Where the sky was looked upon as the incarnation of a goddess, Ra was considered as her son,[**] his father being the earth-god, and he was born again with every new dawn, wearing a sidelock, and with his finger to his lips as human children were conventionally represented. ** Several passages from the Pyramid texts prove that the _two eyes_ were very anciently considered as belonging to the face of Nuit, and this conception persisted to the last days of Egyptian paganism. Hence, we must not be surprised if the inscriptions generally represent the god Ra as coming forth from Nuit under the form of a disc, or a scarabaeus, and born of her even as human children are born. He was also that luminous egg, laid and hatched in the East by the celestial goose, from which the sun breaks forth to fill the world with its rays.[**] ** These are the very expressions used in the seventeenth chapter of the _Book of the Dead_ (Naville's edition, vol. i. pl. xxv. lines 58-61; Lepsius, _Todtenbuch_, pl. ix. 11. 50, 51). [Illustration: 118.jpg THE TWELVE STAGES IN THE LIFE OF THE SUN AND ITS TWELVE FORMS THROUGHOUT THE DAY. 1] 1 The twelve forms of the sun during the twelve hours of the day, from the ceiling of the Hall of the New Year at Edfu. Drawing by Faucher-Gudin. Nevertheless, by an anomaly not uncommon in religions, the egg did not always contain the same kind of bird; a lapwing, or a heron, might come out of it,[*] or perhaps, in memory of Horus, one of the beautiful golden sparrow-hawks of Southern Egypt. A Sun-Hawk, hovering in high heaven on outspread wings, at least presented a bold and poetic image; but what can be said for a Sun-Calf? Yet it is under the innocent aspect of a spotted calf, a "sucking calf of pure mouth,"[**] that the Egyptians were pleased to describe the Sun-God when Sibu, the father, was a bull, and Hathor a heifer. * The lapwing or the heron, the Egyptian _bonu_, is generally the Osirian bird. The persistence with which it is associated with Heliopolis and the gods of that city shows that in this also we have a secondary form of Ra. ** The calf is represented in ch. cix. of the _Book of the Dead_ (Naville's edition, pl. cxx.), where the text says (lines 10, 11), "I know that this calf is Harmakhis the Sun, and that it is no other than the Morning Star, daily saluting Ra." The expression "_sucking calf of pure mouth_" is taken word for word from a formula preserved in the Pyramid texts (Unas, 1. 20).