Before Amenta was created by the excavator Ptah within the nether earth there was no typical ascent of man. Indeed there were no men until the time of Tum, since which time the race has been considered human. When the sun-god Ra arose up from the earth, or from the Lotus, as the father of created man, or man the mortal, the legend of the human ascent was established. In the “creation” of Atum, instead of being reckoned as the offspring of the old First Mother or the group of the seven pre-solar gods, men became the children of Ra, who are said to have come into existence as tears from his eye, or as germs of an elemental soul proceeding from the solar god. Stars were the children of Ra the sun-god in the solar mythos. Souls were the offspring of Ra the holy spirit in the eschatology; and here we may possibly delve down to one of the tap-roots of the legendary “Exodus.” The stars were looked on as a race of beings having souls of light that emanated from the sun. To these the solar race, as human beings, were affiliated by means of the totemic types, which included the crocodile of Sebek, the beast of Bes, the hawk of Horus, the scarabeus of Kheper. Hence it is said by the god Ra to the righteous in Amenta, “You yourselves are tears of mine eye in your person of superior men. I have shed abroad my seed for you” (Book of Hades, 5th division, D). These were the seed of Ra, who, as figured, were born like a tear from his eye, as a mode of effluence, and being solar they were the superior race of men, the Ruti, or men par excellence. Under the name of Khabsu in Egyptian the stars are synonymous with souls. These in their nightly rising from Amenta were the images of souls becoming glorified. They came forth in their thousands and tens of thousands from the lower Egypt of the astronomical mythos, the earliest exodus being stellar. Thus we can realise the leader Shu, who stands upon the height of heaven, rod in hand, and who was imaged in the constellation Kepheus as the Regulus or law-giver at the pole.

One title of the first chapter in the Ritual is “The chapter of introducing the mummy into the Tuat on the day of burial.” This applies to the mummy interred on earth, and also to the Osiris or manes in Amenta, who was figured in the mummy-form. The Tuat is a place of entrance to and egress from the under-world. And in the Pyramid Texts (Pepi, i. 185) those who are in the Tuat are called the Tuata. Now, as the Tuat was in Tanen, the land (ta) beneath the waters of the Nen, they are the Tuata-Tanen, in whom we propose to identify the Irish mythical heroes or divine ancestors called the Tuatha de Danan. In the oldest account of the Tuatha it is said they came from heaven. Therefore their origin was not human. In issuing from the Tuat of Amenta they came from the lower paradise of two from which they brought the wisdom and the symbols of the Egyptians as their sacred treasures, including the four precious things belonging to the Tuatha de Danan. The Tuatha are described as the gods and the not-gods, a title that exactly corresponds to the Egyptian two classes of spirits called the gods and glorified. According to Giraldus in his Topographia Hibernia, it was a guess of the learned that the Tuatha “were of the number of the exiles driven out of heaven,” and if they were of those who came from the land of promise and issued from the Tuat, they would come from the subterranean Aarru or earthly paradise. The hills and mounds of Erin are the places of entrance to and exit from the invisible world of elfin-land, which answers to the hidden earth of the manes in Amenta. When euhemerised by tradition, the Tuatha de Danan are said to have retired into the hills and mounds after they were utterly defeated in battle. In other legends Dagda and his sons were once the rulers over this nether-land, and they are said to lie buried there with “the síd or fairy-mound of the brugh as covering for their resting-place” (Rhys). The brugh was originally the place of burial. He who sleeps at Philae is he who sleeps in the brugh, the burgh, or bury. The name written in hieroglyphics is Piruk=brugh, and there the mummy slept in the burgh of Amenta, or with the Tuata in the Tuat of the nether-world. The divine mother of the Tuatha is known by the name of Danan. The Tuatha are the tribe or people of the goddess Danan, who is also the deëss of death. Now, there is an Egyptian goddess Tanan who is a form of Hathor=the amorous queen in the earth of Tanen, the land of the nocturnal sun and the domain of the dead. The god Tanen is lord of that land, and the goddess is identified with Hathor by her headdress. The name of Tanan may also be written Tann. This agrees [Page 636] with the naming of the Welsh and Irish goddess Danu or Danan. Her name takes the form of Don in Welsh, and the deities who descend from her, like Gwydion and Arianrhod, are called the children of Don. The Tuatha de Danan are also termed the Fir Déa, or men of the goddess. Hence we propose to identify the goddess Tanen with Danan or Danu, the Great Mother of the Tuatha de Danan, who were the people of the goddess as the souls of the dead in the divine Neter-Kar, i.e. in Tanen, and who issued from the Tuat with the sun or solar god as the men of the Goddess, who was Tanan in Egypt, Danan in Ireland, and Don in Britain. The men of the goddess, as we suggest, were the Tuata of the Pyramid Texts, who as divine ancestors become the Irish Tuatha de Danan. The same word is represented by the Irish Tuath for the tribe; Breton Tud, Gothic Thiuda, Saxon Theod, for a people; the Oscan Tauta for a community; it is also extant in the name of the Teutons. One of the chief attributes of the Tuatha de Danan is the power they have of assuming any form at will, and this is a supreme trait of those who come forth when the Tuat is opened (Rit., ch. 2). Chapter 64 is the one by which the Tuata take all forms that each desireth, whether on entering or coming forth from this womb of Amenta. The transformation of the manes has come to be called shape-shifting, but there is no beginning with it as a faculty of the wizards in Ireland. There are various hints in the Irish fairy-lore of the Tuatha de Danan being one with the spirits of the dead. Their relation to the prehistoric mounds is the same as that of the Tuata with the mount of Amenta. There is also a still prevailing confusion in the Irish mind betwixt the fairies and the ghosts, which is very natural when we know that the fairies originated in the spirits of the elements which have got mixed up with the manes of the dead. According to Caesar, the Druids taught the Gauls that they were all descended from Dis Pater, the Demiurge — that is, from the god of Hades or Amenta, who is Tanan as consort of the goddess, and whose name was taken by Ptah-Tanan, the better known Dis Pater, who was earlier than Osiris in the Egyptian cult, and from whom the solar race ascended, whether from Puanta or from the Tuat. Thus interpreted, the Tuatha or tribes who brought the ancient wisdom out of Lower Egypt or the Tuat may have been genuine Egyptians after all, as the much-derided traditions of the Keltae and the Kymry yet allege and strenuously maintain. “The oasis of Tuaut” is another bit of ancient Egypt still surviving in the country of Morocco, where it testifies, like some strange boulder on the surface, to the buried past.

The birthplace of the stellar races was in the celestial north. The solar race were they who came forth from the East. In going down to Amenta, as manes, they were the westerners; in coming forth they are the easterners. Thus, when we are told that Abraham came from Ur of the Kasdim, or the Magi, which was his birthplace, that goes far to identify him as a solar god, just as Laban, the white one, was a lunar deity, and Ur a mythical locality. Ur is an Egyptian name for that which is eldest, first, great, principal. The course of the sun-god by day is reckoned to run from Ta-Ur to Am-Ur, i.e. from east to west. Ta-Ur then is Egyptian for the land of the east, and the migration thence is solar, that is — mythical, — and would be astronomical when the [Page 637] birthplace is designated “Ur of the Kasdim” or Chaldees. Ur of the Kasdim is self-identified by name with the Magi, astrologers or astronomers. Moreover, the frequent coupling of Ur and Martu in the astrological tablets points to Ur as a name for the east being juxtaposed to Martu for the west, “Ur and Martu” meaning east and west, and not Ur a city on earth and Martu a quarter in the heavens.

It has been pointed out by translators that various place-names in the Egyptian Book of the Dead denote celestial localities, and are not geographical. They are names in the astronomical mythology which had been first derived from Egypt on earth, that were afterwards applied to Upper Egypt in heaven and Lower Egypt in Amenta. The heaven above and Amenta below were divided into Upper and Lower Egypt. The Egyptian cities of Thinis, Hermopolis, Memphis, Thebes, Annu, and others were repeated in the planisphere as mythical localities which furnish place-names for the eschatology in the Ritual. When Osiris triumphs, and “joy goeth its round in Thinis,” that is the celestial, not the earthly city (Rit., ch. 18). When the deceased in Amenta exclaims, “May Sekhet the Divine One lift me up so that I may arise in heaven and issue my behest in Memphis” (Rit., ch. 26), it is the heavenly Memphis, the celestial Ha-ka-Ptah, or spirit house of Ptah, the enclosure of the white wall on high, that is meant. When the priest says in the first chapter of the Ritual, “I baptize with water in Tattu, and anoint with oil in Abydos”, the scene of the baptism is in Amenta, not on earth. Rekhet, the place where the two divine sisters waited and wept for the lost Osiris, was a locality in the earth of eternity, but Rekhet was also geographical in Egypt.

At first the localities, as Egyptian, were topographical, next they were constellated as uranographical, and finally they constituted a double Egypt of the other world in the earth and heaven of eternity.

The Egyptian Exodus is a mystery of Amenta. It is described in the Ritual as the Peri-em-heru or “coming forth to day” from “the Hades of Egypt and the desert” (Records, vol. x, p. 109). Thus when Horus comes forth in his resurrection it is said that “Egypt and the desert are at peace” (Rit., ch. 183). Egypt and the desert were the two parts in the double-earth that was divided between Sut and Horus, betwixt whom was internecine war that only ended temporarily at the coming of the prince of peace who came to set the prisoners free from the land of bondage, of drought and darkness, of Apap and the plagues of Egypt in the under-world.

The sufferers depicted in the mythos were at first the stars that fell down headlong into the abyss to be swallowed by the dragon, of whom it is said, “Eternal Devourer is his name” (Rit., ch. 17). This was in the astronomical mythology. In the eschatology the prisoners are the manes or body-souls of the dead who passed into Amenta, the earth of eternity, as it were by way of the grave. Both were the children of light, mythical or eschatological, otherwise the children of Ra, at war for ever with the creatures of darkness in the nether-earth. The exodus or coming forth from [Page 638] this nether Egypt is represented astronomically on the great Mendes Stele. On one side Horus Behutet, the great god, lord of heaven and giver of life, is described as coming “out of the horizon on the side of Upper Egypt,” and on the other side of the Stele “the coming out of Lower Egypt” is spoken of instead. That is the exodus from Kheb or Lower Egypt, which is Amenta in the eschatology (Records, vol. viii, 91). This is the exodus from Egypt of the lower earth according to the representation in the solar mythos that preceded the version in the eschatology by which it was followed and enforced. In the making of Amenta the Egyptians mapped out Egypt in the nether-world in accordance with Egypt on earth, only on a vaster scale. They had their Lower and Upper Egypts in the other life as they had in this. But Khebt, the Egyptian original of the Greek Eguptos, is more expressly the Lower Egypt, hence the lower of the two Egypts in the mythical representation. This was the Egypt below, through which the nocturnal sun and the souls of the deceased passed on their way up to the land of liberty and light. This was the Egypt where the Lord (as Osiris, or the elder Horus) was crucified in the Tat (Rev. xI. 8), or where the solar god suffered his mortal agony, his death and burial; the Egypt from which he rose again. Here was the wilderness of the wanderings during the forty days of the Egyptian Lent, which represented the forty days of the seed that was buried in the earth to attain the new life in the regermination of Osiris, which forty days were disguised as forty years in the historic version of the Jewish exodus. It is unfortunate and humiliating to us as a nation that Egyptology and Assyriology in England should have first fallen into the hands of devout believers in the biblical “history.” Archaeology had to call itself “biblical” in order that a society might be founded for the study of Egyptology and Assyriology, and Egyptian exploration was for a long time limited to looking for “biblical sites” in Egypt, which are only to be met with as mythical localities in Amenta. Nor is this mania of the historic-minded yet entirely extinct! Jewish or Gentile commentators who know nothing of the astronomical mythology, or the Egyptian origin of the Hebrew legends, have never been able to apply the comparative method to these writings. There is but one Egypt for them. But there was another Lower Egypt, another Red Sea, another dragon, another deliverance from Rahab and the Apap-monster, and another exodus, which have not hitherto been taken into account by the Hebraists. It was not to Egypt topographically that the ransomed of the Lord were to return singing the songs of Zion. There is another and a truer version of these mystical matters possible, even as there was of old.

The creation of Amenta in the Egyptian mythos has been already explained as the work of Ptah and the seven Knemmu or navvies who were his assistants in opening up the under-world, and who in the Hebrew rendering become the seven princes that digged the well, referred to in one of the fragments of ancient lore (Num. xxi. 18), which seven princes in the Semitic legends are identified with the chariot of the Lesser Bear. Amenta was a second terra firma for the souls of the departed, a mental fulcrum to the eye of faith laid on the physical foundation of the solar mythology for [Page 639] those who travelled the eternal road. Thus the origin of the exodus, as Egyptian, was in the coming forth of the heavenly bodies from below the horizon in the mythical representation. This was followed by the coming forth of the manes from dark to day, from death to life, from bondage to liberty, from Lower to Upper Egypt in the eschatology. In the coming forth of the Israelites from “the Hades of Egypt and the desert,” it is said the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light: that they might go by day and by night: the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night departed not from before the people” (Ex. xiii. 21, 22). It is possible that the zodiacal light supplied a natural image for the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire described in the book of Exodus. The zodiacal light is a phenomenon visible in Egypt at certain seasons of the year. It is seen as a conical pillar of cloud towards the east in the morning, just before sunrise, and towards the west at sunset. In the pale light of dawn it is a pillar of cloud, and in the ruddy glow of sundown it becomes a veritable pillar of fire. It is said of the Great One God, “the living one, who liveth everlastingly,” and who was Atum-Huhi in his temple at On, “He traverseth the heavens, and compasseth the nether-world each day; he travels in the cloud to separate heaven and earth, and again to unite them” — that is, at morn and evening in making the passage of Amenta. The ‘Lord of the Cloud” is also addressed as the guide of navigation. The flame of the sun is the protection of those who cross the double-earth. He who “commands heaven causes his disk to appear in the desert” (Rit., 99). “He who purifies the water” “appears on the liquid abyss” (101). “He marches for the dead; for those who are overturned” (I.). The opening chapters of the Book of the Dead are called the Peri-em-hru or coming forth to day. In other words, this was the Kamite exodus of the manes from Amenta in the eschatological phase of the mythos, which has been converted by literalization into the “history” found in the book of Exodus. The Hebrew märchen are the legendary remains of the Egyptian mythos, whether in the book of Genesis or the book of Exodus. The “coming forth to day” with which the Ritual opens is the Egyptian exodus, and the Hebrew exodus is likewise the coming forth to day.

An entrance to the mythical Amenta, previously shown, was localized at Abydos as the cleft or the mouth of the rock, a narrow gorge in the Libyan range of hills. Opposite this entrance stood the temple of Osiris Khent-Amenta, a name which denotes the opening to the interior of Amenta. Through this gorge the solar bark passed into the mountain of the west, and bore the image of the dying solar god on board. Once a year also there was a feast of the dead, or, as we have it in survival, of All Souls, and there came a funeral flotilla to the mouth of the cleft on one of the first nights of the year. This answers in the mythos to the starting-point in time of the Jewish exodus as history, in the first month of the year.

Two ways of entering the other world are represented in two different categories of the ancient legend, both of which are derived from the same fundamental origin. One is by means of the dividing [Page 640] waters, the other by means of the passage that opens and closes in the earth at evening or in the equinox. In the Egyptian mythos the entrance to Amenta is both by land and water. The god on board the solar bark, or the children of Ra=Israel on board the bark of souls, passed through the cloven rock by water. Previously the water had to be divided for the travellers to pass. But the waters thus divided were celestial, being mythical. They are the waters divided by Shu-Anhur with his rod as leader of the manes from Amenta up to heaven. It is not written in the Old Testament what the Lord did for Israel in the vale of Arnon, but the Targum of Jerusalem tells us that when the Beni-Israel were passing through the gorge or defile, the Moabites were hidden in the caverns of the valley, intending to rush out and slay them. But the Lord signed to the mountains, and they literally laid their heads together to prevent it; they closed upon the enemy with a clap, and crushed the chiefs of the mighty ones, so that the valleys were overflowed with the blood of the slain. Meanwhile Israel walked over the tops of the hills, and knew not the miracle and the mighty act which the Lord was doing in the valley of the Arnon. Thus the miracle of the Red Sea was reversed. In the one case the waters stood up in heaps and were turned into hills; in the other the solid hills flowed down and were fused, whilst Israel passed over them as if they were a level plain. In the one miracle the Red Sea was turned into dry ground; in the other the dry ground was turned into a red sea of blood. The hills that rushed together to make a level plain are a familiar figure of the equinox, to be found in varied forms of legendary lore (Book of Beginnings, vol. II, pp. 356-357). This account therefore is as good as the biblical one, and it tends to prove that both belong to the astronomical mythos, and that the crossing here was in the equinox.

In the mythos of Amenta the promised land of plenty, the land of corn and wine and oil, was the Aarru-field of divine harvest that awaited the righteous who had been wanderers in the wilderness and who fought their way to it through all the obstacles of the under-world. These obstacles can still be traced in the Jewish narrative compared with the books of Amenta and the mysteries of Taht. All through the journey of this Egypt underground, the objects besought and fervently prayed for are a good passage through the waters and all other hindrances, and a safe way out upon the eastern side, where lay the promised land. One great object of the manes in knowing the words of great magical power in Amenta is to obtain command over the waters. The deceased prays that he may have command over the waters which he has to pass through, even as Sut had command of force on the “night of the great disaster” (Rit., chs. 57 and 62). These waters are the Red Sea of the Jewish exodus, in which the Apap-dragon lurks and lies in wait. The later scholiasts tell us that the habitation of this monster was the Red Sea. Thus the Red Sea is identifiable with the lake of Putrata in which the dragon lurked that lived upon the drowned, the dragon that was turned into the cruel Pharaoh in the Hebrew version of the exodus.

It is evident that the Jews were in possession of an esoteric rendering of the same mystical matter as is presented exoterically in the books ascribed to Moses. There were two versions of the dark [Page 641] sayings and the hidden wisdom, the esoteric and the exoteric, amongst them, as there were amongst the Egyptians, and these have doubled the confusion. The Christian world has based its structure of belief simply and solely on the exoteric version; thus the door of the past just now being opened anew in Egypt was closed to them and locked; they were left outside without the key, and in the darkness of the grossest, crassest ignorance the Christian faith was founded. We have now to recover such “history” as is possible from the Pentateuch by eliminating the mythos and the eschatology. Fragments of the original mythos crop up in the Haggadoth, the Kabalah, the Talmud, and other Hebrew writings, which tend to show that in the earlier time and lowermost strata the same matter had been known to the Jews themselves as non-historical. Thus it is provable and will be proved that “biblical history” has been mainly derived from misappropriated and misinterpreted mythology, and that the mythology is demonstrably Egyptian which can only be explained in accordance with the Egyptian wisdom. This is not to say that the books of Genesis, Exodus, and Joshua are intentional forgeries, but that the data were already more or less extant as subject-matter of the mysteries, and that an exoteric version of the ancient wisdom has been rendered in the form of historic narrative and ethnically applied to the Palestinian Jews. The most learned of the Rabbis have most truthfully and persistently maintained that the books attributed to Moses do but contain an exoteric explanation of the secret wisdom, though they may not trace the gnosis to its Egyptian source. The chief teachers have always insisted on the allegorical nature of the Pentateuch. Two laws, they tell us, were delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai. One was committed to writing, as in the Pentateuch; the other was transmitted orally from generation to generation, as is acknowledged by the Psalmist when he says, “I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings of old, which we have heard and known and our fathers have told us.” Parables and dark sayings of old are the allegories of mythology and enigmas of the ancient wisdom uttered after the manner of the mysteries. Now the subject of this psalm is the story of Israel in Egypt and the exodus from the old dark land. The plagues of Egypt are described. “He set his sign in Egypt; he turned their rivers into blood.” “He sent them swarms of flies which devoured them, and frogs which destroyed them.” He also gave their increase to the caterpillar and their labour to the locust. He killed their vines with hail and their sycamore-trees with frost, and “smote all the first-born in Egypt.” The coming forth is also described. The Psalmist tells of the marvellous things that were done “in the land of Egypt.” How the Lord “clove the sea” and “caused them to pass through” whilst the waters were made “to stand as an heap.” How he led them forth with a pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night. How he clove the rock in the wilderness “and gave them drink abundantly as out of the depths, “ and “ opened the doors of heaven “ and “ rained down manna upon them to eat.” This was heard and known orally as a tale that is told in dark sayings of old which did not originate in the biblical history of the exodus. They are “tried as silver is tried” in the refineries of the nether-earth. They go “through fire and through water,” and are “brought out into [Page 642] a place of abundance” in the pleasant Aarru fields. This journey is described in various psalms. “Working salvation in the midst of the earth, thou didst divide (or break up) the sea by thy strength; thou breakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou breakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces” (Ps. LXXIV. 12-14). In the Hebrew Song of Moses we are in the same nether-earth, where the matter is eschatological. The adversaries are the same opponents of the chosen people — the same, that is, in the book of Deuteronomy as in the Book of the Dead. Ezekiel (XX. 36) makes an allusion to “the wilderness of the land of Egypt,” which points to the lower Egypt of the mythos in Amenta. Egypt itself, as the land of the living, the cultivable land, was the very opposite of the wilderness.

Amenta in the Book of Hades, and also in the Ritual, is described as consisting of two parts, called “Egypt and the desert land or wilderness.” This latter was the domain of Sut in the Osirian mysteries. One part of the domain, named Anrutef, is self-described as the place where nothing grows. It was a desert of fruitless, leafless, rootless sand, in which “ there was no water for the people to drink” ; or, if any, the water was made bitter or salt by the adversary Sut or the Apap-dragon. The struggle of Sut and Horus (or Osiris) in the desert lasted forty days, as these were commemorated in the forty days of the Egyptian Lent, during which time Sut as the power of drought and sterility made war on Horus in the water and the buried germinating grain. Meantime “the flocks of Ra” were famishing for lack of pasture and for want of water in the wilderness. These forty days spent in the desert of the mythos have confessedly been extended into the forty years of the history. They were the forty days of suffering in the wilderness of the under-world which lay betwixt the autumn and the vernal equinox. And when it is threatened by Ihuh that only the children shall go forth with Joshua, it is said, “Your children shall be wanderers in the wilderness even forty days, for every day a year” (Num. XIV. 33, 34).

The lower Egypt of Amenta was a land of dearth and darkness to the manes. It was the domain of Sut at the entrance in the west. Here was the typical wilderness founded on the sands that environed Egypt. Aarru or the garden far to the eastward was an oasis in the desert ready for the manes who were fortunate enough to reach that land of promise. The domain of Sut was a place of plagues; all the terrors of nature were congregated there, including drought and famine, fiery flying serpents and unimaginable monsters. There were the hells of heat in which the waters were on fire; there were the slime-pits, the blazing bitumen, and brimstone flames of Sodom and Gomorrah. The desert of engulfing sands, the lakes of fire, and the deluge of overwhelming waters had to be crossed, and all the powers of death and hell opposed the passage of the glorified elect, the chosen people of the Lord, who were bound for bliss in the land where their redemption dawned upon the summit of the mount. This then was the land of bondage where the manes were in direst need of a deliverer. The typical tyrant and taskmaster in the Hebrew “history” has never been identified on earth, and it may be somewhat difficult to identify him in Amenta, but it is not impossible. The devourer of the people in that land takes several forms. The [Page 643] Apap monster lies in wait and has to be encountered at the entrance to the valley of the shadow of death. But there is one typical devourer. The Red Sea is his dwelling-place, and “eternal devourer is his name.” Another of his names is Mates, the hard, cruel, flinty-hearted. He is described as having the skin of a man and the face of a hound. His dwelling is in the red lake of fire, where he lives upon the shades of the damned and eats the livers of princes. As he comes from the Red Sea, his overthrowal is in the Red Sea, like the overwhelming of Pharaoh and his host. The same typical devourer has another figure in the judgment hall, where it is named Amemit. Here it has the head of a crocodile. Where we might speak of the jaws of death, hell, or destruction, the Egyptians said or showed the jaws of the crocodile. Those who are condemned to be devoured pass into the jaws of the devourer. Thus the crocodile is the devourer, the typical tyrant, the cruel, hard-hearted monster who bars the gate of exit and will not let the suffering people go up from the land of bondage. When the manes seeks his place of refuge in Amenta or in the Ammah (Rit., ch. 72), he prays for deliverance from the crocodile in the land of bondage. He also says, “Let not the powers of darkness (the Sebau) have the mastery over me,” and he prays that he may reach the divine dwelling which has been prepared for him in the Aarru-fields of peace and plenty, where there is corn of untold quantity in that land toward which his face is set. This is the chapter “by which one cometh forth to day and passeth through Ammah or the Ammah” in seeking deliverance from the crocodile or dragon in the land of bondage. Protection is sought in Ammah because the god who dwells there in everlasting light is the overthrower of the crocodile. The crocodile is the dragon of Egypt to the Hebrew scribes, who use it as an image of the Pharaoh. When Ezekiel writes, “Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, I am against thee, Pharaoh, King of Egypt, the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers,” the imagery is derived from the Egypt of Amenta, however it may be afterwards applied. The great dragon, as typical devourer in the land of bondage, is here identified with the Pharaoh of Egypt, as it also has been in the book of Exodus.

Amenta is spoken of at least once in the Ritual as the place wherein the living are destroyed. It is also described as the Kâsu or burial-place. One of the twelve divisions of this under-world was known as “the sandy realm of Sekari,” the place of interment. The dead were buried underneath their mounds in this domain of Sekari, which was a wilderness of sand. This is the probable origin of the wilderness full of buried corpses in the book of Numbers. For, after all the promises made to the children of Israel, they are suddenly turned upon by the Lord and told that their carcases shall fall in this wilderness. “Your little ones will I bring in, but as for you, your carcases shall fall in this wilderness” (Num. xiv. 31, 32). Now, the carcases that were to rot in the wilderness are equivalent to the mummies buried in the sandy realm of Osiris-Sekari, god of the coffin and the desert sand. In the Kamite eschatology those who made the exodus from Amenta to the world of day are those who rise from the dead in the desert called “the sandy realm of Sekari” = the wilderness. Moreover, they rise again as children who are [Page 644] called “the younglings of Shu.” And Shu was the leader and forerunner of this new generation of divine beings, called his “younglings,” from the “sandy realm of Sekari,” when their redemption from that land of bondage dawned (Rit., ch. 55). The wilderness of the nether-earth being a land of graves, this gives an added significance to the question asked of Moses, “Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?” (Ex. XIV. 11), which as the domain of Osiris-Sekari was depicted as a cemetery of sand, where the dead awaited the coming of Horus, Shu, Ap-uat (or Anup), the guide, and Taht, the lunar light, as servants of Ra, the supreme one god, to wake them in their coffins and lead them from this land of darkness to the land of day. Amenta, as the place of graves, is frequently indicated in the Hebrew scriptures, as in the description of the great typical burial-place in the valley of Hamon-Gog. This was in the Egypt described in the book of Revelation as the city of dead carcases, where also their lord was crucified as Ptah-Sekari or Osiris-Tat. Amenta had been converted into a cemetery by the death and burial of the solar god, who was represented as the mummy in the lower Egypt of the nether-earth. The manes were likewise imaged as mummies in their coffins or beneath their mounds of sand. They also rose again in the mummy-likeness of their lord, and went up out of Egypt in the constellation of the Mummy (Sahu-Orion), or in the coffin of Osiris that was imaged in the Greater Bear.

In the Ritual the power of darkness called “the devourer of the ass,” which was a solar zootype, is Am-ã-ã, the great, great devourer by name. Am signifies the devourer, of whom it is said eternal devourer is his name (Rit., ch. 17). This Am-ã-ã, the great, great devourer, is apparently the Amalek of the biblical legend: Melek, the lord of rule, being suffixed to the name of Am, to describe the character. “Then came Amalek and fought with Israel in Rephidim,” in the region of the Rephaim, Sheol or Amenta (Ex. XVII. 8). “The Lord hath sworn he will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.” These are the two great opponents, who were Apap, the devourer of the ass, and Ra in the wars of Amenta. The wars of the lord, as Egyptian, were waged against the adversaries of Ra or Osiris in Amenta. These adversaries were the powers of evil, the Apap-dragon of drought, the serpent of darkness, the Sebau, the Sami, together with Sut and his co-conspirators in the later rendering of the mythos. The adversaries of the Good Being are annihilated in the tank of flame (ch. I). Osiris is thus addressed: “Hail to thee, the great, the mighty, whose enemies are laid prostrate at their blocks! Hail to thee, who slaughterest the Sebau and annihilatest Apap! Thou hast utterly destroyed all the enemies of Osiris” (Rit., ch. 15). Chapter 18 is in celebration of the triumph of Osiris over all his adversaries, who are slaughtered and destroyed. The great slaughter of the adversaries is carried out in the nether-world (ch. 41) or secret earth of Amenta, at a place called Suten-Khen. Also the plagues of Egypt had previously been let loose by the Lord on Abram’s account. “And the Lord plagued Pharaoh with great plagues” before “Abram went up out of Egypt” (Gen. xii. 17; XIII. 1). This is a bit of the same myth of Amenta, which was earlier than the [Page 645] Mosaic exodus. The scenery of Sodom and the pits of bitumen may be found in the Ritual, together with the night of reckoning, which is the “night of fire against the overthrown, the night of chaining the wicked in their hells, the night on which their vital principles are destroyed” (Rit., 17). In the Hebrew version this “reckoning” on the fatal night when the Typhonians (or Sodomites) were destroyed in the hells of fire and sulphur takes the shape of “reckoning,” whether there are fifty, forty-five, forty, thirty, twenty, or ten righteous persons to save the doomed city from destruction (Gen. XVIII. 24-32). In the legend of the monkey, the god who reposes in Amenta and traverses the darkness and the shadows, when he rises gives up the pig to the plague (Book of Hades). Now the pig was a type of the evil Typhon. In one of the pictures a pig called the devourer of the arm (of Osiris) is being driven by the monkey, which was a lunar zootype. Thus the pig which is here given to the plagues shows that in the true mythos the plagues of Egypt were let loose on the Typhonians or powers of evil, the Sebau, the Sami, the conspirators of Sut, the children of darkness, whether from a physical or moral point of view, and that this was in the lower Egypt of Amenta. These in the Hebrew version have been transformed into ethnical Egyptians who so cruelly oppressed and preyed upon the suffering Israelites. Thus the plagues of Egypt occurred twice over in a land which was not the Egypt of the Pharaohs, and the people who suffered from them were not Egyptians. This agrees with the hidden gnosis in the Wisdom of Solomon, and also in the book of Revelation, where the plagues are of the same mystical nature, but are only seven instead of ten in number. The “wilderness” was obviously a place or state in which the shoes and clothes of the people did not wear out. This was only possible to the manes in the desert of Amenta. The two regions of the clothed and unclothed are named in relation to the judgment hall of Mati. The clothed and unclothed are well-known terms for the elect and the rejected manes; the children of light and the offspring of darkness. In the trial scenes the spirits who are judged to be sound and pure are told that they may pass on as the clothed, whilst the condemned are designated the unclothed. Thus the clothed ones pass safely and freely through the desert region of the unclothed. In the Hebrew version we read, “I have led you forty years in the wilderness, (and) your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and your shoe is not waxen old upon your feet” (Deut. XXIX. 5). There can be no doubt about these being the divinely clothed and fed, as described in the Ritual, where they eat of the tahen and drink of the water made sweet by the tree of life, and pass, as the clothed, through the wilderness which is called the region of the naked. To say that the clothes and shoes of God’s own people did not wear out during a period of forty years is a mode of showing they were divinely made for everlasting wear, but not on earth, where nowadays they wear out all too fast for Gentile as for Jew. Apparently the Hebrew manna represents the Egyptian tahen which was given to the manes for food in the wilderness of Amenta. In passing through the desert or the region of the unclothed, the manes tells of the tahen that was given for sustenance (ch. 124). So far as the tahen is [Page 646] known, it agrees well enough with the Hebrew manna. “When the dew that lay (on the ground) was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness a small round thing, small as the hoar-frost on the ground,” which was “like unto wafers made with honey.” Wafers made of tahen were also eaten sacramentally as food of heaven in the Osirian eucharist. In the mystery of opening the mouth and of giving breath to the breathless ones in Amenta, the Egyptians made use of an instrument called the ur-heka, or great magical power. It is sometimes a sinuous, serpent-like rod without the serpent’s head. At others it has the head of the serpent on it, united with the head of a ram. Both ram and serpent were types of the deity Khnef, who represented the breath of life or the spirit, Nef, Hebrew Nephesh, which was assumed to enter the Osiris when the mummy’s mouth was typically opened to inhale the breath of future existence. Here then is a magical rod that turned into a serpent, which may be seen figured in the Vignettes to the Ritual as a form of the magical rod with which the mouth of the deceased was opened in the mysteries of Amenta. It is held by the tail in the hand of the magician or priest who performs the ceremony of apru, i.e., opening the mouth, in illustration of the chapters by which the mouth is opened in the nether-world (Vignettes to chs. 21, 22, 23). The rod is changed into a serpent at the time when the Lord is desirous for Moses to become his mouthpiece. Moses objects, whereupon the Lord asks, “Who hath made man’s mouth? Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth and teach thee what thou shalt speak.” The contest ends in Moses having his own way, and in Aaron becoming a mouth to Moses. Moses is to take in his hand the rod wherewith he is to “do the signs” (Ex. IV. 1-17).

Here then we identify the serpent-rod of the Egyptian priests that was known by name as the great magical power, and it was sometimes a rod, at others a serpent. This we take to be the original of that rod with which the tricks are played in the Hebrew märchen by the Lord God of Israel for the purpose of frightening Pharaoh. “And the Lord said unto him (Moses), What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod. And he said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent: and Moses fled from before it. And the Lord said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand and take it by the tail. And he put forth his hand and laid hold of it, and it became a rod in his hand” (Ex. IV. 2-5). The type of great magical power is thus turned to account in astonishing the natives and in giving lessons to the magicians of Egypt. In both scenes we have the opening of the mouth. In both we have the serpent-rod with which the signs and wonders are wrought. And it is admitted that Pharaoh had wise men, sorcerers, “magicians of Egypt,” who had rods which became serpents as types of transformation. These rods are to be seen in the hands of the wise men portrayed in the Ritual, but not for any such fool’s play as is described in the book of Exodus.

There are two serpents in Egyptian symbolism — one is a type of evil, the other is the good serpent. One is the Apap of drought, darkness, and death or negation; the other is the Uraeus-serpent of life, that was worn on the frontlets of the gods and the glorified manes as a sign of protection and salvation or safety (ch. 34). In [Page 647] the chapter by which a person is not devoured or bitten to death by the eater of the head, which is a snake, an appeal is addressed to the solar Uraeus as the source of life, the flame which shineth on the forehead of the glorified. In the seventh abode there is a serpent named Retuk (the cartouche in my copy reads Ruruk or Rerek), that lives on the manes and is said to “annihilate their magical virtue” (149). The speaker says, “I am the master of enchantments” (149). He is the magician, the prototype of Pharaoh’s, who worked by enchantment (Ex. VII. 11). The “fiery serpent” of the wilderness may be traced in this great serpent of Amenta, whose name is “dweller in his flame.” However rendered, the hieroglyphics identify the mythical serpent of fire as the fiery serpent of the Hebrew märchen. The lifting up of the serpent can also be paralleled in the text when the speaker exclaims, “I am raised up to (or as) the serpent of the sun” — that is, the Uraeus, the good serpent when compared with Apap. The serpent Aker is joined to the nocturnal sun as he traverses the Amenta (or the wilderness) by night. Thus Aker, the serpent of fire, is the good serpent that is raised up as the fiery serpent in the exodus. The evil serpent Apap is then told that he must retreat before this uplifted solar serpent (which accompanies the orb in the Egyptian triad) and in presence of the revivifying sun. And in this way the mythos furnished matter for the märchen and the folk-tales about the evil serpents that bit the wandering Israelites, and how they were saved and healed by an image of the good serpent, which always had been lifted up in Egypt as a solar symbol of healing and of life. In playing off the serpent of fire against the serpent of darkness, the deceased anticipates Moses with Nehushtan the brazen. He exclaims triumphantly, “I understand the mystical representations of things, and by that means I repulse Apap” (108). Also in the zodiac of Esné fiery flying serpents are to be seen on the wing in the decans of Cancer as the sign of heat and drought (Drummond, Oed. Jud., pl. 8). The children of Israel, as followers of the solar god, are the children of Ra, or Atum-Ra, under whatsoever racial name; and these are to be met with even by name, making the passage through the lower Egypt of Amenta on their way to the promised land. People named the Aaiu, an Egyptian plural equivalent to our word Jews, are described in the under-world. Their god is the ass-headed Aiu, or Iu, who was one of the gods of Israel that led the people up out of Egypt — that is, the ass was one of the zootypes of the god Aiu, as the calf, bullock, or ox was another. We had to dredge this nether-earth for much of the sunken treasure of Egyptian wisdom that has long been lost in its authentic shape. And in Amenta we find the ass-headed god of the Jews, respecting whom they have been so ignorantly derided and maligned. His name, we repeat, is Aiu, Au, Aai, or Iu, both as god and as the ass in old Egyptian; and this name survived in the forms of Iao, Iau, Iahu, Ieou, and others. The god was Atum-Ra in Egypt, and Aiu the ass-headed is one of the types of the solar god. Aiu appears ass-headed in Amenta as a god stretched out upon the ground who has the solar disk upon his head, with the ears of an ass projecting beside the disk. He is holding the rope by which the solar boat was towed up from the nether-world (Lefébure, Records, vol. X, [Page 648] p. 130). The figure lying on the ground denotes the god who was Atum-Aiu, the sun by night in the earth of eternity. The people who are with Aiu in this scene are amongst those “who guard the rope of Aiu, and do not allow the serpent Apap to mount towards the boat of the great god.” These are the Aiu as the people of Iu. It is said of them, “Those who are in this scene walk before Ra (Atum-Iu). They charm (or catalepse) Apap for him. They rise with him towards the heavens.”

The Book of Amenta, called the Book of Hades by Lefébure, shows this god in his mummied form as one with Osiris in the body and with Ra in soul; otherwise it is Atum in the body, or mummy, and Iu in soul. And just as Ra the holy spirit descends in Tattu on the mummy Osiris, and as Horus places his hands behind Osiris in the resurrection, so Iu comes to his body, the mummy in Amenta. Those who tow Ra along say, “The god comes to his body; the god is towed along towards his mummy” (Records, vol. X, p. 132). The sun-god, whether as Atum-Iu (Aiu or Aai) or Osiris-Ra, is a mummy in Amenta and a soul in heaven. The imagery is quite natural: the nocturnal sun became a mummy as a figure of the dead, and a soul or spirit in its resurrection as a figure of the living. Atum, or Osiris, as the sun in Amenta, is the mummy buried down in Khebt or Lower Egypt, and Iu in the one rendering, or Horus in the other, raises the mummy-god. This is the meaning of the ass-eared Aiu when he is portrayed in the act of hauling at the rope of the sun or raising the mummy in Amenta. The god Aiu is represented mummified upon the tomb of Rameses the Sixth — that is, in the character of Atum the father, buried as the mummy in lower Egypt. Thus we identify the ass-god Aiu or Iu (an ancient Egyptian name of the ass) in lower Egypt, and his followers, who are the Aiu by name. The followers of Iu=Aiu then are the Aiu, Ius, or the later Jews. They fight the battle of the sun-god in the nether-earth, where the dragon Apap was the cruel impious oppressor; and when they do escape from this, the land of bondage for the manes, they are the Aaiu or the Jews, who “rise behind this god to heaven,” and their exodus is from Khebt, the lower Egypt of Amenta. The whole story of the faithful Israelites who would not bow down to the gods of Egypt is told in a few words relating to the Aiu (or Jews) in Amenta. As it is said, “These are they who spoke the truth on earth and did not rise to (prohibited) adorations” or heresies (Lefébure, Book of Hades, Records of the Past).

The legends of the exodus, like those in the book of Genesis originated in the astronomical mythology, in which the making of Amenta is followed by the Peri-em-hru or coming forth to day from the lower Egypt of the under-world and the wilderness or desert. The story of this exodus is inscribed in hieroglyphics on the sarcophagus of Seti, now in the Soane Museum. The Book of Hades, or Amenta, and the Book of the Dead suffice of themselves to prove that “the Egypt and the desert” of the exodus were in Amenta, and not in the land of the pyramids. This was “the Egypt and the desert” in which the flocks of Ra were shepherded and fed. “Horus says to Ra’s flocks, Protection for you, flocks of Ra, born of the great one who is in the heavens. Breath to your nostrils, overthrowal to your coffins” (Book of Hades, 5th division, [Page 649] legend D). These are the manes in Amenta called the flocks of Ra, who are shepherded by Horus as Har-Khuti, lord of spirits. The overthrowal of the coffins shows that this was the deliverance of the dead, and that the exodus or coming forth to day was synonymous with the resurrection from the dead.

Amenta had been mapped out in twelve domains, according to the twelve astronomical divisions and the twelve gates which the sun passed through by night. “As it is said, the great god travels by the roads of Hades, to make the divisions which take place in the earth” (Book of Hades). There are various groups of the twelve as divine personages or children of Ra in this lower Egypt of Amenta.

As characters in the mythos, Jacob and the ten tribes, sons, or children correspond to Ra the solar-god, with his ten cycles in the heaven of ten divisions (Rit., ch. 18), whilst Israel — the same personage — with the twelve sons, answers to the same god, Ra, in the heaven of twelve divisions or twelve signs of the zodiac.

It has now to be admitted that the twelve sons of Jacob are not historic, and the historical exodus must follow them, for that is founded on the twelve sons going down into Egypt as historic characters, and the people of Israel coming out of it as their direct descendants hugely multiplied. The twelve, as sons of Jacob, go down to Egypt in search of corn, and in the Book of Amenta we get a glimpse of the twelve or their mythical prototypes who make the journey as characters in the astronomical mythology. Twelve gods of the earth are to be seen marching towards a mountain, which shows they are on their way to the nether-world, as it is depicted upside down. Twelve gods in the earth of Amenta are marching towards another mountain, and these two mountains form a sort of forge toward which the divine boat voyages. This is the entrance to Amenta, and these are the twelve as sons of Ra, who are on their way down to the lower Egypt of the mythos, the prototypal twelve who are the sons of Israel in the Hebrew version. These are said to be “those who are born of Ra, born of his substance, and which proceed from his eye.” Thus Ra is the father of the twelve. Ra has prepared for them “a hidden dwelling” in this Egypt of the lower earth or desert of Amenta. Twelve persons called the blessed are portrayed as worshippers of Ra. Twelve others are the righteous who are in Amenta. Twelve mummies standing upright, each in a chapel with open doors, are “the holy gods who are in Amenta.” Twelve men walking represent “the human souls which are in Amenta.” Twelve bearers of the cord with which the allotments are measured for the glorified elect are represented by twelve persons carrying the long serpent Nenuti. These bearers of the cord in the Amenta are those who prepare the fields for the elect. Ra says, “Take the cord; draw, measure the fields of the manes, who are the elect in your dwellings, gods in your residences, deified elect, in order to rejoin the country, proved elect, in order to be within the cord.” Ra says to them of the enclosures, "it is the cord of justice". Ra is satisfied with the measurement. “Your own possessions, gods, and your own domains, elect, are yours. Now eat. Ra creates your fields and appoints you your food”. “The gods are content with their possessions, the glorified are satisfied with their dwellings”. The followers of Har-Khuti, lord of spirits, are the twelve, who take the [Page 650] place in the solar mythos of the earlier seven Khuti in the stellar mythos, five more being added to the seven. These are the twelve as the children of Ra, who cultivate the fields of divine harvest in the plains of Amenta, where they reap for Ra as followers of Horus the beloved son: “They labour at the harvest, they collect the corn. Their seeds are favoured in the land by the light of Ra at his appearance.” Thus the twelve are the cultivators of corn in Egypt. They give food to the gods and to the souls of the elect in Amenta. As the bearers of food they are twelve in number. In one scene the twelve are portrayed in two groups of seven and five persons. The seven are the reapers. The five are seen bending towards an enormous ear of corn. These are described as the twelve who labour at the harvest in the land of corn which is in the earth of eternity. The scene with the twelve in a posture of adoration suggests the sheaf of corn in Joseph’s dream. “Behold, we were binding sheaves in the field, and lo, my sheaf arose, and also stood upright; and behold, your sheaves came round about, and made obeisance to my sheaf” (Gen. XXXVII. 7). In one form the Aarru enclosure was portrayed as the field of divine harvest, and the twelve were the typical reapers of the corn that grew there seven cubits high (Book of Hades, Records of the Past, vols. X and XII). This is sufficiently suggestive of the twelve enormous sheaves in Joseph’s dream, and of the reapers being a form of the twelve harvesters. The twelve as gods were also rulers in the twelve signs which formed the final circle of the Aarru paradise. And in Joseph’s second dream his star is greeted with obeisance like his sheaf. “Behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven (other) stars made obeisance to me,” he who was represented by the twelfth star as well as by the twelfth sheaf (Gen. XXXVII. 6-9). Horus in the harvest-field of lower Egypt has two characters, one pertaining to the mythos, one to the eschatology. In the first he is one of the twelve as harvesters: the twelve who row the solar boat, the twelve to whom the stations were assigned or thrones were given in the zodiac. In the other character he is Har-Khuti, lord of spirits, and in this phase he is the supreme one at the head of the twelve, who are now his servants.

The pictures show the children of Ra both as the group of twelve and also as the twelve with Horus. In one scene Horus is depicted leaning on a staff, and eleven gods are walking towards Osiris. These are the twelve altogether, of whom Horus is one in presence of the father. But on the tomb of Rameses the Sixth the twelve appear, preceded by Horus, the master of joy, leaning on his staff. These are the harvesters: seven of them are the reapers, the other five are collectors of the corn (Book of Hades). Thus the fields of divine harvest are twelve in number; the cultivators are twelve in number; the reapers and bearers of food are twelve in number; the children of Ra=Jacob-El or Isiri-El are twelve in number. So it was not left for the historic Israelites to map out the land of promise in twelve allotments betwixt the twelve tribes and twelve children of Ihuh. Amenta in twelve sections with twelve gates represented the heaven in twelve divisions, and the chart was as old as the solar zodiac of twelve signs that was already in existence, as we reckon, in the heaven of Atum-Ra some 13,000 years ago. Not only was the promised land mapped out in twelve divisions in [Page 651] accordance with the twelve signs of the solar zodiac or the twelve pillars raised by Moses round the mount — not only did the chosen race, as children of the one god Atum, take possession of the land allotted to them, or the land appointed them by lot, as Joshua renders it; title-deeds were also issued to the glorified elect.

This lower Egypt, the land of corn, in the Book of Hades is not geographical. Like Annu, Thebes, and Memphis in the Ritual, it is a mythical locality in the earth of eternity. It is the lower domain of the double earth, the country of the manes called Amenta that was hollowed out by Ptah the opener. It is the lower Egypt named Kheb, to which Isis was warned to flee by night as the place of refuge for the infant Horus when his life was threatened by the Apap-monster. Lower Egypt is the land of death or darkness, leading to the world of life and light. It is here that “Horus says to the flocks of Ra, which are in the Hades of Egypt and the desert”, “Protection for you, flocks of Ra, born of the great one who is in the heavens” as Atum-Ra. These flocks “in the Hades of Egypt and the desert” are the chosen people, the deified elect, as the children of Ra. Amenta was a land of darkness until it was lighted by the nocturnal sun. This was the origin of the typical “Egyptian darkness”. But in the Egypt of this lower hemisphere the god prepared a secret and mysterious dwelling for his children where the glorified elect were hidden in the light. “Ra says to the earth, Let the earth be bright. My benefits are for you who are in the light. To you be a dwelling”. “I have hidden you”. (Book of Hades, 1st division.) Food is given them because of the light, in which they are enveloped. This divine dwelling created by Ra for the elect is entitled “the Retreat”. As it is said, “The earth is open to Ra, the earth is closed against Apap. Those who are in the Retreat worship Ra”. This Retreat is equivalent to the biblical land of Goshen, where the chosen people dwelt in light. In the book of Exodus there is a three days’ solid darkness over the land of Egypt, “but all the children of Israel had light in their dwellings” (ch. X. 22, 23). The land of Goshen in the Hebrew version represents the Retreat of Ammah in the Ritual. Ammah is a locality that is traversed in knowing the spirits of Annu or of attaining the garden eastward. Those who belong to the state of the elect are hidden in Ammah. They are described as being concealed in light by Ra. Ammah is a region reserved for the gods and the glorified spirits who are the children of light bound for the land where there is no more night. It is a place impenetrable to the creatures of darkness and to those who are twice dead — dead in their sins as well as in the mortal body. These are they who do not rise again from the lower Egypt. There is no deliverance or exodus for them; they do not enter Ammah, or follow Shu, the lion of strength, who leads up the elect into the land of light. Ammah is the sixth one of fourteen abodes in the 149th chapter of the Ritual. It is an abode of peace reserved for the blessed, where the evil dead cannot enter. It is a mystery to the manes. The god who is there is called the overthrower of the crocodile or dragon. The deceased in saluting Ammah asks that he may take possession of its stuffs in peace. “O Ammah! Reservation of the gods; mystery for the manes where the dead may not enter. Hail to thee, O Ammah [Page 652] the august. I come to see the gods who are there. Open to me, that I may take possession of your stuffs.” (Cf. the spoils.) Ammah is the Goshen of the Ritual, reserved and set apart for the glorified as a place impenetrable to the powers of evil or the dead who do not rise again, and for whom there is no exodus or coming forth to day (149). It is the work of the worshippers in Amenta to destroy the enemies of Ra and defend the great one against the evil Apap. They “live on the food of Ra, and the meats belong to the inhabitants of Amenta. Holy is that which they carry unto the dwelling where they are concealed.” This divine food is apparently repeated in the quails and manna that were sent from heaven, according to the biblical account.

Dreadful massacres are perpetrated in taking possession of this promised land mapped out in twelve divisions. Ra says, “I have commanded that they should massacre, and they have massacred the beings.” He orders his followers to destroy the impious ones in a suppression of blood. But these beings are not the human inhabitants of Canaan or any other land on earth. The wars of the lord in these battles of Amenta are fought by his true and faithful followers on behalf of Un-Nefer the good being. The enemies who are doomed to be slaughtered by the invaders are the Sebau and Sami, the creators of dearth and darkness, who were in possession of the land, and who are for ever rising in rebellion against the supreme god Ra. It was these dwellers in the ways of darkness who were to be annihilated by the children of light, the glorified elect, the chosen people, who are then to take possession of the land. Ra says to them, “Your offerings (made on earth) are yours. Take your refreshments. Your souls shall not be massacred, your meats shall not putrefy, faithful ones who have destroyed Apap for me.”

Thus the massacres by which the Israelites were enabled to clear out the inhabitants of Canaan and take possession of their lands had been previously committed by the followers of Ra. Ra says to those who are born of him, and for whom he had created the dwelling-place in the beautiful Amenta, “Breath to you who are in the light, and dwellings for you. My benefits are for you.” But the beings there massacred were not human. In the biblical version it is said of a mythical event, “It came to pass, when Pharaoh would hardly let them go, that the Lord slew all the first-born in the land of Egypt, both the first-born of man and the first-born of beast” (Ex. XIII. 15). This insane proceeding on the part of the Lord may be explained by reference to the original. From this we learn that amongst the beings massacred or sacrificed were “quadrupeds and reptiles” (Book of Hades, 1st division, legend E). The Hebrew historian has discreetly omitted the first-born of the reptile, unless it is included as a beast. Again, one name of the keeper of the 17th gate is “lord of the massacre and of sacrificing the enemy at midnight!” (Rit., 145). With this we may compare the passage, “And it came to pass at midnight that the Lord smote all the first-born in the land of Egypt . . . and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead” (Ex. XII. 30).

Now, amongst the glorified elect or chosen people who are the children of Ra, the ass-god, Aai, or Iu, there is a group of his [Page 653] defenders and followers who accompany him, and who are said to rise with Ra towards the heavens to be “for him in the two sanctuaries,” and to “make him rise in Nu” (heaven). These are among the worshippers of the ass-headed god Iu, who are called the Aaiu (the Ius or Jews) by name. Apap is threatened thus, “O impious cruel one, Apap, who spreadest thy wickedness. Thy face shall be destroyed, Apap! Approach thy place of torment. The Nemu are against thee: thou shalt be struck down. The Aaiu are against thee: thou shalt be destroyed”. It is these Aaiu as worshippers of the god Iu that we claim to be the Ius or later Jews of the mythical legends so long supposed to have been historical. Thus the glorified elect, the blessed, the righteous, who are in Amenta, that is in the lower Egypt of the mythos, are the chosen people of the most high god, who was Ra in his first sovereignty as the ass-headed Iu=Iao, Aiu, or Iahu; Atum-Huhi as god the father, Atum-Iu as god the ever-coming son. The Aaiu or Jews, then, are amongst those who “rise for Ra.” “They beat down Apap in his bonds”. Apap is stricken with swords. He is sacrificed. Ra rises at the finishing hour; “he ascends when the chain is fixed”. Those who are in this scene drag the chains of this evil-doer (Apap). They say to Ra, “Come Ra; advance Khuti! The chain is fixed on evil-face (Neha-her), and Apap is in bonds” (Book of Hades, 10th division). This is the scene of making fast the dragon in the pit which is preparatory to the rising of Ra. These Aiu or Jews accompany the sun-god when he makes the journey through the valley of darkness, the lake of Putrata, and the desert in “the Amenta of Egypt,” where they are protected as the “flocks of Ra.” Amidst the people that dwell in darkness and black night they are the glorified elect, enveloped and concealed in light, and fed mysteriously in the wilderness with food supplied from heaven. Earth opens to let them pass when they are pursued by their old enemy, and closes to protect them against the devouring dragon. Hence it is said by those who render the great serpent impotent by their magic, “Earth opens to Ra! Earth closes to Apap!” The monuments of Egypt are as truly and honestly historical as the geological record. Both have their breaks and their missing links, yet are perfectly trustworthy on the whole. And these monuments, from beginning to end, have no word of witness that the Jews or Hebrews ever were in Egypt as a foreign ethnical entity. They know nothing of Abraham as a Semite who went down into Egypt to teach the Egyptians astronomy. They know nothing of Jacob except as a Hiksos Pharaoh, or a divinity, Jacob-El, whose name is found on one of the scarabei. They know nothing of Joseph and his viziership, nor of the ten plagues, nor of the going forth in triumph from the house of bondage to attain the promised land. These and many other wonderful things related in the Word of God are known to the Egyptian records, but not as history. There is another Egypt not yet explored by the bibliolaters: the Egypt of mythology and the Kamite eschatology.

Unless we take into account the mound of the Jew in the neighbourhood of On and the temple of Atum-Iu (W. M. F. Petrie, Hyksos and Israelite Cities), the only way of identifying the Jews [Page 654] in Egypt is by the name of the Iu or Aiu in the lower Egypt of the mythical Amenta, where we find the twelve sons or children of Israel, under the name of the Ius or Aiu, as worshippers of the god who was known in Egypt as the ass-headed Iu, Aiu=Iao, Ieou, or Iahu, and who, as we see from the scarabei, may also have been known in Egypt as Jacob-El, the father of the twelve who were reapers of the corn in the harvest of Amenta.

The writer has previously suggested, in A Book of the Beginnings, that Jacob represents the god Ra as Iu in Kheb, the lower Egypt of Amenta. Jacob was known as a divinity in Northern Syria by the name of Jacob-El, and Joseph by the name of Joseph-El. The El is a Semitic suffix to the names, denoting the divinity of both, versus the ethnical origin of Jacob and Joseph. These, according to the present showing, were among the gods of Egypt as Huhi the father and Iu the son, or sif in Egyptian, Iu-sif being=Joseph in Hebrew. Thus we propose to identify the mummy of Jacob in Egypt with the mummy of Atum or Osiris as a form of the mummy-sun that was portrayed as being carried up from Amenta. Jacob, as we read, was embalmed in Egypt, and the mummy in its coffin was taken up by Joseph and carried to the land of Canaan. This was the land of promise, which is the Aarru-paradise, the field of the tree of life up which the sun-god climbs in his resurrection from the coffin. The “burying-place” of Jacob is “before Mamre,” where the tree of Atum in the garden or meadow, the Sekhet-Hetep, is represented by the oak or terebinth under which Abraham dwelt. Joseph the son (Iusif) is the same character in carrying up the mummy of Jacob that Horus the beloved son is to the dead Osiris in his coffin. Horus acts as the raiser-up of the mummy. This is expressed when the speaker says, “I am he who raises the hand which is motionless” (Rit., ch. 5). Elsewhere Horus comes to raise the mummy of Osiris. Thus the carrying up of Jacob out of Egypt by the son may be paralleled by the resurrection of Osiris, coffin and all. One name of the burial-place for the mummy-Osiris in the Ritual is Sekhem. The deceased is enveloped as a mummy in Sekhem. He rises again and goes, as pure spirit, out of Sekhem. Also the well of Jacob near Shechem answers to the water of Osiris, and the oak or terebinth in Shechem to the tree of life in the pool of the persea or the water of life. The fields of Shechem correspond to the Sekhet-Hetep or fields of peace and plenty, the oasis of fertility which prefigured the celestial paradise. “The parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph” was in Shechem, also called Sichem. This is a parallel to Sekhem as place of burial given by Osiris the father to Amsu-Horus the son, who rose again as the living mummy or sahu after the burial, and went up from the lower Egypt of Amenta and the sandy wilderness of Sekari as the god in the coffin or sekeru-bark. The Egyptian Sekhem was no doubt localized as a sanctuary when Judea and Palestine were sown over with the old Egyptian names. Osiris was the reputed holder of property in Sekhem, unless we understand that his mummy, the body of the lord, constituted the property that was held in that sanctuary (Hymn to Osiris, lines 1 and 2).

The lower Egypt of Amenta is a land of bondage to the manes who were doomed to labour in the harvest-field. Chapter 5 is [Page 655] called the chapter by which work is not imposed upon a person in the nether-world. But provision is made for the work being done by proxy. Chapter 6 is the chapter by which the funeral statuettes may be made to do work for a person in the nether-world. “Be thou counted for me,” says the speaker, “at every moment, for planting the fields, for watering the soil, and for removing the sands.” Thus there was a system of enforced labour in the lower Egypt of Amenta. The land of bondage is likewise alluded to as the land of rule in the Book of the Dead. In the chapter by means of which the manes come forth to day and pass through Ammah or the Ammehit it is said, “Hail to you, ye lords of rule (or ruling powers), living for ever, whose secular period is eternity. Let me not be stopped at the Meskat (or place of punishment); let not the Sebau have the mastery over me; let not your doors be closed upon me.” And amongst other pleas in this invocation it is said, “Deliver me from the crocodile of this land of rule,” or, as it got interpreted, this land of bondage in the lower Egypt of Amenta. In this chapter the crocodile has an evil character, and the evil crocodile is the mythical dragon, the dragon of Egypt, a figure of the Pharaoh who kept the people in bondage and would not let them go from out their prison-house in the Meskat where the evil Sebau had the mastery over the manes, who plead, “Let not the powers of darkness obtain the mastery over me. . . . . I faint before the teeth of those whose mouth raveneth in the nether-world” (Rit., chs. 72 and 74, Renouf).

The Apap-dragon of Amenta is the real Pharaoh who held the people in bondage, but in certain of the Semitic legends Atum-Ra, the great judge and punisher of the wicked, has been mixed up with the cruel Pharaoh who would not let the people go. According to the Arab traditions, the name of the Pharaoh who detained the chosen people, the elect children of light, was known as “Tamuzi”. Castell gives this as the Arabic name of the Pharaoh who hindered the exodus of the Israelites, which name goes to the root of the matter, for Tamuzi appears in the Ritual as Atum-Ra, commonly called Tum. The name of this Ra or Pharaoh is derived from “tumu” to shut up, to close. Tum as the setting sun was the closer in the western gate. As shutter up of day or of autumn he wears the closing lotus on his head, the antithesis to Horus rising out of the opening flower of dawn. Atum was the closer as well as the opener of Amenta by name. Those who were captives in his keeping down in the Amenta were hindered from making their exodus until the plagues were passed or the conditions of freedom had been all fulfilled.

The entrance to Amenta figured in the Egyptian itinerary was “the mouth of the cleft” as it was termed at Abydos. This is apparently represented in the Hebrew legend by the mouth of the gorge at Pi-ha-hiroth, “which is before Baal-Zephon.” Thus the opening in the mount of the swallowing earth is at the same point as the passage of the Red Sea which also opened for the Israelites to pass when pursued by Pharaoh and his host. There are, however, two starting-points in the biblical exodus of the Israelites. No sooner had they set out on the old road that ran from Rameses to Succoth (or Thuku) and Etham or Khetam, the border-fortress in the land of Thuku, than they were commanded to turn back for a fresh [Page 656] departure from Pi-ha-hiroth, the pass or gorge which was entered by the mouth of the cleft. At this point of divergence the local topography is brought to confusion and serves no further use for localizing the journey. We have to go back and start from the entrance to Amenta by the mouth of the cleft in the rock that was figured at Abydos as the beautiful gate of entrance to Khent-Amenta. This two-fold starting-point at least coincides with the two modes of entrance, one by land and the other by water. At Pi-ha-hiroth we enter the Red Sea of the mythos, the water of the west that was red at sunset, but not the geographical Red Sea. This was entered by the boat of the sun and the boat of souls which passed through the cleft by water as depicted in the vignettes (Maspero, Dawn of Civ., Eng. tr., p. 197). We are now upon the track of the exodus from the lower Egypt of the nether-earth, which was mythical in the lesser mysteries and mystical in the greater, and able to show where and how and why the children of Israel pursue the same route through Amenta as do the children of Ra in the Book of Hades (Records of the Past, vols. X. and XII). At Pi-ha-hiroth the Israelites come to the mouth of the cleft and enter on the passage of the Red Sea, pursued by Pharaoh the dragon and his evil host. In the book of Exodus the Israelites, of course, are treated as the glorified and the Egyptians as the powers of darkness, the conspirators against the elect, the chosen, the children of light. Or, according to the Ritual, by the Apap-dragon and the Sebau, whose habitat is in the Red Sea of the mythos and therefore was not geographical. The Egyptians made the passage by water, but by substituting the miracle for the mythos, “the children of Israel walked on dry land in the midst of the sea.” After crossing the waters they enter the wilderness, which is true to its character in the Egyptian books of the nether earth.

When the land that flowed with milk and honey is promised to the children of Israel, it is said by Ihuh, “I will send my terror before thee — I will send the hornet before thee, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite from before thee —“ (Ex. XXIII. 27, 28). Now the hornet, wasp, or bee was a type of Ra the solar god, and thence of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Hor-Apollo says, “They depict a bee to denote a people obedient to their king” (B. i, 62), the force of the creature’s sting being emblematic of the supreme power. Also the abait or bird-fly, a bee, wasp, or hornet, was their guide to the Aarru-garden in the Ritual. “I have made my way into the royal palace,” says the Osiris” (ch. 76), “and it was the bird-fly (abait) that led me hither” — that is, to the land flowing with milk and honey. Apparently this symbolic abait or bee as guide to the Aarru-paradise has been turned into the hornet that drove the people out of the land in the Hebrew rendering of the story. When Moses sends the explorers ahead to spy out the land of Canaan, and they come back afraid because it is inhabited by the Anakim or giants, “Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, "Let us go up at once and possess it, for we are well able to overcome it” (Num. XIII. 30). Caleb the explorer who had been sent forward by Moses to spy out the land of promise is another of these converted divinities. In the Semitic languages Caleb is the dog, and the dog as Egyptian was the jackal, apuat, the guide of ways, the zootype which was the guide of [Page 657] ways in the solar mythos, and the guide of souls to the garden of Amenta, wherein grew the grapes of paradise in brobdingnagian clusters which are to be seen in vignettes to the Ritual. Shu as son of Ra is the great leader of the people to the promised land; Anup the jackal=dog was the guide; and these two are represented in the book of Numbers by Joshua (or Hoshea) the son of Nun, and Caleb the son of Jephunneh. Those two, the leader and the guide, both in the astronomy and the eschatology, are the only two in the Hebrew version that are to go forth in the exodus from the wilderness and burial-place of the dead. “And they came unto the valley of Eschol, and cut down from thence a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it upon a staff between two” (carriers). “And they returned from spying out the land at the end of forty days”. They showed the fruit of the land to Moses and the Israelites, and said, “We came unto the land whither thou sentest us, and surely it floweth with milk and honey, and this is the fruit of it” (Num. XIII. 23-28). The colossal cluster of grapes seen in Eschol by those who were sent to spy out the promised land is of itself almost sufficient to prove the mythical nature and Egyptian origin of the land that flowed with milk and honey and bore the grapes that took two men to carry one cluster. Not only was the circumpolar paradise the land of the seven cows, called the providers of plenty; as Egyptian it was also the garden of the grape-vine by name. Not as Eden, but as Aarru the garden of the vine or the grapes. In one of the Hebrew märchen it is said that when the explorers of the promised land returned they related, “We have seen the land which we are to conquer with the sword, and it is good and fruitful. The strongest camel is scarcely able to carry one bunch of grapes; one ear of corn yields enough to feed a whole family; and one pomegranate shell would contain five armed men. But the inhabitants of the land and their cities are in keeping with the productions of the soil. We saw men the smallest of whom was six hundred cubits high. They were astonished at us, on account of our diminutive stature, and laughed at us. Their houses were also in proportion, walled up to heaven, so that an eagle could hardly soar above them” (Baring Gould’s Legends of the Old Testament Characters, vol. II, p. 118; Weil, p. 175). These are based upon the gigantic inhabitants of Amenta in the Ritual, who have been vastly exaggerated in the märchen. This grand domain was constructed for the manes who as the glorified ones have joined the powers of the east at the point of coming forth where Shu uplifts the sky for Ra and blows off the divine barge with favouring gales. The great or glorified ones are said to be each nine cubits (about 18 feet) in height, and therefore this is the land of the giants to which the Israelites were bound under the leadership of Joshua and the guidance of Caleb the dog. This region of things gigantic may be found in the mystical abodes of the Ritual through which the manes have to pass on their way to the world of light and blessedness. The second abode is called the “greatest of possessions in the fields of the Aarru. The height of this corn is seven cubits; the ears are two, its stalks are three cubits”. The spirits also are said to be seven cubits in stature (ch. 149). Of the fifth abode it is said, “Hail, abode of the spirits, through which there is no passage. The spirits belonging to it are seven cubits long in [Page 658] their thighs. They live as wretched shades”. “Oh, this abode of the spirits”. In chapter 109 the inhabitants are nine cubits in height. The passage through the Hades in the eleventh abode is described as the belly of hell. “There is neither coming out of nor going into it, on account of the greatness of the terror of passing him who is in it”. That is, the devouring demon, the Am-Moloch. The same fear is reflected in the faces of the spies from the land of giants; they had seen the same sight. The Moabites called the giants who dwelt there in times past the Emim (Deut. II. 11), and the Am-am in Egyptian are the devourers. Am is the male devourer, Am-t the female devourer in the Ritual. As said in chapter 109, “It is the glorified ones, each of whom is nine cubits in height, who reap the Aarru fields (in the divine domain of the promised land) in presence of the powers of the east” (Renouf). The giants as Rephaim are also Egyptian (Rit., ch. 149, 5th Abode). These giants of Amenta and the religious mysteries still survive in the grotesque masks of the Christmas pantomime, which represent the huge inhabitants of an under-world that is the lowermost of three, the highest of which is on the mount of glory. Emim, Anakim, Rephaim, and Zamzummim are all giants” — hence the Anakim under different names, nine cubits high; and this land of the giants as Egyptian was in the nether-earth, the original of the Hebrew Sheol, in which the giants are identifiable as non-human inhabitants of a foreworld that had passed away. It is to that foreworld and its people, the children of darkness, that the writer of Deuteronomy refers, and as its inhabitants were altogether mythical (or eschatological), the children of Israel, and of Lot, who drove them out and destroyed them utterly, could not be human nor the transaction humanly historical. The land of the mythical giants can be localized in Amenta, but not elsewhere.

The lower or sub-terrestrial paradise, otherwise called the garden of Aarru, was the garden eastward, the garden of the mount in Amenta, which was in prospect throughout the journey. This was the paradise to which Shu-Anhur was the leader from the western mountain and Anup-Ap-Uat was the guide as dog or jackal. It was the paradise of all good things, including the gigantic grapes and grain, the milk and honey, as types of food and drink in everlasting plenty.

The point of emergence from Amenta was at the double gate of glory on the summit of the eastern mount; otherwise expressed, this was the place of exit from the lower to the upper Egypt of the mythos as celestial localities. Anhur was the uplifter and supporter of the heaven and its inhabitants by night. Shu was the deliverer by day who brought the solar orb to the horizon. In the Hebrew rendering Moses sustains the rôle of Anhur, and Joshua that of Shu, the halves of the whole round being extended to the circle of the year. The earthly paradise was planted as the Allu or elysian fields to the eastward of the nether-earth where stood the tree of life, and where the mountain of the double earth was climbed to get a glimpse of the land of promise that was visible over-sea. Upon this mountain “Moses stood, to view the landscape o’er”, or rather the skyscape. The lower paradise was but a picture and a promise for the wanderers in the wilderness of Amenta. The upper was the paradise [Page 659] of all the ancient and pre-solar legends. Thus far the deliverer as Anhur or as Moses was the conductor of the children of Ra or Israel. High on Mount Hetep, in the heaven of eternity, was the paradise of spirits perfected. This was the land of promise and final fruition both in one, the land overflowing with milk and honey. The milk, called “the white liquor which the glorified ones love”, was supplied by the seven cows, providers of plenty in the meadows of the upper Aarru. Here also was the land of corn in limitless abundance. No words could say how much. Lower Egypt was a land of corn, but the legendary promised land of corn, honey, and oil was in the Aarru fields of the mythos. These were the fields where the corn grew seven cubits high, with ears three cubits long and in eternal plenty for all comers. The landing-place upon Mount Hetep at the summit of attainment is called “ the divine nome of corn and barley” (Rit., ch. 110).

The Egyptians were already tillers of the ground when Ptah laid out and planted the lower Aarru-paradise, as their other field of work, in an earth that was ruled or tyrannized over by the powers of evil, headed by the Apap-dragon. This was the earth of the abyss, the primeval desert which had to be reclaimed by the pioneers and planters of that under-world. It was laid out strictly on the allotment system. Each one of the manes had a portion in which to plough and sow and reap. The seed grown in the harvest-field of life on earth was garnered up to sow and bring forth a hundredfold in this, the field of divine harvest, which was so magnified by tradition because its bounty had been divinized. The Egyptian authorship of a paradise of peace and plenty is pre-eminently shown by their converting the “earth of eternity” into a world of work, the harvest-field that was cultivated by the manes, who dug and hoed and sowed in it, and reaped the corn according to their labours (Rit., ch. 6). Amenta was made from sand converted into fertile soil well watered by the all-enriching Nile. It was like lower Egypt, the land of honey, the land of the sycamore fig-tree, which was a veritable tree of life to the Egyptians. It was the land of the grapes that grew in clusters of prodigious size. It was the country of abundant corn. Not that the Egyptians thought the other world a replica of this, but such was the natural plan on which they wrought in making out the unknown by the known. They dramatized another intermediate state, and acted the eschatological drama in accordance with conditions familiar to them in this world. The Aarru-paradise in Amenta is copied from Egypt in the upper earth. The fulfilment of all blessedness was in its being a likeness of the dear old land made permanent and perfect in the spirit-world. It was the promised land for those who were prepared to take possession of it and to drink of the sacred Nile at its celestial source. Its tree of life was the same sycamore fig-tree that had always been the tree of life and food in season.

The journey from the lower Egypt of the mythos through the deserts of Amenta was from west to east, from the place of sunset to the point of sunrise which was called the solar mount of glory. At sunset Anhur-Shu upraised his mansion of the starry firmament which he uplifted nightly, standing on the steps of Am-Khemen. This presented a stellar picture of the upper Egypt or the upper [Page 660] paradise for which the wanderers in the wilderness were bound. At dawn the mount of sunrise in the garden eastward was attained. This was the mountain of Amenta, also called Shennu or Shenni=Sinai. Shena in Egyptian signifies the point of turning in the orbit of the solar course. This point was figured on the mountain where the lions rested as supporters of the solar disk at dawn, or Shu uplifted Ra from out the darkness of Amenta and held the orb aloft with his two hands. At this point Anhur’s place as leader of the chosen people was taken by his alter ego Shu. The Magic Papyrus describes the warrior-god as “king of upper and lower Egypt” in his two characters of Anhur and Shu-si-Ra. By night Shu-Anhur was the uplifter of the firmament for the Egyptian exodus or coming forth to day from out the darkness of Amenta or of “Egypt and the desert” (Rit., ch. 110). (See the figure of Shu as the uplifter, p. 315.) Under the name of Anhur he is the leader of the upper heaven, rod in hand. His starry image probably was seen as Regulus in the constellation of Kepheus, the ruler there, arrested with the rod or staff still lifted in his hand. He repels the crocodile or dragon coming out of the abyss, the crocodile that is the dragon of Egypt and the Pharaoh of the Hebrew writers. This repelling of the crocodiles that issue from the abyss corresponds to the overthrowal of Pharaoh or the dragon and his host in the Red Sea. Anhur is the lord of the scimitar. He is designated “smiting double horns”; “the god provided with the two horns”, like Moses. “Uplifted is the sky which he maintains with his two arms”, like Moses. This two-fold character of Anhur is indicated when he is described as “the king of upper and lower Egypt, Shu-si-Ra”. This was the Egypt of Amenta. Thus, as the king of lower Egypt he was Anhur the uplifter of the firmament for the chosen people to come forth. At daybreak he assumed the character of Shu, the son of Ra, who lifted up the solar disk at dawn on the horizon, otherwise upon the mount of sunrise. As Regulus on the horizon in the zodiac the leader of the manes changed to Shu, who is then called “the double abode of Ra”. The Magic Papyrus, which contains “the hymn of the god Shu”, is called “the chapter of the excellent songs which dispel the submerged”. It is the celebration of the great victory over the Apap-reptile and all dangerous animals lurking in the depths of the mythical Red Sea. It is said to Shu in the hymn, “Thou leadest to the upper heaven with thy rod in that name which is thine of Anhur. Thou repellest the crocodile coming out of the abyss in that name which is thine of repeller of crocodiles”. The crocodile, of course, is the dragon of Egypt. The wicked are overthrown by Anhur the valiant as the lord of events. His sister Tefnut accompanies him. She is a form of Sekhet, “the goddess in her fury”, the “chastiser of the wicked”. “She gives her fire against his enemies, and reduces them to non-existence”. She is the Kamite prototype of Miriam, the sister of Moses. Tefnut accompanies her brother in his battles with the Sebau and the submerged. Elsewhere she changes her shape into a weapon of war. She shouts her defiance against “the wicked conspirators”, exclaiming, “I am Tefnut thundering against those who are annihilated for ever! “ and against those that “ remain floating on the waves, like dead bodies on the inundation”, just as it was on that [Page 661] day when “Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the sea-shore” (Ex. XIV. 30). Tefnut, the prototype of Miriam, “gives her fire” against her brother’s enemies to reduce them to non-existence by their being submerged in the waters, where “Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. And Miriam answered them, Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea” (Ex. XV. 20-21). Moses corresponds to Anhur. He is the leader of the children of Israel during the first part of the journey towards the promised land. He conducts them through the Red Sea where Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the sea-shore; through the sandy wilderness, the waterless wastes, and the ways of darkness. “Then came Amalek, and fought with Israel in Rephidim”. This, as we reckon, was the great battle of the autumn equinox. It was not a battle fought by human beings once for all on mundane ground, but a war betwixt the Lord and Amalek, that went on for ever, from generation to generation, because it was periodic in the phenomena of external nature, and not a duel betwixt the Lord of heaven and an earthly potentate or people. The description of holding up the hands of Moses to maintain the equilibrium shows the equinoctial nature of the conflict. The going forth at the equinox is further identified by the month of the year. The Jewish new year still begins about the time of the autumn equinox, a little belated in consequence of its not having been carefully readjusted. “And the Lord spake unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be unto you the beginning of months: it shall be the first month of the year to you” (Ex. XII. 1, 2). This was the year that opened with and was determined by the full moon nearest to the autumn equinox. For six months thenceforth the moon was ruler of the year as the great light in the darkness of the double earth. Again, at the time of the vernal equinox there is another poising of the scales, if not a standing still of sun and moon, and another great battle in which the sun-god finally overcomes the dragon of darkness and all the evil powers that war against the light of life and welfare of the world; also against the children of Ra on their journey as souls or manes from the lower Egypt of the mythical Amenta to the upper heaven on the mount of glory.

The present writer has previously suggested that the name of Moyses, or as some Hebrews pronounced it, Mouishé, was derived from the dual name of Shu, one of whose names as Ma, the other Shu, and Ma-Shu denotes Anhur, who manifests in the two characters of Ma and Shu. In the address to the god it is said, “Thou blowest the divine barge off with a favourable wind in that name which is thine of the goddess Ma”. Thus Ma, the goddess of truth, law, and justice, is here identified with Shu in a feminine character. The feather of Anhur also reads both Ma and Shu — Ma as light and Shu as shade. But, after all, the origin of the name is of little importance compared with the traits of character. This female character of Ma-Shu has also been assigned to Moses. There is a tradition, reported by Suidas, that the Hebrew lawgiver and author of the Jewish laws was a Hebrew woman named Musu, which is equivalent to Ma-Shu [Page 662] in Egyptian. Shu is the very personification of light and shade. The name reads both light and shade. This dual character of the god is to be read in the face of Moses, who wears the glory on it when in presence of the Lord upon the mount, and who covers or shades his face when he turns to speak with the people in the valley. He likewise is the personification of light and shade: Moses under the veil is Shu in the shade; Moses wearing the glory of God upon his face is Shu who “sits in his father’s eye, the eye of the sun; Shu-ari-hems-nefer — who keeps his residence radiant — which is a title of Shu at Philae. (Pierret, Le Panthéon Egyptien, pp. 22-3.) “When Moses had done speaking with the people, he put a veil on his face. But when Moses went in before the Lord to speak with him, he took the veil off until he came out”. And when he came out and spake unto them that which he was commanded, they saw the skin of Moses’ face”. And Moses put the veil upon his face again until he went in to speak with him” (Ex. XXXIV. 35). The glory on the face of Moses is described as sending forth horns, which is a way of portraying the god provided with “two horns”, that is a title of Anhur. Moses performs the same act as Shu the supporter of the firmament, but in the heaven with twelve supports instead of the earlier four erected by Shu-Anhur, which followed a readjustment that was made by the Hir-seshti of On in the heaven of Atum-Ra. Anhur was the elevator and supporter of the heavens, and Shu-si-Ra is the upholder of the solar disk. Moses with his arms uplifted on the mount, or with the “rod of God” in his hand, is the Hebrew version of Anhur the sustainer of heaven standing on the mount. Joshua, who becomes the supporter of Iah the solar god, is identical with Shu when he is the son and supporter of Ra upon the horizon east and west. Shu was at first the son of Nun, the deity of the celestial water, who was also called the father of the gods. He afterwards became the son of Ra as the supporter of the solar disk on the horizon “with his two hands”. Joshua also had a double character, like Shu. In the first he is called Hoshea, the son of Nun. In his later rôle Joshua becomes the upholder of Ihuh and his change of name is connected with the change in character. The name of Joshua or contains the name of Ihuh united to a word signifying assistance or help. In the form it denotes a lifting up, an upholding, as in the Egyptian name of Shu, to uphold, which describes him in the character of the uplifter to Ra the solar god. This should suffice to demonstrate the identity of Joshua, the son of Nun and the supporter of Ihuh, with Shu, who became Shu-si-Ra as the uplifter of the solar disk. Thus Shu, the son of Nun and supporter of the firmament as an elemental power, was afterwards personalized as the supporter of the sun-god Ra. Ra is Ihuh. The name of Shu denotes the supporter, and the deity whom he supported on the mount was Atum-Huhi; and in this character Shu became the leader of the children of Ra (or of Israel) as Io-Shua, who proclaims himself to be the supporter of Ihuh in the book of Joshua (XXIV. 15, 16). The firmament is the Nun by name, and Shu the uplifter of the firmament is called the son of Nun. Thus Shu in his uplifting of the firmament is the uplifter of his father. Now, to show once more how widely fragments of the Egyptian wisdom were scattered to become the later legends of many lands, let us glance for [Page 663] a moment at “the exploits of Maui”, a Polynesian form of Shu. Shu was the son of Nnu (Nun), and in Mangaia the name of Nnu is rendered by Ru. Ru is the father of Maui, and one of the exploits of Maui is to hurl his father Ru aloft, sky and all, to a tremendous height, so high indeed that the sky could never get back to earth again. Now for the conversion of the Kamite myth into the Mangaian märchen. Nnu or Nun was also the firmament upraised by Shu. Nnu as firmament was personalized in Nnu the father of Shu; and where Shu uplifts the sky, now personalized, Maui is humorously described as assuming gigantic proportions, and exerting prodigious strength to toss his father so far aloft that he was for ever entangled and suspended among the stars of heaven, and never could come down again (Gill, Myths and Songs, p. 58).

Various legends derived from the Egyptian mythology were compounded in the Hebrew book of Exodus.

One of the most remarkable of all the parallels to be adduced is to be seen in the fact that in one particular type there is a blending of Shu with Horus in Horus-Shuti, and that this is repeated in the story of Moses, who represents the deliverer as Horus in the ark of papyrus, and Anhur in other aspects of the character. Moses is the water-born. Josephus explains the name as signifying one who was taken out of the water. Pharaoh’s daughter called the name of the child Mosheh, and said, “because I drew him out of the water” (Ex. II. 10). Shu-Anhur likewise is the water-born. He is addressed in the Magic Papyrus as “the unique lord issuing from the Nun”, which is the firmamental water, and from which Shu as the breathing-force was born as the son of Nun.

The growth of a legend from its source in the primitive representation or mythicizing of natural phenomena down to its becoming humanized at last as biblical and historical may be exemplified by the story of the child who was saved from the waters in a little ark of bulrush or papyrus-reed. It is told of Sargon in Assyria, of Maui in New Zealand, and various other children who were drawn forth from the water at the time of their birth. It is the myth of the child-Horus, first and far away the oldest in the world. The story has to be read backward in Hebrew a very long way before its primal meaning can be comprehended. In going back we meet at first with the child-Horus floating in an ark upon the waters. The speaker in the Ritual at the time of his re-birth says, “I am coffined in an ark like Horus, to whom his cradle is brought”. This cradle is often represented as a nest of papyrus-reed=the ark of bulrushes in the biblical version (Rit., ch. 130). This in its most primitive Egyptian form was the flower of the papyrus-plant, or later lotus. On this child-Horus is upborne from out the waters, which led to the Egyptian ark or boat that was made of papyrus-reeds. When the legend of child-Horus on his papyrus, or in his nest of reeds, took its Hebrew form, the little ark in which the child was saved is made of bulrushes, or some other form of rush called , which probably represents the Egyptian kama, a reed, the reed of Egypt, therefore the papyrus-reed. According to the legendary lore, repeated with a wise word of caution by Josephus, the young child Moses, saved from the river in the ark, was adopted and named by Thermutis. This name is a title [Page 664] of the Great Mother Mut in Egyptian, the consort of Amen-Ra. But the genesis of the name from Mut the mother and Ta-Ur, which signifies the first and oldest, she who was personalized in Ta-Urt, shows that the Mut or mother, Thermutis, in her primordial form was Ta-Ur-Mut=Thermutis. Again, we learn from the same source that the black or Ethiopian woman who became the second wife of Moses was named Tharuis or Tharvis. In the Greek rendering of the Egyptian Ta-Ur (or Ta-Urt) this name becomes Thoueris, and in Ta-Ur(t) we can identify the prototype of Thermutis and the original of Thoueris or Tharuis (Antiq. B. 2, 10, 2). Both the foster-mother and the wife of Moses are here traced back to the old First Mother as Taurt and Thermutis, who are one and the same, in the Egyptian goddess that first brought forth the divine child from the waters or from the marshes and the bulrushes, as Uati or as Apt, the water-cow, the most ancient form of the Great Mother in Egyptian mythology. In the Hebrew legends the same old mother, under two names which are resolved into one, supplies two characters as the foster-mother and the consort of Moses. Now, the old First Mother Ta-Ur-Mut, who saved the young child from the waters in her primitive ark, is designated “the mother of him who is married to his mother”. In like manner the mother (or foster-mother) and wife of Moses are one and the same in Taurt, who was both mother and spouse of Sebek, the youthful solar god. Moses is saved from the water by Thermutis (Ta-Ur, as Mut, the mother), and he was married to Thaueris, who is the same by name and nature as Thermutis. Thus Moses also was both the child and the consort of his mother, which had been the status of the young sun-god from the time when the human fatherhood had not been individualized. Lastly, the two characters of the old First Mother were represented by the two mothers in the Osirian mythos. These are the two divine sisters, Isis and Nephthys, into which the old First Genetrix was divided as the water-mother and the mother-earth. Isis is the wateress. Hes, her name signifies the liquid of life. Nephthys i,s an earth-mother who carries the basket of seed on her head. As it is said in the Ritual, Horus the child is produced by Isis (from the water) and nourished by Nephthys (on the earth) (Rit. 17). And these two forms of the divine mother can be detected even in their biblical guise as the mother and the foster-mother of the young child Moses, one of whom saves him from the waters in the ark of bulrushes, just as Isis mothers Horus in the element of water and Nephthys nourishes and mothers him on land.

There is nothing human or historical about the young child saved from the waters under any name whatsoever, in any kind of ark, no matter in what language the legend may be told or in what waters the little ark may float. The same legend is related of the mythical Sargon in the cuneiform tablets. He says, “My mother the Princess conceived me; in a secret place she brought me forth. She placed me in a basket of reeds; with bitumen my exit she closed; she gave me to the river, which drowned me not”. When Sargon says, “My mother knew not my father” (Records of the Past, vol. V, p. 3, First Series), he is claiming to be that divine child whose only parent was the divine virgin mother, like Neith, the bringer-forth of Horus (or Helios) without the male progenitorship. [Page 665]

The hidden birth of the Child-Horus is also repeated for the Hebrew infant, of whom it is said that when his mother saw that he was a goodly child “she hid him three months” (Ex. II. 2, 3), to preserve him from the death decreed by the cruel Pharaoh. The time may not be given in any known hieroglyphic text, but the length is correct according to the astronomical data. Child-Horus at a later time was born in the winter solstice and the concealment in the nether earth came to an end in the vernal equinox. Therefore his mother hid him in the marshes and the rushes of Amenta for three months. When the babe was placed in the ark of bulrushes and laid in the flags by the river’s brink his sister was in charge of him. “And his sister stood far off to know what would be done to him” (II. 4, 5). And in the Hymn to Osiris it is said of the Child-Horus, “His sister took care of him by dissipating his enemies and repelling bad luck. She is wise of tongue, and beneficent of will and words” (Records, vol. IV, p. 101), as was the sister of Moses in her suggestion to the daughter of Pharaoh. Horus on his papyrus is the youthful god uplifted from the dark waters and saved from the coils of the Apap-reptile — a salvation that is effected by the two divine sisters Isis and Nephthys, one of whom was the conceiver of the child, the other being the nurse. Here as elsewhere it is the same in the mythos as in the “history”. In the biblical version the daughter of Pharaoh and the sister of Moses take the place of Isis and Nephthys. Here the cruel Pharaoh in the book of Exodus plays the same part as Herod and other tyrants who massacre the innocents, inasmuch as he commands the two midwives to kill all the male children at the time of their birth by drowning (Ex. I. 22). The human innocents were to be murdered en masse so as to include the divine child in the massacre. Only two midwives were appointed to deliver all the parturient women of Israel in Egypt. The mythos will also answer for this limited number. In the Osirian system the divine child was brought forth by the two sisters Isis and Nephthys. In an earlier rendering these were Sekhet and Neith. Josephus states that the two midwives given to the Jewish women by the Pharaoh were Egyptians (Ant. II. 9, 2). And as the midwives were but two for all the multitude of the children of Israel, they are evidently a form of the two mythical bringers-forth, who were Isis and Nephthys in the Osirian religion and Iusãas and Neb-hetep in the cult of Atum-Ra.

In certain of the extra-biblical features of the Mosaic mythos the lower Egypt of Amenta is plainly indicated as the real land of the exodus. For example, when Moses went into India, he and his army enjoyed the light of the sun during the night-time, and this could only occur in the lower earth which the sun illuminated by night — that is, the land of Amenta. India, Sindhu and Hendu each represent the Egyptian Khentu, which is a name for the interior. Thus, we identify the mythical India with Khentu, and Khentu is the interior within the earth where the sun shone at night for Moses and his warriors in the Osirian Khentu-Amenta. Also when Moses is identified with Shu-Anhur this may account for his legendary reputation outside the Bible history as a mighty warrior. Anhur in Egypt is Har-Tesh, the red god Mars, or Arês, who passed into the Greek mythology by name as the great warrior Onouris=Anhur. Shu-Anhur is addressed under [Page 666] various names connected with his deeds. “Thou wieldest thy spear to pierce the head of the serpent Nekau, in that name which is thine of the god provided with horns”. ‘Thou seizest thy spear and overthrowest the wicked (the Sebau), in that name which is thine of Horus the striker!” “Thou destroyest the An of Tokhenti in that name which is thine of Double abode of Ra”. “Thou strikest the Menti and the Sati in that name which is thine of Young-elder!”, “Thou strikest upon the heads of the wicked in that name which is thine of Lord of Wounds!” (Mag. Pap., pp. 2 and 3).

In one of the Rabbinical legends it is related that when Moses was condemned to lose his head for killing an Egyptian, the Lord permitted that his neck should become as hard as a pillar of marble, which caused the sword of the executioner to rebound and kill the wilder of the weapon. This in the mythos is the state of the justified manes in Amenta, who prays that his neck may be invulnerable at the block of execution. In the Hebrew märchen the Manes becomes a man called Moses.

Fragments of the ancient wisdom survive in many foolish-looking legends. The Rabbins relate that Moses was born circumcised. So the kaf-ape is said to have been born in the same condition. “It is born circumcised, which circumcision the priests adopt”. (Hor-Apollo, B. I, 14.) Now Shu in one of his divers characters is said to have taken the form of a kaf-ape (Magic Papyrus, p. 8, Records, vol. X, p. 152). Thus Shu, or Ma-Shu, as the ape in the mythos becomes the man Moses or Mosheh, who is said in the märchen to have been born circumcised, when the anthropomorphic type had taken the place of the zootype. In another legend Shu the giant is portrayed as acting the part of a crazy man. The two characters are coupled together when it is said, “Though didst take the form of a kaf-ape, and afterwards of a crazy man” (Magic Papyrus, pp. 8, 9). This may possibly supply a gloss to the action of Moses when he waxed angry and smashed the tables of the law (Ex. XXXII. 19). For this reason: Shu in this character is called “the giant of seven cubits” (or he represents a shrine of seven cubits), and he is then commanded to make a shrine of eight cubits. And Moses, after breaking the tables of the law and acting uncommonly like a crazy man, is commanded by the Lord to hew two other tables of stone like unto the first, so that the Lord might write upon the second tables the words that were on the first set which the crazy man had broken.

Shu-Anhur is described as he “who putteth a stop to them whose hand is violent against those who are weaker than themselves” (Rit., ch. 110). This is the character in which Moses begins his personal history. The first thing he does is to slay an Egyptian whom he saw oppressing a Hebrew (and bury his body in the sand). On the “second day” “behold two men of the Hebrews strove together, and he said to him that did the wrong, Wherefore smitest thou thy fellow?” (Ex. II. 11-13). This contention in the Ritual is betwixt the twin-brothers Sut and Horus when Shu-Anhur reconciles the two warrior gods where Moses tries to reconcile two fighting men who were fellow-Hebrews.

Moses is said to have built an altar, and to have called it “Jehovah-Nissi, the Lord is my banner”. This, to say the least, is suggestive of a title of Anhur, to whom it is said, “ Thou comest here upon [Page 667] thy stately stand in that name which is thine of being in thy stately stand”, or on the standard (Am aat). Here there is the same dual rendering possible as in the Hebrew, the stately stand and standard being equivalent to the banner. Moses carries the “rod of God” in his hand. With this rod he divides the Red Sea for the people to go over on dry ground. With this he smites the rock in Horeb, and causes the water to spring forth abundantly. The plagues descend on Egypt at the stretching forth of Moses’s wonder-working rod. Shu-Anhur is likewise the bearer of the rod. He is represented with the rod in his hands, and is designated “Lord of the rod”. In the Hymn to Shu it is said, “Thou leadest the upper heaven with thy rod in that name which is thine of Anhur,” the uplifter of heaven (Magic Papyrus, 2, 5). The origin of smiting the rock to make the water come forth is connected with the rock of the Tser Hill, the mount of sunrise. The first waters that issued out of this rock were the springs of dawn and the floods of day. In the Ritual we meet with the hero who causes the water to gush forth. He says, in the character of the great one, who has been developed into a chief, “I make the water to issue forth”, or “I make water to come” (117). The striker of the rock with his rod or staff was Shu-Anhur, the impersonator of the force that burst up out of the rock at sunrise when the waters of day were once more set free. The water of dawn is called the “water of Tefnut”, she who is the twin-sister of Shu, and of which water the children of light “drink abundantly”. As one of these — who are the prototypes of the children of Israel — says, “I drink abundantly of the waters of Tefnut”. The waters of dawn (or the tree) were ascribed to the female source, whether as Tefnut or as Hathor. And it is noticeable that in the Hebrew version the first to make the water come forth by miracle for the people to drink is Miriam, whose relation to Moses is identical with that of Tefnut to Shu. The legend of the one god who reveals himself upon a summit of a rock, whether to Shu or Moses, is a matter of mythology, not a subject of human history, and as such the mythos is Egyptian. “And God spake unto Moses and said unto him, I am Iahu, and I appeared unto Abraham, unto Israel, and unto Jacob as El Shaddai, but by the name of Iahu I was not made known to them” (Ex. VI. 3). In the original rendering of the mythos Ra reveals himself to Shu and the elders as the deity in spirit, living in truth. He has become greater than the god who created him. He tells them that although later in point of time, he is the one primeval source who has been giving them light all the while, and in this new character he assumes his sovereignty as god over all, the one beside whom there is none other. This is the deity in the Ritual who says, “I am the self-originating force. Behold me, how I am raised upon my throne” (ch. 85). He is no longer merely solar, or one of the seven elemental powers. He is the god in spirit — the spirit that is divine, and a type of that which lives for ever. This accounts for the change of name or title which follows the change in status. Ra was known by other titles in the mythos, but as Huhi the eternal he was previously unknown. In this character the god reveals his secret self as the supreme one, whose name is then [Page 668] expressed by the titles of Huhi the eternal and Ra the holy spirit. The Hebrew deity Ihuh was not simply the one god in a single form of personality; he is the Egyptian one god in his various attributes. He is the one god both as the father and the son, who in the words of Isaiah (IX. 6) is the everlasting father and the prince of peace, who as Egyptian was Atum-Huhi the eternal father, and Iusa the ever-coming son; Atum-Ra as closer on the horizon west, and Atum-Horus as opener on the horizon east. He is the Egyptian god of Sinai as the lord of Shenni; the god who was “lifted up” in his ark-shrine of the sanctuary on the mount. He is the god of the Urim and Thummim, or lights and perfections; the Urai or Urur, of the winged disk and other figures of the Egyptian symbolism; the one god who was solar in the mythos and the holy spirit in the eschatology. In the book of Exodus the one god Ihuh supersedes all other gods, El-Shadai and the Elohim; and, like the Egyptian Ra, he assumes the sovereignty as Ihuh the eternal. It was in this new character Ra issued his commands for an ark, shrine, or sanctuary to be made, in which he was to be lifted up by Shu, the supporter of Ra.

Ages before the Hebrew Pentateuch was written and ascribed to Moses, the one god had been worshipped at On or Annu as Egyptian under the title of Atum-Ra, and if he was made known to Anhur by revelation, whatsoever that may imply, the revelation was Egyptian. This is the god who was one by nature and dual in manifestation; one in the solar mythos as the closer and opener of the nether-world; one in the eschatology as Huhi the everlasting father, and Iu the ever-coming son as prince of peace; the one god, called the holy spirit, who was founded typically on the human ghost. This is the living (Ankhu), self-originating, and eternal god. This is he who was to be lifted up as god alone in his ark or tabernacle on the mount of glory — that is, as Ra-Harmakhu on the double horizon or in the dual equinox; the deity who gave the law upon Mount Shenni through the intermediation of Anhur or Ma-Shu, the son of Ra.

In the so-called “destruction of mankind” the solar god resolves to be lifted up in an ark or sanctuary by himself alone. This sanctuary is carried on the back of Nut, the celestial cow. “There was Nut. The majesty of Ra was on her back. His majesty arrived in the sanctuary. And his majesty saw the inner part of the sanctuary”. This creation of the sanctuary for the one god Ra upon the mount is followed in the Hebrew book. Ihuh says to Moses, “Let them (the children of Israel) make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them. According to all that I show thee, the pattern of the dwelling and the pattern of all the furniture thereof, even so ye shall make it”. “And they shall make an ark of acacia-wood”. The two together, the sanctuary and the ark, constituted an ark-shrine of the true Egyptian pattern. As Egyptian, the ark of Ra-Harmakhu represented the double equinox in the two horizons. This was the “double abode of Ra” in the dual domain of light and shade, the model of the Jewish arks or tabernacles that were to be erected equally in sun and shade. The part open to the rays of light was exactly to balance the shade or veil of the covering, and not to have more sun [Page 669] than shade (Mishna, Treatise Succah, ch. 1). This was in accordance with the plan of the Great Pyramid in relation to the luminous hemisphere and the hemisphere of shade at the two equinoxes. The sanctuary of Ra was a figure of the heavens. The Hebrew ark was a portable copy, a tabernacle fitted for an itinerating deity. It was the Kamite custom to represent the heaven in miniature as an ark of so many cubits. There is an ark of seven cubits, one of eight cubits, another of four cubits, in which the god was “lifted up” or exalted. Inside the ark there was a shrine for the deity, with a figure of the god within the sanctuary. As water was the primary element of life, the nature-powers were held to have come into being by water. Hence their images were placed within the shrine that was carried on board the papyrus bark and borne upon the shoulders of the priests. These tabernacles, consisting of a boat and shrine, were the sacred ark-shrines of Egypt. Thus the beginnings were for ever kept in view. The ark-shrine on the water represented by the boat became a type of heaven as dwelling-place of the Eternal. Thus an ark of Nnu was constellated in the stars and pictured on the waters of the inundation. The ark of Atum-Ra was depicted with the solar orb on board, which was always red. In the religious mysteries, as already shown, an ark of four cubits imaged the heaven of four quarters or, as the Egyptians phrased it, of four sides. As we have seen, there was an ark of seven cubits for the heptanomis, and one of eight cubits for the octonary. This ark-shrine of eight cubits is to be built for the god to float in after there has been a great subsidence of land in the celestial waters. So likewise in the “destruction of mankind”, when Ra becomes the supreme one god, he orders an ark or tabernacle to be made for his voyage over the heavens. The inscription was engraved in the chamber of the cow that was herself a form of the ark as the goddess Nut.

William Simpson in 1877 called attention to the Japanese ark-shrines or mikoshi, “which have many points of likeness to the Jewish ark of the covenant, and which are carried on men’s shoulders by means of staves. Mikoshi signifies the high or honourable seat. Temo-sama may be translated “heaven’s lord’ “ (Trans. Soc. of Bib. Arch., vol. V, p. II, 550). Now, the first type of heaven’s lord that is known to astronomical mythology was the ruler of the pole-star, whose high or honourable seat was at the pole, like that of Anup on his mountain. In some of these arks, we are told, there is the small figure of a deity, which is no doubt the “heaven’s lord” intended by the name. There were seven of these lords of heaven altogether, who, as here suggested, had been rulers of the seven pole-stars in succession. Now, Simpson tells us that there are seven of these arks preserved in the temple of Hachiman at Kamakura, Japan. “They are said by some to be state-norimans, but as these shrines are connected with the deified Mikado, they are most probably temo-samas or mikoshis as well as norimans”. This is confirmed by a statement of Kaempfer’s. He says, “The mikoshi themselves being eight”, the eight seats or ark-shrines answer to the Kami when the eighth one had been added to the seven as over-lord, but seven was the primary number of the Kami as of the Egyptian Akhemu or never-setting ones. We infer that seven ark-shrines or seats were typical of the seven rulers, in addition to all the other forms of the septenary, mounds, mountains, islands, [Page 670] menhirs, towers, temples, or cities that were raised on high to symbolize the seven stations marked by pole-stars in the circuit of precession. Now, Israel is charged by Amos with having borne an ark-shrine that was obviously the tabernacle of a star-god or gods who were once the Elohim after which she went a-whoring (Amos. V. 26). The passage in the revised version runs thus, “Yea, ye have borne siccuth your king and chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves”. The most probable rendering depends on siccuth being a tabernacle or ark of the god, corresponding to the Egyptian sekhet, for an ark, shrine, or cabin, and on chiun, from chun, denoting the pillar or pedestal of the star. Kûn signifies to found, set up, erect, heap up, and establish; it denotes the highest point, at the centre, and is applied to the founding of the world. The name was assigned to Saturn as god in the highest. But Sut was the earlier founder of a world as god of the pole, in conjunction with his mother, who first represented the mount. The siccuth as tabernacle, ark, or female abode is equivalent to the ben-ben or beth of the child, the god or king who as Sut was figured at times within the cone. The chun as pedestal would be the pillar of the star, and the images would signify the ark of the pole and its star in short, the Great Mother and her child, who were the primeval female and male as Apt (or the Egypto-Semitic naked goddess Kûn) and Sut, later Sut-Anup. The so-called tabernacle was a “hut”, which agrees with the conical pillar or ben-ben as a figure of the pole. The god of the pillar originated as god of the pole; Sut was primarily and pre-eminently god of the pillar, and El-Shaddai we hold to have been a form of Sut-Anup on his mountain of the pole.

In the solar mythos the mount was figured on or as the horizon at the point of equinox, the point of turning and returning from Amenta in the circuit of the year, or from the lower Egypt of the mythos. Hence it was named Mount Shenni=the Hebrew Sinai. This was the place of crossing or passing over the line in the exodus or coming forth from the land of bondage when commemorated as an historical passover. The first day of the first month was the day of the equinox. The Hebrew dual year, sacred and civil, was based upon the double equinox. Hence the ark-shrine of Ihuh (Jehovah) is identifiable with that of Atum-Huhi, whose title of Ra-Harmachis shows that he was the deity of the double horizon, the double abode, or double sanctuary, first as Horus, next as Ra. This may be gathered from the statement, “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, On the first day of the first month thou shalt rear up the tabernacle of the tent of meeting. And thou shalt put therein the ark of the testimony” (Ex. XL. 1) — that is, on the mount which was the equinoctial meeting-point upon the summit, the point at which the rescued spirits went on board the bark of Ra, as represented in the Ritual. “The tabernacle of the tent of meeting” is the full title of the portable dwelling-place that was built for Ihuh on Sinai, according to the imagery shown to Moses in the mount. “Moreover, thou shalt make the tabernacle with ten curtains. The length of each curtain shall be eight-and-twenty cubits, and the breadth of each curtain four cubits”. These numbers correspond to the ark of heaven in ten divisions, with the four corners and the twenty-eight measures of a lunar zodiac. Ten cubits also [Page 671] was to be the length of each board of acacia-wood. The seven-fold candlestick we look on as a figure of the celestial heptanomis and its mystery of the seven stars. It was thus the symbolism was compounded and continued in the later rendering of the imagery.

The mount of the horizon in the equinox was the place of the two lions called the Sheniu, which also tend to identify the mount with Sinai. These two lions, the two kherufu or kherubs that support the sun upon the horizon, are repeated in the two cherubim that were portrayed upon the ark of testimony. One symbol of Mount Hetep is a table piled with food. This is reproduced in the table of shew-bread that was to be always set as the oblation in the presence of the Lord. Ihuh was to commune with Moses from between the two cherubim. The position is that of Atum-Ra-Har-Makhu in the equinox when he rises as the sun-god from betwixt the two kherufu or lions on the mount (Rit., Vig. to ch. 18). Atum-Ra-Har-Makhu was the lion-god of the double force, or the power and glory of the sun upon the mount of the horizon. He rose up betwixt two lions which imaged the double solar force, and was also represented by the fore-part and the back-part of the lion.

The lion in sign-language was an Egyptian type of the terrible (Hor-Apollo, I, 20). This was applied to the sun or solar god as an image of his double force, and represented by Anhur and Tefnut. The hinder part of the lion that is carried on the head of Anhur is a sign of force. But the fore-part, the face and front of the lion, which reads peh-peh, denotes the glory of the double force. The fore-part of the lion or lion-god being the symbol of his glory, this was not to be seen by Moses, who is told to stand in the cleft of the rock whilst the glory of the Lord, or fore-part of the lion, passes by, and he is only to see the deity’s hinder part. As Egyptian, the cleft in the rock was the place of entrance to and egress from Amenta. The solar god who rose again as lord of terror was the lion of the double force, the power and the glory of the god being figured and differentiated by the hind-part and the fore-part of the lion. In strict accordance with Egyptian symbolism, the dual nature of Ihuh was made known to Moses — that is, if the promise was kept and the Lord revealed his hinder part (Ex. XXXIII. 18, 23). Moreover, it was made known by means of the lion or the man-lion as zootype. Moses asks to see the glory, and the Lord replies, “Thou canst not see my face” and live, so terrible was the glory imaged by the lion’s face. The glory being in front, the power was behind, and this alone could be seen by the mortal who desired to live. The unbearable glory obviously depended on the Lord as solar lion because he had first shown his face to Moses “as a man”. “And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face as a man speaketh unto his friend” (Ex. XXXIII. 11). On one occasion, when Anhur comes into the presence of the solar god, it is said, “Turn thou back, O Rehu; turn thou back from before his mightiness=the glory, or, as otherwise said, “from him who keepeth watch and is himself unseen”, or is not to be seen, which is equivalent to the Hebrew “Man shall not see me and live”. Now, according to the astronomical mythology — with the twin lions stationed east and west — the lion of the hinder part was to the west, the lion with the face of glory to the east, the place of sunrise. The entrance to the nether earth was in the west. This [Page 672] was the side of the Amenta through which the first of the two leaders was Moses; he was to see the back part only, whether of the double horizon, or the god in person, or the lion of Atum-Ra. Thus, the statement that Moses was not to see the glory or fore-part is equivalent to his not being allowed to enter the promised land upon the other side of the water, which was visible from the mountain of Amenta that reached up to the sky.

As shown by the Vignettes, there is an Egyptian origin likewise for “the burning bush” in which the one god was manifested to Moses in Mount Horeb. The Lord as Iahu-Elohim was previously revealed to Moses in his solar character. As it is said, “Moses was keeping the flock of Jethro”, and he “came to the mountain of god unto Horeb”. “And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, I will turn aside now, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burned” (Ex. III. 1, 3). Now, this “burning bush” is to be seen full blaze in pictures to the Ritual. There is a vignette to chapter 64 in which the burning bush is saluted (figure, Papyrus du Louvre, III, 93; Renouf, Book of the Dead, pl. 17). In the texts the golden unbu is a symbol of the solar god. It is a figure of the radiating disk which is depicted raying all aflame at the summit of a sycamore-fig tree which thus appears to burn with fire, and the tree is not consumed. It images the lord of the resurrection going forth from the state of the disk to give light (Rit., 64). The manes, without shoes on his feet, saluting the tree with the flaming disk in or upon it, from which there issue tongues of flame, addresses the god concealed in the solar fire, who is going forth from the state of the disk, saying, “Shine on me, O unknown soul” “I draw near to the god whose words were heard by me in the lower earth” (64). This was the burning bush in which the sun-god manifested as Tum, whose other name is Iu or Unbu, the burning bush being the solar unbu. There are two corollaries following this identification: the one is that the god of the burning bush is the same as the god of the flaming thornbush named the “unbu”, and the god being the same, the person addressed by the god is the same in both versions, and the lion-god who is Shu-Anhur in the Ritual is the prototype of Moses in the book of Exodus. Further, in the manifestation of the burning bush duality of person is implied. First it is “an angel of the Lord” that appears “in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush”. Then the Lord or Elohim speaks in person and calls on Moses by name (Ex. III. 4). These two correspond to the divine duality of Ra and Unbu in the original representation, when Unbu (Horus or Iu) as the ever-coming son of god the eternal father (Huhi), is the manifestor for Ra in the flowing thorn. The burning bush, then, is identical with the “golden unbu” of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the “golden unbu” of the Pyramid Texts is literally the “golden bough” of later legends — as in the English work of that name.

Here we may say in passing, that The Golden Bough contains a learned, large, and serviceable collection of data, but the theories of interpretation derived from the writings of Mannhardt are futile. Besides which, mythology is not to be fathomed in or by a [Page 673] folk-tale, and The Golden Bough is but a twig of the great tree of mythology and sign-language — a twig without its root. The reception of the work in England served to show how prevalent and profound is the current ignorance of the subject-matter. It was hailed as if it had plumbed the depths instead of merely extending the superficies. The writer never once touches bottom; never traces the comparison home either in the Assyrian or the Egyptian version. In the former, for example, Gilgames goes to the other world in quest of the tree of life and the fountain of youth. His desire is to learn how to become immortal. In that other world across the water, not in the nether-earth of Arali, there grows the tree of renewal. Like the Kamite Unbu, it is described as similar to the bush of hawthorn in flower, and its thorns are said to “prick like the viper”. When Gilgames touches the shore of that upper paradise, he is told of this tree, shrub or plant, and it is said that if he can lay hold of it without his hand being torn, gather a branch and bear it away, it will secure for him eternal youth. The tree is identical with that which grew in the sacred grove at Nemi, from which no branch was to be broken. And beyond the Babylonian legend lies the Egyptian myth in which the tree is rooted. The Egyptian golden bough is a bush of flowering thorn. It is a symbol of the young solar god who says, “I am Unbu, who proceedeth from Nu (heaven), and my mother is Nut” (Rit., ch. 42; Pyramid Texts, Teta 39). “I am Unbu of An-ar-ef, the flower in the abode of occultation” (Rit., ch. 71). This identifies the golden bough with Horus in the dark and the bush that flowered at Christmas like our Glastonbury Thorn. The golden bough or burning bush is a solar symbol of Atum-Huhi, who says to Anhur, “O lion-god, I am Unbu”, and who thus identifies himself with Ihuh in the burning bush. “I am Unbu”, says the Egyptian deity in the flowering thorn, where the Hebrew god announces that he is Ihuh from the midst of the burning bush.

The golden calf in Israel had also been the gilded heifer in Egypt. Hes, the sacred heifer, was adored under the name of Isis in the time of the old empire. This was also a type of the golden Hathor, the habitation of Horus, her calf. The setting up of the golden calf for worship is likewise evident in “The destruction of mankind”. It is “said by the majesty of Ra (to the calf-headed Hathor), Come in peace, thou goddess, and there arose the young priestess of Amu”. “Said by the majesty of Ra to the goddess: I order that libations be made to her at every festival of the new year under the direction of my priestesses. Hence it comes that libations are made under the direction of the priestesses at the festival of Hathor, through all men, since the days of old” (Pl. B., lines 24-6). This was the worship of the golden calf, thus instituted as Egyptian. There was a special form of the cow-headed goddess called the golden Hathor, and a particular type of her child or calf known as the golden Horus. Both were imaged in one by the virgin heifer, or, as in the Exodus, by the golden calf, the image of the goddess of Amu. A dual type of deity originated with the child that was potentially of either sex, or both. Hence the boy like Bacchus with the female mammae, and the lad in Revelation with the feminine paps and girdle, or Horus with the female breasts. Also the lock of childhood, or the long hair [Page 674] of the Egypto-gnostic Christ, represented this dual type of deity, as well as “the long garment in which was the whole world”, because it had been the clothing of both sexes for the child. Hathor in Egypt was the goddess of the golden calf, or heifer with the golden neck. One of her titles was Nub the golden (Wilk., vol. III, p. 115), and the goddess Iusãas, consort of Atum-Ra and mother of Iusa in the cult of On, was a form of the golden Hathor, as is shown by the ears of the heifer in her headdress. Hathor was the Egyptian Venus, also the goddess of music and dancing, and of female ornaments, including precious stones, particularly the turquoise. The calf or heifer of gold was a befitting figure for the cult whose gods were Iu the calf, Iusaas the cow, and Atum-Iu the bull — the gods which they, the Jews or Ius, brought out of Egypt in the Hebrew exodus. So soon as the metal was fused, the image fashioned, and the calf set up, the festival of Hathor-Iusãas followed. “And Aaron made proclamation, and said, To-morrow shall be a feast to Ihuh. And they rose up early on the morrow and offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and (then) rose up to play” (Ex. XXXII. 5-6). The festival was phallic, for the people remembered Iusaas, the consort of Ihuh and the divine mother of the non-ethnical Jews, who were born Egyptian. In connection with peace offerings, one might mention that Iusãas was also called Neb-hetep, the lady of peace, and her son, Iu-em-hetep, was the prince who comes with peace. But the libation to the cow-headed or calf-headed goddess was turned into waters of bitterness when Moses, according to the story, “took the calf and burnt it with fire, ground it into powder and strewed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it” (XXXII. 20).

There is but one calf mentioned in the book of Exodus, but in the first book of Kings we see the type is dual. “The king took counsel, and made two calves of gold; and he said . . . Behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt” (1 Kings XII. 28). These in Egypt were the heifer that imaged the mother as the goddess Iusãas, and the calf of Iu, her sa or su — that is, her son — Iusaas being a form of the golden Hathor, who was the goddess of Mount Sinai. Also it was pardonable, if not pleasing in the sight of Ihuh, that Jehu did not forsake the golden calves of Jeroboam (2 Kings X. 29, 31). The golden calf was the great symbol of sin in the eyes of the monolators, because it was a figure of both sexes and pre-eminently sacred to the divine mother, Neith, Hathor, or Iusãas. Although the one god as the god in Spirit was evolved in the Egyptian cult of Ptah and Atum-Ra as Huhi the eternal, he was compounded with the child and mother of an earlier religion. His consort Iusaas was a form of Hathor, the mother of fair love, who was the Egyptian Venus, and the child was Iu (em-hetep), the wise youth who became the Hebrew prince of peace. These were the gods which brought the Hebrews up or were brought up by them out of Egypt. The later monotheists sought to exclude the child and mother from the nature of the deity, which was a holy family in itself, consisting of the father, mother, and child. The mother was cast out, for the god to be imaged by a figure of the father alone. But the goddess was continued in her types of the birthplace. Hers were the ark, the tabernacle, the [Page 675] sanctuary, the temple, the meskhen, the holy of holies, as the abode of the divine child or reborn god. Hence the Hebrew tabernacle or ark-shrine is the mishken, which as Egyptian is the meskhen, the chamber of birth, that was imaged in the constellation of the “thigh” or haunch of Nut in the astronomical mythology. This change had been made in the theology of Annu, as witnessed by the legend of the cow in the tomb of Seti I., in which the god is “lifted up” in his sanctuary as male alone. Nevertheless, there was a continual recrudescence of the old Egyptian cult, and a return to the worship of the mother, as is shown in Israel by the setting up of the golden calf, and the denunciation of it by the later writers.

This worship of Hathor in the mount had already extended from Sinai to Jerusalem as an Egyptian cult. Eusebius relates that when Constantine was about to build the Basilica, he discovered a “mound of Venus” already raised above the Saviour’s tomb (Life of Constantine). This was a mount of the mother, who was Hathor-Iusaas in Egypt; and no one was buried in or born from the typical mount of Venus except child-Horus, or his other self, Iu-em-hetep, whose mother was a form of the Egyptian Venus. The primitive mound had been perpetuated, as it was in the Tel-el-Jehudieh (near On). The mount which typified the means of ascent from the valley of Amenta to the summit where the glorified elect were taken on board the bark of Ra is variously represented in the Hebrew version of the exodus. As in the astronomical mythos, it is the one mountain with several names, and, being celestial, it may be localized in numerous sacred sties on earth as the place of worship. The mount upon which Moses stood in conversation with Ihuh is identified with the celestial height, when it is said to the children of Israel, “Ye yourselves have seen that I have talked with you from heaven”. This, again, is celestial as the mount on which the pattern of the divine dwelling, or ark and tabernacle of the Lord, was shown to Moses. In the Ritual it is the mountain of Amenta that touches the sky. It is said almost in the opening of the book of Exodus, when the call is made to Moses by Ihuh, “When thou hast brought forth the people out of Egypt, ye shall serve God upon this mountain” (Ex. III. 12), which is here called Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. It is also said of the chosen people, in this ancient fragment of the mythos, “Thou shalt bring them in, and plant them in the mountain of their inheritance, the place, O Lord, which thou hast made for them to dwell in, the sanctuary, O Lord, which thy hands have established”, where “the Lord shall reign for ever and ever”. This was in the mount of Jerusalem on high, the celestial mount of the gathering and congregating together in the Aarru-Salem = Aarru-Hetep in Jerusalem below by those who built the city as outcasts or colonists from Egypt. The mountains are several. Elsewhere it is Mount Zion or Sinai. But the mountain of God, the holy mountain, is one, because it was astronomical; therefore in the eschatology it is the mount for which they were bound as spirits, and not as leprous and abominated mortals fleeing from the land of the Pharaohs. In making the passage from Amenta, the supreme object of attainment is the mount of peace and plenty, called Mount Hetep in Egyptian. Hetep is a word of various meanings besides peace and plenty. It is the mount of the oblations, [Page 676] one sign of which is a table piled with provender. The mount itself presents the oblations to the gods and the glorified upon the summit, on a scale that is worthy of the eternal feast. And this, we would suggest, is the prototype of the Oblation described by Ezekiel (XLVIII), which is colossal in its magnitude. It is commanded that a huge oblation shall be offered to the Lord, with the sanctuary in the midst thereof. It is to be “an oblation from the oblation of the land”, just as Hetep was the oblation to the heaven from the offerings made by the worshippers on earth as contributions to the table of the Lord. The mound-builders raised their mount or mound of oblation in Britain the size of Silbury Hill. Here it is to be a city the size of paradise, or the New Jerusalem, the eternal city built upon the square, and therefore a heaven of the four quarters, raised upon twelve pillars erected round the mount. The difficulty of identifying Sinai as a geographical mount, according to the book of Exodus, may be explained when we know that the beginnings were not geographical, and that the mount on which Shu-Anhur shared the throne of Ra his father was the mountain in Amenta, not on earth. It was the stellar mount of glory in the eschatology which had been the mount of sunrise in the mythology.

After the passage of the Red Sea, in the exodus, the children of Israel arrive at “the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and Sinai” (Ex. XVI. 1). This wilderness can be identified in the Ritual with Anrutef, the region of sterility. After passing the red pool, lake, or sea, we come to the desert of Anrutef, which is said to be near Sheni. Here there is some evidence to show that the Hebrew Sinai is derived from the Egyptian Sheni. Ra, the solar god, is designated lord of Sheni in the Ritual. The speaker in chapter 36 says, “I am Khnum, the lord of Sheni”, or Shennu, equivalent to Sinai in Hebrew. When Osiris becomes the supreme lord of the mountain in Amenta he is also described as the “commander in the region of Sheni.” He is a form of that lord over all who gave the Commandments on Mount Sinai. Horus also issues from the region of Sheni with the other divine chiefs who repulse the enemies of Osiris in these battles against his enemies. He also is the lord who came from Sinai. The word Shennu or Sheni in Egyptian also denotes an orbit, the circuit or circle, to turn and return. Hence the solar god was designated lord of Sheni. Mount Sheni, as the place of turning and returning, is the mount of the equinox. This was the mount of the two lions, and these also are the Sheni by name. Ra may be Khnum or Amen or Atum, according to the cult. The Ra of Annu was Atum, otherwise Huhi, whom we also identify as the Hebrew god Ihuh. In the vignettes to the Ritual, Atum-Ra, the one god living in truth, is portrayed upon the summit of the mount of glory, with the seven spirits praising him upon the mount (Naville, Todtenbuch, Kap. 16, A.), the mount of the circle of turning and returning and of the lions, therefore Mount Sheni=Sinai. The mount of glory in the Ritual is represented in the book of Exodus as a mount of fire or the mount on fire — that is, with the solar glory. The circuit of fire about the mount is the “sheniu of fire”. This occurs as the title of a chapter in the Ritual. Thus the sun-god Ra or Atum-Huhi=Ihuh was the lord of Sheni. His throne was on the [Page 677] mount of glory where he sat surrounded by the Sheniu who form the divine circle of the celestial court. “The Sheniu of this chapter”, says Renouf, “are living personages who attend upon the Osiris and greet him (on the mount of glory) with their acclamations. The word is often translated ‘princes,’ ‘officers,’ but it signifies those who are in the circle of a king or god, hence ‘ministrants,’ ‘courtiers,’ as in the rubric to ch. CXXV”. (Renouf, Book of the Dead, XXX. Note 1). These Sheniu constitute the upper circle round the throne of God upon Mount Sheni in Egyptian, or Sinai in Hebrew. Here it may be noted that the Japanese call their divine Kami, the 7+1 primeval powers, the Shin, whence came the Shintu gods, which as stellar correspond to the Egyptian Sheniu, who are a group of gods in the upper celestial circle, and of whom it is said “the Sheniu marshal the Osiris” on his way to the “mount of glory” (Rit., ch. 130).

The descriptions of Mount Sinai in the book of Exodus show that it was the mount of glory in the solar mythos — that is, the mount of sunrise in the daily course, and the mount of the equinox as the horizon of the annual sun. Various meanings of the word Sheni coincide in showing that the typical Mount Sinai, Sin, or Ba-Shen was the Mount Sheni in the Egyptian astronomical mythology. We have to remember that as far back as the time of the first dynasty Egypt included the mount and surrounding region of Sinai as a part of the double kingdom. Thus the Sarabit el Khadem was considered very holy ground by the Egyptians seven thousand years ago. It was the seat of Hathor there, whose sanctuary of the mother was a primitive cavern in the rock. The turquoise mines of the Sinaitic peninsula were also worked by the Egyptians for the gems of the goddess to whom they were consecrated. In fact, Mount Sinai was Egyptian at any time from seven thousand to thirteen thousand years ago, both as a geographical locality and as a sacred site. The deities who were worshipped on it were likewise Egyptian. It was the seat of Hathor, of Atum-Ra, and Horus the calf. There is a vignette to the Ritual in which this dynasty of divinities from On or Heliopolis may be seen grouped together on the mount. The scene portrayed is on Mount Sheni, which became the Hebrew Sinai. In this, as in the Osirian dynasty of deities, Atum the father was the bull, Iusãas the mother was the cow or heifer; and the calf as a type of renewal for either sex was an image of all three, as was the child-Horus in the anthropomorphic representation. The calf is again represented in another vignette in presence of the god with the worshipper (Naville, Todt., Kap. 108 and 109) in the attitude of adoration behind the calf. This is literally the worship of the golden calf, which was a dual image of both Hathor the Egyptian Venus and of Horus as her calf (ch. 108). So ancient is it, when measured by the mythos, that Horus is the crocodile-headed Sebek as the son of Hathor, who was represented at Annu by the heifer-headed Iusãas. These three are designated the powers of the east. Horus of the solar mount is represented by the calf in presence of the great god Atum-Ra and the star of dawn, or of Hathor as the morning-star. Professor Petrie’s explorations show us that a transformation of this old Egyptian religion into a Semitic or Syrian cult took place at [Page 678] Sinai amongst the miners, many of whom were no doubt slaves who were sent to work the mines, according to the Egyptian practice of devoting captives to the service of the gods. But the goddess Hathor and her child Horus, who were the objects of worship at Sarabit el Khadem in the Sinaitic peninsula, did not originate as Syrian or Semitic deities. They were Egyptian from the first, and were continued wheresoever the Egyptian miners went, whether as the diggers for the turquoise gems of Sinai, the tin of Cornwall, or the gold of the Zimbabwe in Mashonaland.

The summit of Amenta at the head of the valley was attained upon the horizon in the east. It was the mount of glory in the solar mythos, which is Sinai, the mount of the glory of god and the seat of judgment in the book of Exodus. “Now these are the judgments which thou shalt set before them”, Ex. 21. 1.) This is the height on which the kneeling Anhur, in the character of Shu-si-Ra, uplifts the solar orb upon the horizon, called the mount, from the summit of which the hosts of darkness were hurled down the steps and for the time being annihilated. Also from this Pisgah-height the promised land was visible as the paradise across the firmamental waters, which are represented by the river Jordan in the Hebrew exodus. A peak of Mount Sinai in Arabia Petrea is known by the name of Djebel Mousa, the mount of Moses, which is traditionally identified as the scene of the events and occurrences on the mount described in the book of Exodus. Taking Mousa or Mouishé to be the Hebrew equivalent for Ma-Shu, the lion-god Shu, Mount Sinai is a localized form of the typical mount on which the lion-god stood to uplift the heaven or sustain the solar disk with his two hands. This in the annual course was at the equinox, and therefore on the mount at the point of turning and returning, or on Mount Sheni=Sinai.

From the peak of Pisgah Moses is shown the land here called Canaan as the land flowing with milk and honey, oil, corn, and wine, which was one and the same in all the legends of this paradise of peace and plenty at the summit of the mount. Those who went up from the valley to the top of the mountain neither died there nor were buried there. They were the glorified spirits of the dead, or the leaders of the starry host, like Shu upon the mount of Am-Khemen. Upon the solar mount of glory or Mount Sheni, the mount of the Sheniu, was the Egyptian maat in which the law was given on the mount. This is the hall of justice. The maat was a double law court, first erected for Anup at the pole; but in the solar myth the place of equipoise was changed, and the maat was represented where the annual or periodical assize was held. This was at the point of equinox, which was at one time imaged in the sign of the Scales. Maat or mati in Egyptian is the law. The maat was the hall of justice or of law. The tablets of mati in the maat were the books of the law. Ages before Osiris was enthroned as the great judge in the maat, Atum-Iu the son of Ptah was the divine law-giver in the great hall of justice which was figured on the mount, with Anhur as the intermediary. A divine law-giver was worshipped in Egypt as Atum-Iu, the original giver of the law which was given first by him to Egypt, not to Israel. But when Atum-Huhi had become the Hebrew Ihuh, the law was repeated at second-hand in Israel. The [Page 679] tables of the law are identical by name with the tablets of mati, and the comparative process will show that the matter is the same so far as the Hebrew records go; and if the law were divinely revealed and had any superhuman authority, it would be as the law of mati, which was first inscribed in the papyrus of Ma-Shu or Anhur, and not as the law of the Hebrew Moses, written in the later letters of the Pentateuch. Several meanings are connoted by the word maat or mati in Egyptian, such as law and justice, truth and right. The equilibrium of the universe was expressed by maat, which represented the natural immutable and eternal law. The balance is a symbol of maat and its oneness in duality. It was erected as a figure of the equinox, or the two halves of night and day at equal poise. Makha is a name for the scales and to weigh. The scales were erected at the place of poise and weighing in the equinox. Har-Makhu was the deity of the double equinox, who represented the duality of mati in the oneness of the equinox. The Sphinx was a figure of this duality in oneness at the equinox. The feather of Shu (or Ma) was another type of the same duality, in this case the duality of light and shade which meet and mingle in one at twilight. The Hebrew “two tables of the testimony, the tables of stone, written by the finger of God” (Ex. XXXI. 18), are the equivalent of the laws, or truths and commandments that were “consigned, performed, engraved in script, and placed beneath the feet of Ra-Har-Makhu in the great temple at On to last for ever. The tables of the law and commandments represent the tablets in the hall of maati. The tablets in the Ritual (ch. 28) are expressly assigned to the god Atum-Ra. “This whole heart of mine is laid upon the tablets of Tum, who guideth me to the caverns of Sut” or through the dark passages of Amenta. The tablets of Tum are records of the law or maat. They are kept by Taht the divine scribe in the hall of judgment. We learn from the Ritual (ch. 28) that the Egyptian tables of the law are the tablets or kanu of Atum-Iu; the same word denotes carving in ivory and engraving on stone, and Atum-Huhi is the Kamite original of the Semitic Ihuh. The tables of Moses were the tables of the law, and the law in Egyptian is ma (mati in the plural). The tables or tablets of the law were produced in the judgment hall, and we know from the pleadings of the deceased in what is called the negative confession that these tables of the law contained the commandments or prohibitions concerning the things which the manes says he has not done because of the “thou shalt not” in which the law originated. The speaker, addressing Taht-mati, the recorder in the great hall, says: “O thou bearer of peace offerings, who openest thy mouth for the presentation of the tables (or tablets), for the acceptation of the offerings and for the establishment of mati (law or justice) upon her throne; let the tables be brought forward and let the truth be firmly established” (Rit., ch. 41). These tablets, we repeat, were the tables of the law (ma, maat, or mati); they are produced at the trial before the judges when the heart (character) of the deceased is weighed in the balance of Mati and the goddess (of law or justice) is established on her throne. Otherwise stated, when the law was given in the judgment hall upon Mount Sheni or the mountain of Amenta. The religion of Egypt was based on maat, that is, on law, or more abstractly on [Page 680] truth and justice. And the law was impersonated in the goddess Mati, the Kamite original of the Greek Themis. It is said in the Ritual, “The gods and their symbols come into existence by virtue of law” (ch. 50). This in one sense was by means of Ma or Ma-Shu, the intermediary betwixt the great god and the people; who is represented in Israel by Moses. It is said that the Ten Commandments were given by Ihuh, the Egyptian Huhi, to Moses on Mount Sinai. The Jewish Commandments, however, are not limited to ten in number. The ten are followed by a series of judgments or laws (Ex. XXI, XXII, and XXIII). And here it may be observed that the laws and judgments are identical in Hebrew, as in the duality of maati for law and justice in Egyptian. Also in the book of Deuteronomy (XXVII) twelve statutes are enacted under the form of commandments, enforced with twelve curses. And in the Papyrus of Ani there is a company of twelve gods sitting on twelve thrones as judges in the maat or judgment hall upon the mount — a picture that suggests “the House of the Lord” in the celestial Jerusalem, of which it is said“ ; there are set thrones for judgments, the thrones of the House of David” (Ps. CXXII. 5). These, as described in Revelation, were likewise twelve in number. The maat is identified with the mount of God by Zechariah when he says, “Jerusalem shall be called the city of truth (maat) and the mountain of the Lord of Hosts the holy mountain” (VIII. 3, 4). The law was given to Israel on Mount Sinai, where the sanctuary or divine dwelling answers to the maat. Also when Ihuh comes “to judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with his truth” (Ps. XCVI. 13), that is according to maati in the maat. “Thou shalt have no other god but Ihuh”, in the book assigned to Moses, was preceded ages earlier in the books of Ma-Shu and Taht at On by “Thou shalt have no other god but Huhi the eternal one”, besides whom there was none other in the cult of Atum-Ra. Thus the god Ihuh is one with Atum-Huhi the eternal. Mount Sinai is one with Mount Sheni, whether as the mount of the lions or of turning in the solar orbit; and Moses is one with Anhur. The tabernacle or sanctuary of Ihuh is one with that of Atum-Huhi. The tables of the law that were given to Moses are identical with the tablets of the law in the hall of mati. This taps once more the sealed-up source of “God’s Word”, which was derived from the Egyptian wisdom written in the books of Taht and Shu that were preserved in the great library of On (Annu), where Atum-Huhi was god the father, and Iu was the ever-coming son, the prince of peace in person, the Egyptian Jesus, Iusa, or Iu-em-hetep.

Most of the Hebrew commandments are acknowledged and fulfilled by the speaker, who protests in the judgment hall that he has neither said nor done any evil thing against the gods, but the following quotations will show that the Hebrew commandments were compiled directly from the Egyptian. The pleadings are in reply to the commandments which the deceased declares he has kept. The following parallel will briefly indicate how directly the Mosaic commandments were borrowed from the wisdom of Egypt:- [Page 681]

 Shu-Anhur, the prototype of Moses as giver of the law, has been somewhat overlooked as a god of the writings in which the revelation of Ra was made known by him to men. When he is mentioned in the Ritual as the author of writings called “his rules (or laws) and his papyrus”, Renouf considers this to be an error of the scribes, and moots the opinion that the god Taht is meant (Book of the Dead, ch. 110). Nevertheless, Renouf is wrong. Shu is said to work in the abode of the books of Seb, that is, of earth (Rit., ch. 17). This we can identify with the great library at On or Annu. (See Records, X. 138.) “The papyrus or writing, mahit, of Shu” are mentioned in the Ritual when the speaker says, “I am in unison with his successive changes, and his laws (or rules) and his writings” (Rit., ch. 110). The book of the laws is the book of ma or mati, which was presented by the duality of Shu-Anhur and represented in that of Moses and Joshua. Shu is called “truth” (Magic Papyrus, p. 1, line 9). And as is shown by “the hymn to the god Shu”, among the records that were kept in the great temple library or, as it is called, “the royal palace at On”, there were writings ascribed to Shu-Anhur, the lord of truth or mati. It is said of him, “He made hereditary titles” for Ra, “which are in the writings of the lord of Sesennu” — that is, in the collection of Taht, here called “the scribe of the king Ra-Har-Makhu” and these titles were “consigned, performed, engraved in script under the feet of Ra-Har-Makhu”, or beneath the feet of the statue of the god. Moses likewise is the writer of “hereditary titles” for Ihuh. He also fulfils the same rôle as transmitter of titles in the book of Exodus. When he asks for the name of the new divinity “God said to Moses, I am that I am”. And he added, “Thus thou shalt say unto the children of Israel: I am (Eyeh) hath sent me unto you. This is my name for ever, and this is my memorial for all generations” (Ex. III. 13-16). The writings of Shu-Anhur were preserved at On among the 36,000 books that were traditionally ascribed to Taht. He wrote them as the mouthpiece of Ra, or Atum-Huhi the father of Iu, who was carried into Judea as Ihuh the god of the Ius, Aaiu, or Jews, who brought on the sacred writings that had been “consigned, performed, engraved in script”, and memorized for ever in “the royal palace of On”, or Heliopolis Magna. Now the priest named Osarsiph by Manetho, who was afterwards called Moses, is reputed to have been born at On (Annu), and [Page 682] to have been a priest of the great temple there, the temple of Atum-Ra-Har-Makhu, where the writings were kept, including those in which Ma-Shu had made hereditary titles for Ra-Har-Makhu to be transmitted from generation to generation for time and eternity. The most perfect rendering of the name “I am” would be “the self-existent”, and in the hymn to the god Shu Atum-Ra is designated “the self-existent” (p. 1, l. 9). Also his other title of Kheper signified “he who is” in the Egyptian tongue. Amongst the subject-matter of the exodus is the revelation of the one god that was made to Moses on the mount, which revelation had previously been made to Anhur. It is to Anhur that the one god Ra who is to supersede all other gods and elemental powers is revealed as Huhi the eternal. Anhur is represented as being the medium of communication betwixt the god and mortals. “His substance is blended with the substance of Ra” as intermediate power. He makes divine law known to men (Magic Papyrus). As it is said, the people present their offerings to the god with Anhur’s own hands. Moses is represented as being the same to Ihuh that Anhur was to Atum-Ra — his medium for communication with the people, the medium that was the human mouthpiece for the god. So the ancestral spirit that inspires the Zulu Inyanga says to the medium, “You will not speak with the people; they will be told by us everything they come to inquire about” (Callaway).

We learn from the very ancient magical texts that amongst the 36,000 books ascribed to Taht by tradition there was a particular collection known as “The Four Books”. These had the titles of (1) The Old Book, (2) The Book to Destroy Men, (3) The Great Book, (4) The Book to be as God. There was also a group of four books that were astronomical and astrological. Whether these were the same or not, the “Four Books” were in the temple of the sun at Annu or On, where Osarsiph is said to have been a priest. The number does not coincide with that of the Pentateuch. But then the books originally assigned to Moses were only four in number, not five. The wisdom of Egypt, in which Osarsiph was so profoundly learned, would naturally be written upon rolls of papyrus in the library at On, from which it was carried forth in one of the exodes from Egypt. The original nucleus of the Hebrew collection consisted of “the precepts of the Pentateuch” (by which the law was given), “together with their traditional implications” (Montefiore, C. G., Hib. Lect., p. 469). This, in a limited or possibly primitive sense, was the Jewish torah. In Egyptian the Teruu is a roll of papyrus and the torah has the form of the papyrus-roll. Also torah, denotes the whole law, and in Egyptian teruu signifies all, entire, the whole.

There is a tradition of the assumption of Moses in the so-called apocryphal “Assumptio Moysis” (Apocryphal Literature, vol. II, p. 177). Such a mode of translation bodily does not apply to any human being, under whatsoever name. But it was the way in which Anhur made his exit from the mount or from the mouth of Ra. Anhur is an entirely mythical character, and if he be the prototype of Moses, it would seem to follow that this is the origin of the legend concerning his disappearance on the mount. The present writer does not attempt to fathom the meaning of the mythos in the form of märchen to which the [Page 683] tradition belongs, but the disappearance of Moses from the mount may be taken as identical with that of the god who represented wind and in the solar mythos was the breathing force of the rising sun personified. With the cessation of the breeze, or, if very fierce, the tornado, Shu-Anhur might be said to pass away, as a current saying has it, “like the devil in a high wind”. It is recorded (Deut. XXXIV. 5) that Moses died , literally “upon the mouth of the Lord” (Ihuh). And Shu-Anhur was the breath of the Lord. He was the spirit of Ra as the breathing solar force emaned from the very mouth of the god, or, as might be, he was represented by the panting lion on the mount of dawn. At sunrise on the mount the all-embracing, all-absorbing fires of Ra did veritably swallow up the force of Anhur, who passed away as breath from the mouth of the solar god. The personality of Shu-Anhur is united with that of Ra, the supreme lord. His very substance is blended with the substance of Ra (Magic Papyrus, I. 6), and is absorbed into it as nutriment when he passes away upon the mount or makes his change in character. Also there is a legend of Anhur’s final disappearance from the mount, an occurrence that took place during a nine days’ tempest, and of which Maspero says, “We may here note the most ancient known reference to the tempest whose tumult hid from men the disappearance or apotheosis of kings, who ascended alive into heaven” (Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, Eng. tr., p. 178). Thus Shu-Anhur as an elemental power had represented breathing force with lion-like capacity, the equinoctial wind, the breeze of dawn, but in the solar myth the increase of the twilight current was attributed to the sun; it was considered to be breath of Ra, the lord of all, which died upon the mount of sunrise. This becomes the vanishing of Moses on Mount Pisgah, Alphi-Jehovah, in the Hebrew märchen. In rendering the fact, which was scientific in relation to Ra and Shu at sunrise, without due knowledge, the Hebrew writer has apparently made Jehovah swallow Moses bodily as a human being, although the statement is somewhat reticently made, in causing him to die like breath upon the mouth of the lord. This was the “burial of Moses”, and there need be no wonder that “no man knoweth of his sepulchre to this day”.

When Moses passed away or was dislimned upon that mountain of the Abarim, his rôle as army leader of the Israelites was taken over by the young man Joshua, who answers perfectly to Shu when the part of Shu is carefully discriminated from that of Anhur. Anhur was the uplifter of the stellar heaven in various forms — his “upliftings” are mentioned in the texts — whereas Shu was the supporter of the sun-god in the solar mythos. In the first character he pushes up the heaven with his rod, as prototype of Moses with his rod. In the second he uplifts the solar disk upon the horizon as the servant and supporter of the great god Ra. Shu had been all that Joshua is going to be when he tells the children of Israel to “put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the river and in Egypt. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” — the Lord being Ihuh, one with the Egyptian Huhi, the new god Atum-Ra. When Shu becomes the leader in his name of Shu-si-Ra there is a river to be crossed. “I am Shu”, he says, “the image of Ra”, “sitting in the inside of his father’s sacred eye”, or the solar disk. [Page 684]

“I am the chosen of millions coming out of the lower heaven. When my name is spelt on the bank of the river, then it is dried up”. This in the Hebrew account is Joshua coming to the river Jordan. After the death of Moses “Ihuh spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses’s minister, “ saying”, Arise; go over this Jordan, thou and all this people, unto the land which I do give them, even to the children of Israel” (Joshua. I. 2). The white bull was the bull of Shu, who was called the bull, the master of strength. And according to one of the Jewish märchen, at the conquest of Canaan Joshua rode upon a bull. When they came to the river “all Israel passed over on dry ground”. It is the same with Joshua at the river as with Shu, at whose name “spelt on the bank” the waters dried up for the passage. Shu is the opener of the gates for egress from Amenta on behalf of Ra and the glorified elect who made their exodus from the lower Egypt of Amenta pursued by the Apap-dragon and all the host of darkness. The Osiris thus addresses Shu: “O thou who leapest forth, conductor of the manes and glorified ones from the earth, let the fair path to the tuat (point of egress) be granted to me which is made on behalf of those who are in pain” (Rit., ch. LXIV) — that is, on behalf of the sufferers in the Egypt of the lower world. The earth here mentioned is Amenta, from which the manes and the glorified were conducted first by Anhur to the presence of the solar god upon the mount of glory, and afterwards by Shu on board the solar bark.

Shu became the harbinger of Ra and leader in the coming forth from lower Egypt considered as an astronomical locality that was afterwards represented to be geographical in the Hebrew exodus. Thus, in the round of night and day Shu-Anhur enters the Amenta at evening to conduct the children of Ra up from the lower Egypt of the mythos. His alter ego, Shu, takes up the leadership upon the horizon east at dawn, to end the journey in the promised land or upper paradise of plenty and perpetual peace.

The land of promise on the other side of Jordan is that paradise across the water which was on the summit of Mount Hetep at the pole, hence the circumpolar paradise of the heptanomis, or heaven in seven astronomes. Thus in the book of Joshua the promised land is mapped out and measured in accordance with the astronomical mythology of the heptanomis. When the racial names are added in place of the divine, the seven divisions are called the seven lands of “the Canaanite, the Hittite, and the Hivite, and the Perizzite, and the Girgashite, and the Amorite, and the Jebusite” (Joshua III. 10). The final heaven attributed to Atum-Ra, as an astronomical formation, was in twelve divisions. This formation had been repeated in the making of Amenta. The previous heaven, considered to be antediluvian, was in ten divisions. These were represented by the ten circles of Ra in the Ritual (ch. 18) and by the ten divine domains of the blessed in the paradise upon the summit of Mount Hetep (Rit. ch. 110). This celestial formation was also represented by the ten tribes that were lost upon the other side of the waters, and by the ten sons of Jacob who preceded the twelve sons of Israel. But the later formation was repeated when Moses set a boundary to the mount and erected [Page 685] twelve pillars, “according to the twelve tribes of Israel” (Ex. XXIV. 4). The same figure of formation is again repeated when Joshua is commanded to set up twelve stones in the midst of the waters, and also in the Gilgal-circle which became the lodging place (Joshua IV. 20) of the Israelites, who were continually on tramp in making the journey of the manes through the subterranean world, which was in twelve sections of space, with the twelve gates through which Ra passes with the blessed on his right hand and the damned upon his left, in accordance with the Egyptian rule of perspective (Book of Hades). In one form of the mythos, then, the Israelites divide the promised land into twelve lots among the twelve tribes. This is in accordance with the ground-plan of Amenta, in which twelve sections of space are shown to be successively enclosed as the possessions of the glorified elect, the chosen people who originate as the children of the sons of Ra, headed by the twelve who reap the harvest-field with Horus in the lower Egypt of Amenta. The gods of this nether earth in twelve divisions are twelve in number. The fields of divine harvest are twelve, the harvesters are twelve. The bearers of the measuring cord are twelve. The lots are also twelve. All being in accordance with the heaven that was mapped out in twelve domains. Thus the land of promise in the solar mythos was the terrestrial paradise of legendary lore. This was the land mapped out in twelve divisions where the type of plenty is the harvest-field of Amenta, and the cultivators are the twelve with Horus as the children of Ra. They formed the twelve colonies altogether under the suzerainty of local gods, and were the prototypes of the twelve tribes called the children of Israel. In the second stage the promised land is that more ancient circumpolar paradise upon Mount Hetep first mapped out in seven divisions, where the water-plants (aarru) supplied a primeval natural type of plenty. Both forms of the double paradise have been reproduced as Hebrew, one in the book of Exodus, the other in the book of Joshua. The land that was to be inherited by the children of Israel is also described as a form of the celestial heptanomis which preceded the heaven in twelve divisions. Mount Pisgah represents the mountain of Amenta, the summit of which reached up to the sky (Rit., ch. CXLIX). This was the top of attainment for Moses, whose journey here comes to an end midway. But from this point the second upper land of promise might be seen. This is the circumpolar paradise or the celestial city in seven divisions, and in attaining this upon the stellar mount of glory Joshua brings the mythical exodus to its own proper ending.

Hence the men who were prospecting on behalf of Joshua “went and passed through the land, and described it by cities into seven portions in a book” (Joshua XVIII. 9).

The promise made to Moses (Ex. III. 17) was that the Lord would lead the children of Israel “up out of the affliction of Egypt unto the land of the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Amorite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite and the Jebusite; unto a land flowing with milk and honey”. The Girgashite is omitted from this list of names. But when Joshua had crossed the Jordan “he came unto Jericho”, and the men of Jericho who fought against Israel are said to be the [Page 686] Amorite, the Perizzite, the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Girgashite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite. Thus Jericho in itself becomes a form of the heptanomis in which the tribes and totems are but seven in number, corresponding to “the seven portions in a book”. This may account for seven priests encompassing the city seven times upon the seventh day, blowing seven times on seven trumpets of rams-horns in order that the city walls might fall down flat. Here let it be remembered that in the astronomical mythology the localities are primarily celestial (Joshua XXIV. 11). The descriptions point to the heaven thus taken by storm as being a form of the celestial heptanomis or upper Egypt of the seven astronomes — the upper paradise that was indefinitely more ancient than the twelve divisions of the solar heaven established by Ra in his first sovereignty, who is Atum-Huhi, the Hebrew Ihuh. In short, the siege of Jericho as a subject of the astronomical mythology is identical with the siege of seven-circled Troy.

In various survivals of the self-same mythos there is a Delilah who betrays the city when it is besieged, and who becomes the consort or the ally of the captor. This in the Greek version is Helen of Troy. We learn from Plutarch that in the wars of Sut and Horus, Ta-Urt (Greek Thauris), the concubine of Sut, deserted and came over to the side of Horus, and was pursued by a serpent (of Isis and Osiris, 19). Ta-Urt was the Great Mother in the constellation of the Great Bear, the old harlot of the heptanomis who deserted Sut and joined herself to the solar Sebek-Horus as “the great mother of him who was married to his mother”. Rahab the harlot, who dwelt on the top of the wall in Jericho, the city of the seven tribes, is another survival of the pre-monogamous Great Mother, the whore of later language. Rahab in the Psalms and the book of Job is the crocodile, a symbol, a nickname for Egypt. In Assyrian, rahâbu is a monster of the waters=the crocodile. The crocodile was a type of the old Great Mother Apt or Ta-Urt, not only in lower Egypt (Kheb), but in the upper Egypt where the waters were celestial; and Apt the goddess passes into Hathor as the amorous queen (Ps. LXXXVII. 4, LXXXIX. 10; Job XXVI. 12). The scarlet signal placed in the window by Rahab is of the true typhonian colour, the proper hue of the red dragon or hippopotamus — that is, of the old harlot sitting on the waters of heaven (Rev. XVII. 15).
 

 In conclusion, the children of Israel, under Moses, travel through Amenta. They take possession of a land divided into twelve domains, which the Egyptian manes had already cultivated in the nether earth as a map of heaven in twelve divisions. Under Joshua they cross the water to take possession of the ancient heptanomis which had been configurated by the Egyptians as the upper circumpolar paradise. They are led to this land flowing with milk and honey by the hornet=the Kamite wasp or bee. This was the heaven mapped out of old by the Egyptians as the pastures of the seven cows who provided milky abundance in the Sekhet-Hetep, or the evergreen meadows of divine Aarru. And it is the Great Mother, whether in her stellar or lunar character as Apt or Hathor in the mount, who plays the part of traitress and surrenders the city to the solar god. [Page 687]

The paradise looked up to by the most primitive races was a heaven of perpetual plenty. That type was preserved by the Egyptians in the fields of celestial food upon Mount Hetep, but, as before said, there was no unearned increment to be derived from these elysian fields. “I am master there”, says the beatified spirit who has attained his allotment and built his homestead. “I am in glory there; I eat there; I plant and I reap there; I plough there; I take my fill of love”. “I net the ducks and I eat the dainties”. “I am united there to the god Hetep”, the good Osiris, as the deity of plenty and of peace (ch. 110, Renouf). The Aarru was their oasis in the desert, well watered, with the sand turned into soil for seed by ceaseless human labour, and transferred into the nether earth or into the upper paradise. But in transmogrifying Kamite mythology into the Semite history, a remarkable omission has been made by the inspired writers of God’s Word. In the Egyptian original the elect people are chosen as the cultivators of the Aarru fields, which are measured out and the allotments made for the express purpose of cultivation. “Holiness to you, cultivators”, says the god Ra. The Egyptians in their lower paradise of plenty reaped the produce of their labours, but they had to earn it individually first. In the Jewish version of the Aarru it is a land flowing with milk and honey, corn, oil, and wine. But there is no demand for work, no thought of cultivation, or of earning an eternal living. On attaining this land of promise they were to enter into an inheritance prepared by the labours of others, with no need to become the cultivators on their own account; and this position of the chosen people as non-cultivators of the soil has been religiously preserved by the non-agricultural Jews for this world and by the Christians for the world to come. Also the Jews have been and are to-day the victims of their misappropriated mythos. The mount was a stone of stumbling in their path, the rock on which they split. Their racial and religious origins are still at war in every meeting of the Zionists. The Zion of the visionaries is based on a celestial foundation. It is Jerusalem the golden; Jerusalem above, not to be confounded with a sacred site in Palestine. In the remotest parts of Africa the Jews would be much nearer “home” than in the Zion localized in Palestine which represented the eternal city on high, according to the Egyptian eschatology. The ideal of the racial Jews is a paradise on earth, whereas the religious ideal was the city in the heavens figured ages earlier on the summit of the mount, which was Hetep, the mount of peace, in Egyptian, and in Hebrew it was Mount Salem, or the later Jerusalem.

THE SEED OF YSIRAAL.

Only one mention of the people of Israel occurs by name on all the monuments of Egypt. This was discovered a few years since by Professor Petrie on a stele erected by the King Merenptah II. Not that there is any possibility of identifying these with the Israelites of the biblical exodus. The “people of Ysiraal” on the monument belong to those who were amongst the confederated Nine Bows, the marauders, North Africans, the Kheta, the Canaanites, the Northern Syrians, and others with whom they are classed. “Every one that was a marauder hath been subdued by the King Merenptah, who gives life like the sun-god every day”. This inscription gives an account of the Libyan campaign, and concludes with the following description of the triumph of King Merenptah: “Chiefs bend down, [Page 688] saying, Peace to thee; not one of the Nine Bows raises his head. Vanquished are the Tahennu (North Africans); the Khita (Hittites) are quieted; ravaged is Pa-kanana (Kanun) with all violence; taken is Askadni (Askelon?); seized is Kazmel; Yenu (Yanoh) of the Syrians is made as though it had not existed; the people of Ysiraal is spoiled — it hath no seed (left); Syria has become as widows of Egypt; all lands together are in peace (Petrie, Contemp. Review, May, 1896). The people of Ysiraal (Israel) are here included, together with the Syrians, and amongst the confederated ”Nine Bows” who made continual incursions into Egypt as invaders and marauders, and who are spoken of as having been exterminated. Hence it is said, “The people of Ysiraal is spoiled; it hath no seed”. But there is nothing whatever in the inscription of King Merenptah corresponding to or corroborative of the biblical story of the Israelites in the land of Egypt or their exodus into the land of Canaan. The campaign against the Libyan confederacy had been undertaken by Merenptah, who, according to the inscription, was born as the destined means of revenging the invasion of Egypt by the Nine Bow barbarians. In proclaiming the triumph of the monarch the inscription says, “Every one that was a marauder hath been subdued by the King Merenptah”. The people of Ysiraal in this inscription are identified by the Pharaoh with the nomads of the Edomite Shasu or shepherds, and are classed by him with the confederate marauders who invaded Egypt with the Libu, and were defeated with huge slaughter at the battle of Procepis (Pa-ar-shep, which is also recorded on the monuments. They were a tribe or totemic community of cattle-keepers, one of “the tribes of the Shasu from the land of Aduma” who went down into Egypt in search of grazing ground to find sustenance for their herds in the eastern region of the Delta. At this very time, when the people of Ysiraal and their seed were being “wiped out” or annihilated as the Israelites in Syria, there was an exodus of the Edomite Shasu which has been pressed into the service of false theory on behalf of biblical “history”. These tribes had considered the eastern region of the Delta, as far as Zoan, to be their own possession, until they were driven out by Seti I. Now they bestirred themselves anew, under Meneptah II (Merenptah), but “in a manner alike peaceful and loyal”. “As faithful subjects of Egypt, they asked for a passage through the border fortress of Khetam in the land of Thuku (Heb. Succoth), in order that they might find sustenance for themselves and their herds in the rich pasture-lands of the lake districts about the city of Pa-Tum (Pithom)” (Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs, Eng. tr., one vol., p. 317). An Egyptian official makes the following report on the subject. He says: “Another matter for the satisfaction of my master’s heart: we have carried into effect the passage of the tribes of the Shasu from the land of Aduma (Edom) from the fortress (Khetam) of Merenptah-Hetephima, which is situated in Thuku (Succoth), to the lakes of the city Pa-Tum, of Merenptah-Hetephima, which are situated in the land of Thuku, in order to feed themselves and to feed their herds on the possessions of Pharaoh, who is there a beneficent sun for all peoples. In the year 8 . . . Sut, I caused them to be conducted (according to the list of the days on which the fortress was opened for their passage)”. (Brugsch, citing Pap. Anastasi; 6). Merenptah also had his royal seat in the city of Ramses. Here we meet with the field of Zoan and the store-cities of Pithom and Ramses which have been imported into the second book of Moses, and futile efforts have been made to show that this record corroborated the biblical version of the exodus. But in this exodus we find the Shasu or shepherds are peaceful and loyal people, faithful subjects of the Pharaoh, who are politely conducted from the land of Edom through the fortress (Khetam) to the lake-country of Succoth (or Thuku), the first encampment assigned to the Israelites, where they would find abundance of food and fodder for themselves and their flocks and herds instead of wandering in the wilderness for forty years, according to the other story. At the same time, or thereabouts, the people of Ysiraal in Syria were cut up root and branch by Merenptah. The passage through the land of Thuku, Hebrew Succoth, here described is apparently the route adopted by those who converted the “coming forth” from Amenta into the biblical exodus from Egypt, and it tends to affiliate the cattle-keepers in the land of Goshen to the nomadic tribes of the Edomite Shasu (Gen. XLVI. 32). But we shall not overtake the children of Israel as an ethnological entity on this line of route, nor as the people who perish by the million in the wilderness of sand that formed the land of graves in the desert domain of Sekari. For that we shall have to “turn back” and encamp before Pi-ha-hiroth, and pass through the mouth of the cleft into the wilderness of Amenta. But it is useless trying any further to confuse the Jewish exodus with the [Page 689] mythical “coming forth” from the lower Egypt of Amenta, with intent to reestablish a falsely-bottomed history. The eruption of the Libyans and their confederated invaders in the time of Merenptah is a matter of historic fact. That they were vanquished and driven back by Merenptah is equally historical. They at least made no triumphant exodus from Egypt as 600,000 fighting men, for they never got there, but were fatally defeated on the borders of the land. The only people, then, known by the name of Israel to the Egyptian monuments are the people of Ysiraal who had their very seed destroyed, as claimed by the Pharaoh beloved of Ptah. These can be identified as a North Syrian contingent of fighting men who had joined the Libyans, or the old confederation of the Nine Bows, in their attacks on Egypt, and were hunted back in wreck and ruin, if not entirely destroyed, by Merenptah, the so-called “Pharaoh of the exodus”. Thus, if these were the same people as those of the Hebrew exodus, the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt would be turned into the deliverance of Egypt itself from the Libyan confederacy of raiding barbarians amongst whom the Israelites were a hardly distinguishable unit. What then was “the seed of Israel” as an ethnological entity in the eyes of Merenptah, or the writer of his inscription? They fought as mercenaries and marauders for the Libyan king, who had made war on Egypt collectively, and were driven backward all together in one common, overwhelming rout. They came and went, and left no record of their past. Israel in Syria was not Israel in Egypt. Israel in Egypt is not an ethnical entity, but the children of Ra in the lower Egypt of Amenta, who are entirely mythical.

THE TITLE OF PHARAOH.

By the bye, so far as hitherto known, the name of “Pharaoh” is only found in Hebrew. Some Egyptologists derive it from Par-ao, the great house. The present writer is of opinion that this title of the Ra was more probably derived from Paru the lion than from Para the house. The Pharaoh personated the lion, or the lion-god, and sometimes wore the lion’s tail as the emblem of royalty. Then he was Paru as the lion and the hak as ruler. Thus the king as lion-ruler would be the Paruhak=Pharaoh. Moreover, and this seems conclusive, the lion-god is addressed as the god Paru (Rit., ch. 162), and the full spelling of the name (Paruhak) is extant in the Ritual. In an address to Sekhet (ch. 164) the goddess is called the divine mother of Parhakasa, who is the royal wife of Paruhak-Khepera, the king as lion-ruler or Pharaoh. Probably the Paruhak originated with Kheper-Ptah and his consort Sekhet, who were the parents of the lion-god Atum-Ra, and therefore of Ihuh in Israel. The chapter in which the lion-ruler appears as the Paruhak is one of the most ancient in the Ritual. It is said to have been written partly if not entirely in the language of the blacks (the Nahsi) and the Antiu of Nubia (ch. 164), which takes us beyond Egypt as now known to the country of Sut-Nahsi, whence the Egyptians came in their course of descent from the equatorial regions where they had dwelt in a land of equal day and night, the prototype of their double earth and of time in Amenta. We find from chapter 162 that this lion of the double force, the Paruhak, is invoked as the protector of his people. His whip is used against their enemies. He is saluted as the lion of the double power who answers prayer and comes to those that call upon him and invoke him as the “protector of the wretched against the oppressor” (Rit., 162). These were the manes in Amenta. A corroboration of this origin of the Pharaonic name may be found in Ezekiel (XXXII. 2): “Son of man, take up a lamentation for the Pharaoh king of Egypt, and say unto him, Thou was likened unto a young lion of the nations”. Which he was as the lion-ruler Paruhak.