I mention this idea of "totem" worship because it may have been somewhat in this way that the Egyptians came to consider as sacred such curious, and so many, animals as they did--cats, hawks, bulls, crocodiles, even beetles. I do not say that it was thus that the worship of these creatures came to prevail among the Egyptians. I do not think that there is any at all clear evidence that it came about in this way; but it may have been so, and it is rather difficult to see how else it grew. You may have noticed that I wrote, for the heading of this chapter, "religions" in the plural, with an "s," not "religion." And this I did because the religion of the ancient Egyptians was not one. There are at least three different lines of religious thought and speculation to be traced, so tangled up together that the whole subject becomes very difficult to understand, but beyond all doubt there are these three. There is this animal worship; there is the worship of the sun and moon; and there is the worship of the two opposed and yet connected powers that bring good and evil. [Sidenote: Legends of the Gods] The invention, the imagination, of the mind of early man was disposed to making up stories about these gods. If the stories explained the events that people saw happening, so much the better. Now there was a god, by name Osiris, who was first worshipped, as it seems, only in a town called Busiris. Near by {31} was a town called Buto, where it is thought that a goddess, to whom they gave the name of Tsis, was worshipped. For some reason which we do not know, the worship of Osiris extended until it spread over the whole of Egypt, and with it the worship of Isis, who was supposed to be the wife of Osiris. The story of Osiris and Isis was told very differently at different times and in different places. According to the Greek writer, Plutarch, the legend which he heard about them went thus: that Osiris a very long time ago reigned as a great king over all Egypt. He civilised the people and taught them arts and science. He had a wicked brother Seth, who made a conspiracy against him and killed him, and put his body into a coffin and threw it into the Nile. The wife of Osiris, Isis, after long search, found the body and brought it back. Then she went on a visit to her son, Horus, who lived at Buto; and while she was away the wicked Seth came back, found the body (mummified, as we may suppose) of Osiris, took it away and cut it up into fourteen pieces, so that Isis might never again have it as a whole body. [Illustration: HORUS, ISIS (WITH HORUS)] From that point there seem to be two versions of the story. One is that Isis, having found the fourteen pieces, buried each piece where she found it. Another is that she collected the pieces, put them all together again, and that Osiris, thus made whole again, ruled in the under-world as king of the dead.