that reliquary of hard stone which is hidden in the secret place of Pa-Aart, in the district of the divine lock of the god Ra; and behold the fire departed from the limbs of the Majesty of Seb. And many years afterwards, when this lock of hair was brought back to Pa-Aart in At-Nebes, and cast into the great lake of Pa-Aart, whose name is the Dwelling of Waves, in order that it might be purified, behold the lock became a crocodile; it flew to the water and became Sebek, the divine crocodile of At-Nebes.”(180) Inside the shrine is a picture of the two relics, the cobra which adorned the head-dress of the Pharaoh, and the _aart_ or lock of hair which was supposed to give its name to the temple. They were doubtless preserved at At-Nebes, and shown to the faithful as the veritable objects which had proved the bane and the antidote of the god Seb. They introduce us to a side of Egyptian religion which, though essentially characteristic of the popular faith, had also received the sanction of the official creed. The belief in amulets and charms was too deeply engrained in the popular mind to be ignored; they were consequently taken under the patronage of the gods, and a theory was invented to explain their efficacy. Already the later chapters of the Book of the Dead are concerned with the various amulets which were necessary to the preservation or resuscitation of the body; and even if the latter were regarded as symbolic, they were concrete symbols—symbols, that is to say, which actually possessed the virtues ascribed to them. Just as the name was a concrete entity, expressive of the very essence of the thing to which it was applied, so too the symbol was an entity with a concrete existence of its own. The materialistic tendency of Egyptian thought, added to the fetishism of the earlier stratum of native religion, produced this result. The doctrine of the Ka furnished a theory by which the educated classes could explain the efficacy of the amulet and the active virtues of the symbol. It was the Ka, the spiritual and yet materialised double, of the amulet that worked the charm—that made the scarab, for instance, a substitute for the living heart, or the _dad_—the symbol of stability—a passport to the other world.(181)