Every time I hear people talking of the religion of Egypt, I am tempted to ask _which_ of the Egyptian religions they are talking about? Is it of the Egyptian religion of the fourth dynasty, or of the Egyptian religion of the Ptolemaic period? Is it of the religion of the rabble, or of that of the learned? Of the religion such as was taught in the schools of Heliopolis, or of that which was in the minds and conceptions of the Theban sacerdotal class? For, between the first Memphite tomb, which bears the _cartouche_ of a king of the third dynasty, and the last stones engraved at Esneh under Cæsar Philippus, the Arabian, there is an interval of at least five thousand years. Leaving aside the invasion of the Shepherds, the Ethiopian and Assyrian dominions, the Persian conquest, Greek colonization, and the thousand revolutions of its political life, Egypt had passed during those five thousand years through many vicissitudes of life, moral and intellectual. Chapter XVII of the _Book of the Dead_, which seems to contain the exposition of the system of the world, as it was understood at Heliopolis during the time of the first dynasties, is known to us by a few copies of the eleventh and twelfth dynasties. Every one of the verses composing it was already interpreted in three or four different ways; so different, indeed, that according to this or another school, the Demiurge became either the solar fire—Ra‐ shoo, or the primordial water. Fifteen centuries later, the number of readings had increased considerably. Time, in its course, had modified their ideas about the universe and the forces that ruled it. In the short eighteen centuries that Christianity has existed, it has worked up, developed and transformed most of its dogmas; how many times, then, might not the Egyptian priesthood have altered their dogmas during those fifty centuries that separate Theodosius from the King Builders of the Pyramids.(457) Here we believe the eminent Egyptologist is going too far. The exoteric dogmas may often have been altered, the esoteric never. He does not take into account the sacred immutability of the primitive truths, revealed only during the mysteries of Initiation. The Egyptian priests _had forgotten much, they altered nothing_. The loss of a great part of the primitive teaching was due to the sudden deaths of the great Hierophants, who passed away before they had time to reveal _all_ to their successors, mostly in the absence of worthy heirs to the knowledge. Yet they have preserved in their rituals and dogmas the principal teachings of the Secret Doctrine.