Here the noblest moral sentiments are blended with Oriental salutations in the worship of a god who, for the moment, is recognised as lord of lords, but who is also a ram at Mendes. This apparent confusion of ideas, and this assertion of supremacy for a god who, in the next hymn, is subjected to another god, mark civilised polytheism; but the confusion was increased by the extreme age of the Egyptian faith, and by the doubt that prevailed as to the meaning of tradition. "The seventeenth chapter of the _Book of the Dead_" which seems to contain a statement of the system of the universe as understood at Heliopolis under the first dynasties, "is known to us by several examples of the eleventh and twelfth dynasties." _Each of the verses had already been interpreted in three or four different ways_; so different, that, according to one school, the Creator, _Râ-Show_, was the solar fire; according to another school, not the fire, but the waters! The _Book of the Dead_, in fact, is no book, but collections of pamphlets, so to speak, of very different dates. "Plan or unity cannot be expected," and glosses only some four thousand years old have become imbedded in really ancient texts.* Fifteen centuries later the number of interpretations had considerably increased.** Where the Egyptians themselves were in helpless doubt, it would be vain to offer complete explanations of their opinions and practices in detail; but it is possible, perhaps, to account for certain large elements of their beliefs, and even to untie some of the knots of the Osirian myth. The strangest feature in the rites of Egypt was animal-worship, which appeared in various phases. There was the local adoration of a beast, a bird, or fish, to which the neighbours of other districts were indifferent or hostile. There was the presence of the animal in the most sacred _penetralia_ of the temple; and there was the god conceived of, on the whole, as anthropomorphic, but often represented in art, after the twelfth dynasty, as a man or woman with the head of a bird or beast.*** * Cf. Tiele, _Hist Egypt_. Rel., pp. 26-29, and notes. ** Maspero, _Musee de Boulaq_, p. 149. *** As to the animals which were sacred and might not be eaten in various nomes, an account will be found in Wilkinson's _Ancient Egyptians_, ii. 467. The English reader will find many beast-headed gods in the illustrations to vol. iii. The edition referred to is Birch's, London, 1878. A more scientific authority is Lanzoni, _Dizion. Mit_.