the great god, existing by his own power, is Osiris; and the great Bennu also is Osiris (p. 69). By Chem is meant Chemhor, _i.e._, the Horus, who by his own power renews his own youth every day. On the cover of the sarcophagus we find the formula, "When this chapter has been pronounced, he (the dead man) enters into the western land at the time of his resurrection: if entirely unacquainted with it, he cannot enter; for him, as for one uninitiated, there is no resurrection."[128] Thus we must assume that the Egyptians believed in man's return to his divine origin in the sense that a soul which was not found wanting in weight, and was conscious of its own true nature, was not only received, after the completion of the proper cycle, into the bosom of the godhead, and allowed to be absorbed into the divine power, but was so far deified that it could adopt divine attributes and power, and even assume a divine title. According to the account of Herodotus, the Egyptians believed that the soul of the dead passed into an animal, born at the time; from this it wandered into all the other animals on earth, in the air and the sea, and after 3,000 years it was again born with a human body.[129] That this account is incorrect is proved by the records already quoted; it may perhaps have arisen from the Egyptian conception that the soul of the justified obtained the power to assume every shape. But a purification of the unclean and ignorant soul by passing through the bodies of all kinds of animals could never have been assumed by the Egyptians, since the sacred races were pre-eminent manifestations, and the selected animals continuous incarnations, of the gods. If a pilgrimage through the bodies of beasts was really regarded by the Egyptians as a course of punishment and amelioration, the beasts meant can only be such as were not sacred. But as yet the examination of the monuments and records has by no means completely cleared up the relation of the soul to the body it has left, nor has it attained to any result on the fate in store for the souls which were found wanting when weighed in the balance. FOOTNOTES: [34] Herod. 3, 37. [35] De Rougé, "Revue archéolog." 1860, 1, 357. [36] "De Isid." c. 51, 52; "De Pyth. Oraculis," p. 400. [37] Macrob. "Sat." 6, 18. [38] "De Isid." c. 36. [39] De Rougé, "Zeitsch. d. d. m. Gesellschaft," after a sepulchral pillar in the Berlin Museum, 4, 375. [40] Champollion, Monuments, pl. 123 _seq._ Dümichen, "Tempelinschriften." 1, 24. Lepsius, "Aelteste Texte des Todtenbuchs," s. 13. [41] Lepsius, "Die Götter der vier Elemente;" Dümichen, in "Zeitsch. für ægyptische Sprache," 1869 s. 7. [42] Herod. 2, 61. [43] Plut. "De Isid." c. 38.