What then did matter become, it was transformed, the deities were transformed. Matter was transformed,--this is explained to us through the symbolism of the scarab, the hieroglyph of the word _Kheper_, i.e., "to be," "to exist," "to become," "to create," "to emanate;" of which, as I have said, the Great Sphinx is the symbol, and has therefore the philosophical value of creator and created.[78] God and His universe, existence and change or transformation, death and dissolution, all which were only considered as regeneration and re-birth in another form. Thence becomes apparent to us, the great value and importance to the Egyptian people of the symbolism of the scarab, it was, to them, the emblematic synthesis of their religion as to-day to Christians, the Latin or the Greek cross, is the emblematic synthesis of Latin or Greek Christianity. The philosophic Egyptian, thought, the atoms and molecules of all bodies and of all matter, were never destroyed or lost, they were always in motion but were only transformed and changed, by death or the dissolution of forms. Death on this earth did not destroy the personality of the human being, that continued beyond death on our earth, and as to those who had been good and pious during their life here, their personality continued eternally; but the punishment of the wicked was, the annihilation of that personality or an immobility which was almost the same. The work entitled, Hermes Trismegistos, contains a resumé of that idea, saying, among other things: "What was composed is divided. That division is not Death, it is the analysis of a combination; but the aim of that analysis is not destruction, it is the renewment. What is in effect the energy of life? Is it not movement? What then is there in this world, immovable?"[79] The everlasting interchange of life and death, flows throughout all the religious philosophy of the Ancient Egyptians; basing itself on the continual return of day from night and of day to night, and upon the apparent course of the sun, they seem to have formulated the idea of the immortality of the soul of man after death.