The 17th chapter begins a new section. It sums up in a condensed form all that the soul was required to know about the gods and the world to come. But it has been glossed and reglossed until its first form has become almost unrecognisable. The commentary attached to the original passages became in time itself so obscure as to need explanation, and the chapter now consists of three strata of religious thought and exposition piled one on the top of the other. As it now stands it unites in a common goal the aspirations of the followers of Osiris and of those of the solar cult; the dead man is identified with the gods, and so wends his way to the divine land in which they dwell, whether that be the fields of Alu or the bark of the Sun. The chapters which follow are intended to restore voice, memory, and name to the dead man. With the restoration of his name comes the restoration of his individuality, for that which has no name has no individuality. Then follows (in chapters xxvi.-xxx.) the restoration of his heart, which is regarded first as a mere organ of the body, and then in the Osirian sense as the equivalent of the conscience. As an organ, the figure of a heart placed in the tomb was sufficient to ensure its return; as the living conscience and principle of life, something of a more mysterious and symbolic nature was needed. This was found in the scarab or beetle, whose name _kheper_ happened to coincide in sound with the word that signified “to become.”(155) In a series of chapters the soul is now protected against the poisonous serpents, including “the great python who devours the ass,” which it will meet with in its passage through the limbo of the other world. As Professor Maspero remarks, the large place occupied by these serpents among the dangers which await the soul on its first exit from the body, make it plain that in the days when the Book of the Dead was first being compiled, venomous snakes were far more plentiful than they ever have been in the Egypt of historical times. Indeed, the python, whose huge folds are still painted on the walls of the royal tombs of Thebes, had retired southward long before the age of the Fourth Dynasty. To an equally early period we may refer the forty-second chapter, in which the soul is taught how to escape the slaughter of the enemies of Horus, which took place at Herakleopolis during the Osirian wars,—a chapter, however, in which, it may be observed, the elder Horus is already confounded with the son of Osiris.(156)