At last during the eighteenth dynasty, about 1460 B. C., Amenhotep IV realized that the power of the priesthood was a menace to the crown and therefore proclaimed the Sun as the sole God, not in human shape, but in that of a disk. He ordered all other images of other Gods associated with the sun to be destroyed; the priests of these deposed Gods lost their places and estates, which latter were confiscated. But his sons-in-law who succeeded him restored the deposed monarchs. Nevertheless they were marked as heretics by those priests who were reinstated in their former power. In consequence of this conflict, which was violent and prolonged, the intellectual life of Egypt was paralyzed and the mystic teachings of the priests were henceforth not disturbed by any wave of progress or advance. The people again sank into a stupid and unredeemable formalism, demonism and sorcery. With the purpose of amusing them the priests furnished gorgeous sacrificial processions and festivals, while at the same time drawing them away from the true God by teaching them a worship of deceased kings and queens. They also built temples, to only the outer portion of which were the people generally admitted, while the innermost portions were guarded by these priests lest the mysteries thus protected be such no longer. They also procured the building of the ancient Labyrinth, near Lake Moeris, of which Herodotus tells us that there were fifteen hundred chambers above ground and as many more under ground, which latter were never shown except to the initiated, and which contained the remains of sacred crocodiles and of the Pharaohs. The Egyptian priests taught that man was made up of _body_, a material essence or the _soul_, which in the shape of a bird left the body at death, and an _immaterial spirit_ which held to the man the same relation which a God held to the animal in which he dwelt, and which at death departed from the body like the image of a dream. They taught also that, if the soul and spirit were to live on, the body should be embalmed and laid in a rock chamber, and that then the relatives must supply meat, drink, and clothing for its use. The spirit took its way to Osiris and by means of a magic formula the dead would be made one with Osiris; hence in the Egyptian "Book of the Dead" the deceased was addressed as Osiris with his own name added, and could now lead a happy life in the other world, which life was portrayed on the walls of the Sepulchres in pictures which are still to be seen, showing how the creature comforts of this world were to be enhanced in the next. Having reached the outer world, and having escaped the host of demons that threatened him on his passage, he could then revisit this earth at will in any form.