heaven, which led to a doctrine of natural depravity and pollution of the flesh when compared with the purity of spirit. The doctrine of natural depravity did not originate in the moral domain, it originated in matter considered to be at enmity with the spirit. The cause of this depravity in the flesh was ascribed to the woman after the soul or spirit had been assigned to the fatherhood. The mother was the maker of flesh from her own blood or the red earth, and in one particular phase the blood of the woman was held to be vile and filthy. Job asks, "How can man be clean that is born of a woman?" (xxv. 4). But this "depravity" was a result of confounding the blood as virgin source of life with the menstrualia. There is a hint of the doctrine in the Ritual. In the chapter "whereby one cometh forth to day from Amenta," the manes says, "Shine thou on me, O gracious power; as I draw nigh to the divine words which my ears shall hear in the Tuat, let no pollution of my mother be upon me." The speaker is making his transformations into the glorious body of a manes who will be perfected in becoming pure spirit, which is the antithesis of the earthly body that was made flesh in the blood of the mother. "Let no pollution of my mother be upon me" is equivalent to saying, "Deliver me from all fleshliness of the old earth life." Here, however, the utterer of this prayer is one of the manes who has risen in the shape of the old body, but changed in texture, and who is desirous of being purified and perfected in the likeness of the holy spirit, which is personalized in Amenta as Horus, the anointed son of god the father. A hundred times over one sees how these utterances pertaining to Amenta have been perverted through being assigned to human beings in the life on earth.

The additional features added by the Semites to the original version of the mythos consist in the introduction of a primal pair of mortals eating the forbidden fruit; the temptation and seduction of the woman by the deceiving serpent; the turning of the woman into the tempter of the man; the criminality of the first parents, who lost the world and damned the race before a child was born; the creation of an original sin which was destined to overshadow the human family with an antenatal cloud of guilt and of hereditary depravity, and thus prepare the way and the need for the Christian scheme of redemption to regain a paradisaical condition which was never lost and never had existed. These were the crowning achievements of those who falsified the teachings of the Egyptians. Nothing could better illustrate the difference between the two versions than the opposite treatment of work. In the biblical travesty the curse is to come to the man in the shape of work and to the woman with the labour pangs of maternity. Whereas in the Ritual work is the blessing and the workers in Aarru are the blessed. They cultivate their own allotted portions in the field of divine harvest, and may be said to

make their way and win their other world by work. For the Egyptian could find his heaven in the satisfaction of accomplished work. Again, if we take Ani and his wife, Tutu, as representatives of the pair, once human, and now manes, in the garden, we shall find that so far from the "woman" having been the cause of a fall in the Egyptian Genesis, so far from her having been an agent of the evil serpent, or of Satan, as the Christian fathers ignorantly alleged and brutally maintained, she, the only one who ever had been a woman in this or in other forms of the pair, is portrayed as defender of the man all through the trials and temptations that beset him in his passage through the nether world. She is his guide and protector. She propitiates the powers with offerings on his behalf. She makes his. music and his magic all the way.

The pair in Eden or the earthly paradise fulfil two characters in the Kamite myth and eschatology. They are either two of the gods, as Atum and Kefa (Kep), or two of the glorified, as Ani and Tutu. But in neither are the male and female in the garden a pair of human beings; both as the gods and the glorified they are supramundane and doubly non-human. Finally, if the "fall" had ever been a veritable fact, the subsequent history of man might be summed up as one long, vast, unceasing, vain endeavour to remedy the disaster and the failure that befell the divine government of the universe in such a helpless way as would destroy all future trust. The vessel would have been lost in the act of being launched, and not a hand reached forth to save the victims until some nineteen centuries ago, when God himself is said to have come down in person for a long-belated rescue of shipwrecked humanity. Semitic story of the fall is false, and the scheme of redemption founded on it is consequently fraudulent. As it comes to us, the book of Genesis is based on misappropriated legends. It is responsible for an utterly erroneous account of creation and the origin of evil, and its damnation of the race through Adam's fall is the sole ground on which the Christian world can now find foothold for its coming Saviour. And, however long or however short a time the imposition lasts,

"The same old lie, for ever told anew,

Will never serve to make the falsehood true."

But the

THE EGYPTIAN WISDOM IN OTHER JEWISH

WRITINGS

BOOK VIII

THE Kamite mythos of the old lost garden may be seen transforming into Hebrew legendary lore when Ezekiel describes an Eden that was sunk and buried in the lowermost parts of the earth. "Thus saith the Lord... When I cast him (Pharaoh) down to Sheol with them that descend into the pit: and all the trees of Eden, . . . and all that drink water were comforted in the nether parts of the earth. . . .” "To whom art thou thus like in glory and in greatness among the trees of Eden? Yet shalt thou be brought down with the trees of Eden into the nether parts of the earth; thou shalt lie in the midst of the uncircumcised." (Ez. xxxi. 15, 16, 18.) This is the garden of Eden in Sheol, and Sheol is a Semitic version of the Egyptian Amenta. That is why the lost Gan-Eden is to be found in the nether parts of the earth as an outcast of the later theology.

When the word Sheol in the Old Testament is rendered in English by "the grave," it is inadequate times out of number. The Hebrew writers were not always speaking or thinking of the grave when they wrote of Sheol, which has to be bottomed in Amenta, the divine nether-earth, not simply in the tomb. The grave is not identical with hell, nor the pit-hole with the bottomless pit. The pangs and sorrows of Sheol, like the purging pangs of the Romish purgatory, have to be studied in the Egyptian Ritual. Many of the moanings and the groanings in the Psalms are the utterances of Osiris or the Osiris suffering in Amenta. They are the cries for assistance in Sheol. The appeals in the house of bondage for help from on high, and for deliverance from afflictions and maladies more than human, were uttered in Amenta before they were heard in Sheol, and the Psalmist who first wrote the supplications on behalf of the manes was known as the divine scribe Taht before the Psalms in Hebrew were ascribed to David. The speaker of Psalm xvi. is talking pure Egyptian doctrine in Amenta concerning his soul and body when he says, "My flesh shall dwell in safety, for thou wilt not leave my soul in Sheol; neither wilt thou suffer thy holy one to see corruption; thou wilt show me the path of life; in thy presence is the fulness of joy, in thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore." As we see from the Ritual, this is the manes expressing his confidence in the duration of his personality, the persistence of his sahu or mummy-soul in

Amenta, and his hope of being vivified for ever by the Holy Spirit and led along the pathway of eternal life by Horus the Redeemer to the right hand of his father, Atum-Ra. He is the sleeper in Amenta when he says, "I shall behold thy face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied with thy likeness when I awake" (Ps. xvii. 15). The Osiris woke in Sekhem, where he saw the likeness of his Lord who left his picture there; his true likeness as the risen one transformed, transfigured, and divinely glorified, that looked upon the manes, smiling sun-wise through the defecating mist of death, for the Osiris to come forth and follow him. The speaker was in Amenta as the land of bondage when the "cords of Sheol" were bound about him. He was assimilated to the suffering Horus, sitting blind and helpless in the utter darkness, pierced and torn and bleeding from the wounds inflicted on him by Sut, who had been his own familiar friend, his twin-brother, and who had turned against him and betrayed him to his death. The most memorable sayings in the Psalms, and the most misleading when misunderstood, are uttered in this character of Osiris, who was the typical victim in Amenta, where he was tormented by the followers of Sut, the forsaken sufferer who was piteously left to cry, "My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me?" The sufferer is in Sheol, the miry pit, when he says, “I sink in deep mire." "Deliver me out of the mire, and let not Sheol shut her mouth upon me" (Ps. Ixix. 2, 14, 15).

Sheol, then, is one with Amenta, and the drama with its characters and teachings belongs to the mysteries of Amenta, which are attributed to Taht, the Egyptian psalmist, who is the great chief in Sekhem, the place where Horus suffered or Osiris died. Taht was the writer of the sayings attributed to Horus in his dual character of the human sufferer in Amenta and of Horus-Tema, the divine avenger of the sufferings that were inflicted on Osiris by the "wicked," the Sami, the co-conspirators with Sut, the Egyptian Judas. This will account for the non-natural imagery and hugely inhuman language ascribed to the supposed historic David, who as writer was primarily the psalmist Taht, and who called down the divine wrath upon the accursed Typhonians for what they had done in binding, torturing, and piercing Horus (or Osiris) and pursuing him to death. So far as the language of Taht remains in the Psalms of David, it is inhuman because the characters of the drama were originally non-human. This is one of the many misrenderings that have to be rectified by means of the Egyptian Ritual, when we have discriminated between the earth of time and the earth of eternity, between the denizens of Judea and the manes in Sheol, and learned that the Hebrew and Christian histories of these mystical matters have been compounded out of the Egyptian eschatology.

It is noteworthy that certain of the Psalms, in two different groups (xlii. to xlix. and Ixxxiv. to lxxxviii.), are specialized as " Psalms of the Sons of Korah." These were the rebels, once upon a time, who, according to Hebrew tradition, disappeared when the earth opened and swallowed them up alive. This is a legend of Amenta. The only earth that ever swallowed human beings was the nether-earth of Sheol; and if we take our stand with the sons of Korah in Amenta we can

read these Psalms and see how they should especially apply to those who were swallowed by Sheol in the nether-world. "One thing," says a commentator, "which added to this surprising occurrence, is that when Korah was swallowed in the earth his sons were preserved.” They went down to the pit in death, but lived on as did the manes in Amenta. The sons of Korah are in Sheol. But, says the speaker, "God will redeem my soul from the power of Sheol" (Ps. xlix. 15). He exclaims, "Bring me unto thy holy hill and to thy tabernacles." Psalm xlv. is a Psalm addressed to the anointed son, the king = the royal Horus, who comes as a conqueror of death and Sheol. Psalm xlvii. is a song of the resurrection from Amenta. "God is gone up with a shout," to sit upon his holy throne, in the eternal city “on his holy mountain," which was the way up from the dark valley for those who, like "the sons of Korah," sank into the nether-earth, but who lived on to rise again and reach the summit of the sacred mount. The Kamite steps of ascent were buried as a fetish figure in the coffins with the dead for use, typically, when they woke to life in Amenta. It is said to the Osiris in the Ritual, "Osiris, thou hast received thy sceptre, thy pedestal, and the flight of stairs beneath thee"; this was in readiness for his resurrection. These images of the stand on which the gods were elevated, like Anup at the pole, the tat of stability, and the steps of ascent to heaven, were buried with the mummy as emblems of divine protection which are with him when he emerges from the comatose state of the dead. The steps thus buried stand for the mountain of ascent. We are reminded of this by the Psalmist when he sings, "O Lord, thou hast brought up my soul from Sheol. Thou, Lord, of thy favour hadst made my mountain to stand strong" (Ps. xxx. 37)—the mountain that was imaged in the tomb by the steps with the aid of which the deceased makes the ascent from Amenta, and can say, "I am the lord of the stairs. I have made my nest on the horizon" (Rit., ch. 85). The Pharaoh Unas exults that the ladder or steps have been supplied to him by his father, Ra, as means of ascent to spirit world. King Pepi makes his exodus from the lower earth to the elysian fields Sut sets up his maket, or ladder, in Amenta by which the manes reaches the horizon; and, secondly, Horus erects his ladder by which the spirit of Pepi reaches up to heaven. This divides the steps of ascent into halves of seven each as these are figured in the seven steps of the solar boat. Thus the total number is fourteen, as it was in the lunar mythos when the eye of the full moon was attained at the summit of fourteen steps or top of the staircase. The number, as may be explained, was fifteen in the soli-lunar reckoning of the month. Thus in one computation there were fifteen steps to the ladder of ascent from the depths of Amenta to the summit of the mount. Now, fifteen of the Psalms (cxx. to cxxxiv.) are termed "Psalms of degrees." In the Hebrew they are called "a Song of ascents." In the Chaldee they were designated "a song that was sung upon the steps of the abyss." These are the steps from the abyss. or depths of Sheol mentioned by the speaker, who says, "Thou shalt bring me up again from the depths of the earth" (Ps. lxxi. 20). "Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord" (Ps. cxxx. 1). Thus the steps constituted a means of ascent from Sheol or Amenta,

When