The priests took care that such a picture did not fade from want of reproduction and, true to the genius of their nation, elaborated it until its main features are almost lost to us under the mass of details[665]. Especially was this the case with the religion of the Sun-God Ra, who after his fusion with Amon of Thebes at the establishment of the New Empire came to overshadow all the Egyptian cults save that of Osiris. The tombs of the kings at Thebes are full of pictures of the land of this Amenti or the West, in which horror is piled upon horror, and book after book was written that there should be no mistake about the fate lying in wait for the souls of men[666]. In these we see the dead wandering from one chamber to another, breathing a heavy and smoke-laden air[667], and confronted at every step by frightful fiends compounded from the human and bestial forms, whose office is to mutilate, to burn, and to torture the soul. The means of escape open to the dead was, under the XXth dynasty, neither the consciousness of a well-spent life nor the fatherly love of the gods, but the knowledge of passwords and mysterious names[668]. Every chamber had a guardian who demanded of the dead his own name, without repeating which the soul was not allowed to enter[669]. Every fiend had to be repelled by a special exorcism and talisman[670], and every “circle” through which the dead passed had its own song and “mystery,” which it behoved the dead to know[671]. Only thus could he hope to win through to the Land of Osiris, where he might enjoy a relative beatitude and be free to go about and visit the other heavenly places[672]. For this purpose, the map, so to speak, of the route was engraved on the walls of the tombs of those who could afford it, and the necessary words to be said written down. Those who were not so rich or so lucky were thought to be parcelled out, like the _fellahin_ of that day, or the _villeins_ of feudal times, in colonies among the different districts of the lower world, where they flourished or perished according to the number of talismans or “protections” that they possessed[673]. “If ever,” says M. Maspero, “there were in Pharaonic Egypt mysteries and initiates, as there were in Greece and in Egypt under the Greeks, these books later than the _Book of the Other World_ and the _Book of the Gates_ are books of mystery and of initiates[674].” Thereafter, he goes on to say, the ancient popular religion disappeared more and more from Egypt, to give place to the overmastering sense of the terrors of death[675] and the magical means by which it was sought to lighten them.