Ani ploughs and sows and reaps in the fields of the underworld. He is
carried past a dreadful place on the back of the cow Hathor. After as
many adventures as Browning's Childe Roland he steps into the
judgment-hall of the gods. They sit in majestic rows. He makes the proper
sacrifices, and advances to the scales of justice. There he sees his own
heart weighed against the ostrich-feather of Truth, by the jackal-god
Anubis, who has already presided at his embalming. His own soul, in the
form of a human-headed hawk, watches the ceremony. His ghost, which is
another entity, looks through the door with his little wife. Both of them
watch with tense anxiety. The fate of every phase of his personality
depends upon the purity of his heart.
Lying in wait behind Anubis is a monster, part crocodile, part lion, part
hippopotamus. This terror will eat the heart of Ani if it is found
corrupt. At last he is declared justified. Thoth, the ibis-headed God of
Writing, records the verdict on his tablet. The justified Ani moves on
past the baffled devourer, with the mystic presence of his little wife
rejoicing at his side. They go to the awful court of Osiris. She makes
sacrifice with him there. The God of the Dead is indeed a strange deity,
a seated semi-animated mummy, with all the appurtenances of royalty, and
with the four sons of Horus on a lotus before him, and his two wives,
Isis and Nephthys, standing behind his throne with their hands on his
shoulders.
The justified soul now boards the boat in which the sun rides as it
journeys through the night. He rises a glorious boatman in the morning,
working an oar to speed the craft through the high ocean of the noon sky.
Henceforth he makes the eternal round with the sun. Therefore in Ancient
Egypt the roll was called, not the Book of the Dead, but _The Chapters on
Coming Forth by Day_.
This book on motion pictures does not profess to be an expert treatise on
Egyptology as well. The learned folk are welcome to amend the modernisms
that have crept into it. But the fact remains that something like this
story in one form or another held Egypt spell-bound for many hundred
years. It was the force behind every mummification. It was the reason for
the whole Egyptian system of life, death, and entombment, for the man not
embalmed could not make the journey. So the explorer finds the Egyptian
with a roll of this papyrus as a guide-book on his mummy breast. The soul
needed to return for refreshment periodically to the stone chamber, and
the mummy mutilated or destroyed could not entertain the guest. Egypt
cried out through thousands of years for the ultimate resurrection of the
whole man, his _coming forth by day_.
We need not fear that a story that so dominated a race will be lost on
modern souls when vividly set forth. Is it too much to expect that some
American prophet-wizard of the future will give us this film in the
spirit of an Egyptian priest?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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