Maskhonit appeared by the child's cradle at the very moment of its birth;[*] and Raninit presided over the naming and the nurture of the newly born.[*] Neither Raninit, the fairy godmother, nor Maskhonit exercised over nature as a whole that sovereign authority which we are accustomed to consider the primary attribute of deity. Every day of every year was passed by the one in easing the pangs of women in travail; by the other, in choosing for each baby a name of an auspicious sound, and one which would afterwards serve to exorcise the influences of evil fortune. No sooner were their tasks accomplished in one place than they hastened to another, where approaching birth demanded their presence and their care. From child-bed to child-bed they passed, and if they fulfilled the single offices in which they were accounted adepts, the pious asked nothing more of them. Bands of mysterious cynocephali haunting the Eastern and the Western mountains concentrated the whole of their activity on one passing moment of the day. They danced and chattered in the East for half an hour, to salute the sun at his rising, even as others in the West hailed him on his entrance into night.[**] * Raninit presides over the child's suckling, but she also gives him his name, and hence, his fortune. She is on the whole the nursing goddess. Sometimes she is represented as a human-headed woman, or as lioness-headed, most frequently with the head of a serpent; she is also the urseus, clothed, and wearing two long plumes on her head, and a simple urous, as represented in the illustration on p. 169. ** This is the subject of a vignette in the _Book of the Dead_, ch. xvi., where the cynocephali are placed in echelon upon the slopes of the hill on the horizon, right and left of the radiant solar disk, to which they offer worship by gesticulations. It was the duty of certain genii to open gates in Hades, or to keep the paths daily traversed by the sun.[*] These genii were always at their posts, never free to leave them, and possessed no other faculty than that of punctually fulfilling their appointed offices. Their existence, generally unperceived, was suddenly revealed at the very moment when the specific acts of their lives were on the point of accomplishment. These being completed, the divinities fell back into their state of inertia, and were, so to speak, reabsorbed by their functions until the next occasion.[***] * Maspero, _Etudes de Mythologie et d'Archeologie Egyptiennes_, vol. ii. pp. 34, 35. *** The Egyptians employed a still more forcible expression than our word "absorption" to express this idea. It was said of objects wherein these genii concealed themselves, and whence they issued in order to re-enter them immediately, that these forms _ate_ them, or that they _ate_ their own forms. [Illustration: 110.jpg SOME FABULOUS BEASTS OF THE EGYPTIAN DESERT. 2]