“I am all that is, has been and shall be.  No mortal has lifted my veil.”

That pronouncement, graven on the statue of Isis, confounded Egypt, condemning her mysteriously for some sin, anterior and unknown, to ignorance of the divine, leaving her, in default of revelation, to worship what she would, jackals, hyenas, cats, hawks, the ibis; beasts and birds.  Yet to the people, whose minds were as naked as their bodies, and who, in addition, were slaves, there must have been something very superior in the lords of the desert and the air.  Obviously they were wise.  Among them were some that knew in advance the change of the seasons.  Others, indifferent to man and independent of him, migrated over highways known but to them.  The senses of all were keyed to vibrations.  They heard the inaudible, saw the invisible, and, though they had a language of their own, when questioned never replied.  To slaves, clearly they were gods.

Not to the priests, however.  They knew better.  They but affected belief in divinities that had perhaps emigrated from the enigmas of geography and who were polychrome as the skies they had crossed.  Fashioned in stone, these gods were dog-headed or longly beaked.  Some, though, were alive.  In temples were saurians on purple carpets, bulls draped with spangled shawls, hawks on shimmering perches, that little gold chains detained.  Among gods of this character, the Sphinx, in its rôle of eternal spectre, must have seemed the ideal.  Others were nearly sublime.  Particularly there was Ausar.

Ausar, called commonly Osiris, died for man.  In an attempt to preserve harmony, in a struggle with the real spirit of actual evil which discord is, Osiris was slain.  Being a god he arose from the dead.  The latter thereafter he judged.

The people knew little, if anything, concerning him.  They knew little if anything at all.  They had a menagerie and a full consciousness of their own insignificance.  That sufficed.  In all of carnal Africa, the priest alone possessed what then was truth and of which a part is theology now.

Egypt, in which the evangels began, millennia before they were written, knew no genesis.  Her history, sculptured in hieroglyphics, was cut on pages of stone.  It awoke in the falling of cataracts.  It ended with simoons in sand.  The books that tell of it are pyramids, obelisks, nécropoles; constructions colossal and enigmatic; the granite epitaphs of finite things.  To-day, in the shattered temples, from which all other gods are gone, one divinity still lingers.  It is Silence.

In Iran sorrow was a folly.  In Egypt speech was a sin.  Apis could bellow, Anubis bark; man might not even stutter.  It was in the submission of dumb obedience that the palpable eternities of the pyramids were piled.  Yet in that darkness was light, in silence was the Word.  But to behold and to hear was possible only in sanctuaries reserved to the elect.  The gods too had their castes.  The lowest only were fellahin fit to worship.  On the lips of the others the priests held always a finger.  Crocodiles were less distant, hyenas more approachable, and the Egyptian, barred from the divine, found it on earth.  He prayed to scorpions, sang hymns to scarabs, coaxed the jackal with psalms; with dances he placated the ibis.  It was ridiculous but human.  He too would have a part, however insensate, in the dreams of all mankind.

Yet, had he looked not down but up, he would have lifted at least a fringe of the Isian veil.  The sun, taken as a symbol only, the symbol of life, death, and resurrection ­phases which its rising, setting, and return suggest ­was the deity, the one really existing god.  Nominally, figuratively, even concretely, there were others; a whole host, a hierarchy vaster than the Aryans knew; a great crowd of divinities less grandiose than gaudy, that swarmed in space, strolled through the dawns and dusk, thronged the temples, eyed the quick, confronted the dead.  They were but appearances, mere masks, expressions, hypostases, eidolons of Ra.

Ra was the celestial pharaoh.  But not originally.  Originally he was part of a triad which itself was part of a triple trinity.  Ra then was but one divinity among many gods.  These ultimately lost themselves in him so indistinguishably that there are litanies in which the names of seventy-five of them are used in addressing him.  Regarded as the unbegotten begetter of the first beginning, he succeeded in achieving the incomprehensible.  He became triune and remained unique.  He was Osiris, he was Isis, he was Horus.  At once father, mother, and son, he fecundated, conceived, produced, and was.

From him gods and goddesses emanated in sidereal fireworks that illuminated the heavens, dazzled the earth, then melted into each other, faded away or, occasionally, flared afresh in a glare dispelling and persistent.  Among these latter was Amon.  Glimmering primarily in provincial obscurity at Thebes, the thin fire of his shrine mounted spirally to Ra, fused its flames with his, expanding and uniting so inseparably with them, that the two became one.  Amon means hidden; Amon-Ra, the hidden light.

In the infinite, time is not.  In heaven there is no chronology.  The date of any god’s accession to supremacy there is, consequently, apart from mortal ken.  None the less that of Amon-Ra is known.  At the beginning of the earthly reign of Amonhoteph III., an edict, scrupulously executed throughout Egypt, determined, on monument and wall, the substitution of Amon-Ra’s name for that of previously superior gods.

The pharaohnate of Amonhoteph began about 1500 B.C.  It is from that period, therefore, that dates the divinity’s accession to the pharaohnate of the skies.  There is, or should be, a reason for all things.  There is one for that.  Amonhoteph regarded himself as Amon’s son.  It was one of the traits of the pharaohs, as it was also of the Incas, to believe, or at least to assert, that their fathers, therefore themselves, were divine.  As a consequence of the idea they prayed to their own images and likened their palaces to inns.

Originally foreigners, invaders from Akkad or Sumer, the pharaohs first conquered, then surprised.  It was they that embanked the Nile, turned morasses into meadows and piled the pyramids.  More exactly, it was by their commands that these miracles were contrived.  To the neolithic people whom they subjugated their divinity was clear.  So elsewhere was that of the kings of Akkad.  Like them, like the Incas, the pharaohs were of the solar race and so remained from the first dynasty to the Greek conquest, when Alexander, to legitimatize his sovereignty, had himself acknowledged as Amon’s son.

The ceremony had its precedents.  An inscription in eulogy of the great Rameses states that Amon, when possessing the pharaohs august mother, engendered him as a god.  On a wall of the Temple of Luxor an earlier inscription sets forth that the god of Thebes, incarnating himself in the person of Thotmes IV., appeared in his divine form to the pharaoh’s queen, who, at sight of his beauty, conceived.

It was therefore not in the beast alone, but in man, that divinity revealed itself in Egypt.  That in Judea a similar revelation should have been withheld until after the Roman occupation is hardly explicable on the theory, general among scholars, that Moses is not a historical character, for an identical revelation had been received in Babylonia where Israel twice loitered.  Moreover, a curious parallelism exists between post-Mosaic prophecy and Egyptian clairvoyance.  In a papyrus of the Thotmes III. epoch ­about 1600 B.C. ­it is written:  “The people of the age of the son of man shall rejoice and establish his name forever.  They shall be removed from evil and the wicked shall humble their mouths.”  In commenting the passage an Egyptologist noted that the words son of man are a literal translation of the original si-n-sa. But already in Akkad a similar prophecy had been uttered. It may be, therefore, that it was in Babylon that Israel first heard it.

The doctrine of a trinity, common to almost all antique beliefs, was a blasphemy to the Jews.  The belief in immortality, also prevalent, though less general, was to them an abomination.  The miracle of divine descent they were perhaps too practical to accept.  There was no room in their creed for the dogma of future rewards and punishments, and that, together with other articles of the Christian faith, Egypt’s elect professed.

The slaves and mongrels that constituted the bulk of the population were not instructed in these things and would not have understood them if they had been.  In Babylonia education was compulsory.  In Egypt it was an art, a gift, mysterious in itself, reserved to the few.  To the Egyptian, religion consisted in paraded symbols, in avenues of sphinxes, in forests of obelisks, in pharaohs seated colossally before the temple doors, in inscriptions that told indistinguishably of theomorphic men and anthropomorphic gods, and in a belief in the divinity of bulls and hawks.

These latter had their uses.  In transformations elsewhere effected, the sacred bull may have become a golden calf, the golden hawk a sacred dove.  In Egypt they were otherwise serviceable.  The worship of them, of other birds and beasts, of insects and vipers as well, ecclesiastically indorsed, hid the myth of metempsychosis.

Of that the people knew nothing.  When they died they ceased to be.  Even mummification, usually supposed to have been general, was not for them.  Down to an epoch relatively late it was a privilege reserved to priests and princes.  When the commonalty were embalmed it was with the opulent design that, in a future existence, they should serve their masters as they had in this.  Embalming was a preparation for the Judgment Day.  Of that the people knew nothing either.  It was even unlawful that concerning it they should be apprised.

In the Louvre is a statue of Ptah-meh, high priest of Memphis.  On it are the significant words:  “Nothing was hidden from him.”  A passage of Zosimus states that what was hidden it was illicit to reveal, except, Jamblicus explained, to those whose discretion a long novitiate had assured.  To such only was disclosed the secret that life is death in a land of darkness, and death is life in a land of light.

It was because of this that the pharaohs seated themselves colossally before the temple doors.  It was because of it that their palaces were inns and their tombs were homes.  It was because of it that their sepulchres were built for eternity and the tenements of their souls placed there embalmed.  It was because of this that the triumphs of men were inscribed in the halls of the gods.  Instead of seeking to be absorbed, it was their own inextinguishable individuality that they endeavoured to assert.  Tombs, tenements, triumphs, these all were preparations for the Land of Light.

The land was Alu, the asphodel meadows of the celestial Nile that wound through the Milky Way.  To reach it a passport, vise’d by Osiris, sufficed.  The first draft of that passport was held to have been written on tablets of alabaster, in letters of lapis lazuli, by an eidolon of Ra, who, known in Egypt as Thoth, elsewhere was Hermes Thrice the Greatest.

At Memphis, Hermes was regarded as representing the personification of divine wisdom, or, more exactly perhaps, the inventive power of the human mind.  A little library of forty-two books ­which a patricist saw, but not being initiate could not read ­was attributed to him. The books contained the entire hieratic belief.  Fragments that are held to have survived in an extant Greek novel are obviously Egyptian, but as obviously Alexandrine and neo-platonic.  In the editio princeps Pheidias is mentioned.  Mention of Michel Angelo would have been less anachronistic.  The original books are gone, all of them, forever, perhaps, save one, chapters of which are as old as the fourth dynasty and, it may be, are still older.  Pyramid texts of the fifth dynasty show that there then existed what to-day is termed The Book of the Dead, a copy of which, put in a mummy’s arms, was a talisman for the soul in the Court of Amenti, a passport thence to the Land of Light.

“There is no book like it, man hath not spoken it, earth hath not heard it” ­very truthfully it recites of itself.  One copy, known as the Louvre Papyrus, presents the Divine Comedy, as primarily conceived and illustrated by an archaic Dore.  Text and vignettes display the tribunal where the souls of the dead are judged.

In the foreground is an altar.  Adjacent is a figure, half griffon, half chimera, the Beast of Amenti, perhaps too of the Apocalypse.  Beyond, an ape poises a pair of scales.  For balance is an ostrich feather.  Above are the spirits of fate.  At the left Osiris is enthroned.  From a balcony his assessors lean.  At the right is the entrance.  There the disembodied, ushered by Truth, appears and, in homages and genuflections, affirms negatively the decalogue; protesting before the Master of Eternity that there is no evil in him; praying the dwellers in Amenti that he may cross the dark way; declaring to each that he has not committed the particular sin over which they preside.

“O Eater of Spirits gone out of the windows of Alu!  O Master of the Faces!” he variously calls.  “O the One who associates the Splendours!  O the Glowing Feet gone out of the Night!  I did not lie.  I did not kill.  I have not been anxious.  I did not talk abundantly.  I made no one weep.  No heart have I harmed.”

The assessors listen.  “I have not been anxious.  I made no one weep.  No heart have I harmed.”  These abstentions, graces now, were virtues then, and so efficacious that they perhaps sufficed, as rightly they should, for absolution.

But while the assessors listen and Osiris looks gravely on, no one accuses.  It is conscience in its nakedness, conscience exposed there where all may see it, where for the first time perhaps it truly sees itself, and seeing realizes what there is in it of evil and what of good, it is that which protests.

Still the assessors listen.  Orthodoxy on the part of the respondent is to them a minor thing.  What they require is that he shall have been merciful to his fellow creatures, true to himself.  Only when it is proven that he has done his duty to man, is he permitted to show that he has done his duty to gods.

The appeal continues:  “I fed the hungry, clothed the naked, I gave water to them that thirsted.  O ye that dwell in Amenti!  I am unpolluted, I am pure.”

But is it true?  The scales decide.  The heart of the respondent is weighed.  If heavy, out it is cast to pass with him again through life’s infernal circles.  But, if light as the feather in the balance and therefore equal with truth, it is restored to the body, which then resurrects and, in the bark of the Sun, sails the celestial Nile to Ra and the Land of Light.

That singer gone out of Amenti, actually, like Osiris, rose from the dead.  The picture which a papyrus forty centuries old presents, is the dream of a vision that Michel Angelo displayed, a sketch for a papal fresco.  Such indeed was the conformity between the underlying conceptions, that, at almost the first monition, Isis, whose veil no mortal had raised, lifted it from her black breast and suckled there the infant Jesus.  Then, presently, in temples that had teemed, the silence of the desert brooded.  The tide of life retreated, an entire theogony vanished, exorcised, both of them, by the sign of the cross.

At sight of the unimagined emblem, a priesthood who in secret sanctuaries had evolved nearly all but that, flung themselves into crypts beneath, pulled the walls down after them, burying unembalmed the arcana of a creed whose spirit still is immortal.

In Egypt, then, only tombs and nécropoles survived.  But it is legendary that, in the solitudes of the Thebaid, dispossessed eidolons of Ra, appearing in the shape of chimeras, terrified anchorites, to whom, with vengeful eyes, they indicated their ruined altars.