Under the Eighteenth Dynasty, the legend thickens; the identifications of the gods become more and more intricate; Amen and Ra are sought and found under innumerable {171}forms of other deities; and a foundation is laid for the esoteric Monotheism or pantheistic nature-worship of the later philosophising priesthood. It was under the Nineteenth Dynasty that the cult of local Triads or Trinities took fullest shape, and that the mystical interpretation of the religion of Egypt came well into the foreground. The great Osirian myth was then more and more minutely and mystically elaborated; and even the bull Apis, the totem-god of Memphis, was recognised as a special incarnation of Osiris, who thus becomes, with Amen, the mysterious summing-up of almost all the national pantheon. At last we find the myth going off into pure mysticism, Osiris being at once the father, brother, husband, and son of Isis, and also the son of his own child Horus. * Sentences with an almost Athanasian mixture of vagueness and definiteness inform us how “the son proceeds from the father, and the father proceeds from his son”; how “Ra is the soul of Osiris, and Osiris the soul of Ra and how Horus his child, awakened by magical rites from his dead body, is victorious over Set, the prince of darkness, and sits as Osiris upon the throne of the father whom he has revived and avenged. Here as elsewhere the myth, instead of being the explanation of the god, does nothing more than darken counsel.” * “Stories like the Osiris myth,” says Mr. Lang, “spring from no pure religious source, but embody the delusions and fantastic dreams of the lowest and least developed human fancy and human speculation.” This sentence enforces precisely the same idea that I have previously expressed in chapter ii. as to the real relations of religion and mythology. The myth nowhere explains the cult; it casts no light upon its origin or history; on the contrary, it only obscures and overshadows the underlying kernel of genuine fact. In like manner, I believe, Ptah was originally a local mummy-god of Memphis, and Khem of Ap, afterwards known as Chemmis. This gradual growth of a dead and mummified village chief, however, into a pantheistic god, strange as it may seem, is not in any way more remarkable than the gradual growth {172}of a Galilean peasant into the second person of an eternal and omnipotent Godhead. Nor does the myth of the death and resurrection of Osiris (to be considered hereafter in a later chapter) militate against the reality of his human existence any more than the history of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ militates against the human existence of Jesus of Nazareth. “Gross and crude euphemerism” may be bad; but airy and fantastic Max-mullerism appears to me just as unphilosophical.