Pasht (p. 27, line 9) is connected with the Greek Artemis,
especially in her offices of judgment and vengeance. She is
usually lioness headed, sometimes cat headed, her attributes
seeming often trivial or ludicrous unless their full meaning is
known, but the inquiry is much too wide to be followed here. The
cat was sacred to her, or rather to the sun, and secondarily to
her. She is alluded to in the text because she is always the
companion of Pthah (called "the beloved of Pthah," it may be as
Judgment, demanded and longed for by Truth), and it may be well
for young readers to have this fixed in their minds, even by
chance association. There are more statues of Pasht in the British
Museum than of any other Egyptian deity; several of them fine in
workmanship, nearly all in dark stone, which may be, presumably,
to connect her, as the moon, with the night; and in her office of
avenger, with grief.
Thoth (p. 31, line 12), is the Recording Angel of Judgment; and
the Greek Hermes--Phre (line 16), is the Sun.
Neith is the Egyptian spirit of divine wisdom, and the Athena of
the Greeks. No sufficient statement of her many attributes, still
less of their meanings, can be shortly given; but this should be
noted respecting the veiling of the Egyptian image of her by
vulture wings--that as she is, physically, the goddess of the air,
this bird, the most powerful creature of the air known to the
Egyptians, naturally became her symbol. It had other
significations; but certainly this, when in connection with Neith.
As representing her, it was the most important sign, next to the
winged sphere, in Egyptian sculpture; and, just as in Homer,
Athena herself guides her heroes into battle, this symbol of
wisdom, giving victory, floats over the heads of the Egyptian
Kings. The Greeks, representing the goddess herself in human form,
yet would not lose the power of the Egyptian symbol, and changed
it into an angel of victory. First seen in loveliness on the early
coins of Syracuse and Leontium, it gradually became the received
sign of all conquest, and the so called "Victory" of later times,
which, little by little, loses its truth, and is accepted by the
moderns only as a personification of victory itself,--not as an
actual picture of the living Angel who led to victory. There is a
wide difference between these two conceptions,--all the difference
between insincere poetry, and sincere religion. This I have also
endeavored farther to illustrate in the tenth Lecture, there is
however one part of Athena's character which it would have been
irrelevant to dwell upon there, yet which I must not wholly leave
unnoticed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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