It was thus that the Egyptians sought to make themselves homes in the next world, and to secure all the comforts and pleasures of their earthly life in the life which was to come. Nevertheless, the pious Egyptian did not expect to remain for ever as an Osiris, or as a god in human likeness: he rather hoped for ever-increasing freedom, for the power of taking other shapes and transforming himself at will into quadrupeds; or into birds—such as the swallow or the heron; or into plants—more especially the lotus; or even into gods.[51] This is no doctrine of compulsory transmigration such as used to be freely ascribed to the Egyptians on the strength of the statements made by Herodotus[52]; there is no question here of souls being forced to assume fresh forms in which their purification is gradually worked out and their perfection achieved. To the Egyptian transmigration was not the doom of imperfect souls, but a privilege reserved for such as had already attained perfection. Again and again the texts assert that the blessed may assume any form and visit any place at will; body and place can no longer enthral him. He may travel round the heavens with the Sun-god Rā, or arise from the shades with Osiris in the “divine night” of the 26th of the month Khoiak (_i.e._ at the winter solstice); he is even as a god, nay, he is himself a god, able to live in and by Truth, actually taking it, indeed, as food and drink. The power of the soul to incarnate itself at pleasure became one of the chief reasons for embalming the body. As we have seen, the preservation of the body was held to be necessary because the mummy was supposed to be the material form of which the Osiris was the essential reality. But this temporary need might have been met in simpler fashion, since the journey of the Soul to the Hall of Judgment was accomplished in a comparatively short time. There was, however, a further need for which provision had to be made. The soul might sometimes visit the mummy, again take up its abode in its former body, and, animating it anew, return to earth under that form and thus revisit the spots where once it had dwelt. To this end it required an earthly and tangible body, and this was supplied by the mummy. If the mummy were destroyed, then the soul not only lost one of the forms in which it might incarnate itself, but that one with which its interests were naturally most closely connected—that one which linked it to earth and best enabled it to exhort the survivors to remember the funerary offerings, and to see how it fared with those whom it had been obliged to leave behind. The destruction of the mummy did not involve the destruction of the soul, but it narrowed the soul’s circle of activity and limited its means of transmigration.