The three gods who preceded Osiris upon the throne had ceased to reign, but not to live. Ra had taken refuge in heaven, disgusted with his own creatures; Shu had disappeared in the midst of a tempest; and Sibu had quietly retired within his palace when the time of his sojourning upon earth had been fulfilled. Not that there was no death, for death, too, together with all other things and beings, had come into existence in the beginning, but while cruelly persecuting both man and beast, had for a while respected the gods. Osiris was the first among them to be struck down, and hence to require funeral rites. He also was the first for whom family piety sought to provide a happy life beyond the tomb. Though he was king of the living and the dead at Mendes by virtue of the rights of all the feudal gods in their own principalities, his sovereignty after death exempted him no more than the meanest of his subjects from that painful torpor into which all mortals fell on breathing their last. But popular imagination could not resign itself to his remaining in that miserable state for ever. What would it have profited him to have Isis the great Sorceress for his wife, the wise Horus for his son, two master-magicians--Thot the Ibis and the jackal Anubis--for his servants, if their skill had not availed to ensure him a less gloomy and less lamentable after-life than that of men. Anubis had long before invented the art of mummifying, and his mysterious science had secured the everlasting existence of the flesh; but at what a price! [Illustration: 256.jpg THE OSIRIAN MUMMY PREPARED AND LAID UPON THE FUNERARY COUCH BY THE JACKAL ANUBIS.1] 1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Rosellint, _Monumenti Civili_, pl. cxxxiv. 2. While Anubis is stretching out his hands to lay out the mummy on its couch, the soul is hovering above its breast, and holding to its nostrils the sceptre, and the wind-filled sail which is the emblem of breath and of the new life. For the breathing, warm, fresh-coloured body, spontaneous in movement and function, was substituted an immobile, cold and blackish mass, a sufficient basis for the mechanical continuity of the double, but which that double could neither raise nor guide; whose weight paralysed and whose inertness condemned it to vegetate in darkness, without pleasure and almost without consciousness of existence. Thot, Isis, and Horus applied themselves in the case of Osiris to ameliorating the discomfort and constraint entailed by the more primitive embalmment. [Illustration: 257.jpg THE RECEPTION OP THE MUMMY BY ANUBIS AT THE DOOR OP THE TOMB, AND THE OPENING OF THE MOUTH. 1] 1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a painting in the tomb of a king in the Theban necropolis.