“May all who thus invert good be compelled to die head downward!” said Imos, solemnly, as the trap-door closed, and the executioners stood, blankly facing each other. Great care was taken to preserve a semblance of lifelike proportions in the outlines of the funeral basket, to enable the spirit to manifest easily at some future time. Four lusty tamanes shouldered the basket-covered remains and the little procession filed out of the temple inclosure. Men, women and children turned their backs as it passed, and there was no one to receive the body when it was delivered to the priest at the judgment hall of Hirach. Early next morning Imos announced in the Temple of the Sun that Alcamayn’s body had been refused burial. Then the citizens went to the hall, and carried the remains down to Land’s End, opposite Point Lobos. When the strongest ebb tide was at its full, they cast it into the sea. At this point the current runs at the rate of from three to four knots an hour, and the people knew that when once washed out to the north, the body could never, in time or eternity, return again to Golden Gate Bay. The continuous barkings and roarings of the now extinct sea-cows which congregated on the rocks in that vicinity were supposed by the populace to be wails and lamentations from the unfortunate dead whose bodies had been literally condemned as food for the fishes. CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE RAHULA’S DENUNCIATION OF YERMAH—AT THE FUNERAL OF ORONDO The Azes believed that every part of a man’s body had a counterpart in the world of matter. At the moment of dissolution, the individual ego was thought to be reunited to the Absolute, if Will, which is the real body of the individualized spirit, is free from Desire. If bound by these ties, it must reincarnate again, and it was thought possible to sink so low in the scale that the life principle would contact the animal kingdom. These people did not practice cremation of the dead, because they did not think it right to skip all the intervening purgations, or reincarnations, by projecting the ego back into the Absolute at once. They embalmed their honored dead and mummified their bodies in order that the individuality might be preserved, so that in the next incarnation memory might function on the physical plane. There are excellent examples of this practice found in the catacombs in Mexico and Peru as well as in Egypt where the descendants of Atlantis employed the same rites. The Egyptian “Book of the Dead” pertains entirely to initiation, or the finding of the Perfect Way in this life; and the well-known portions of it found with mummies are simply certificates of initiation. It is a curious fact in psychology that, so long as the physical body is preserved, the astral counterpart cannot disintegrate; and as memory is a function of the astral man, the Egyptian adepts expect to take up their life work again with a full knowledge of the past.