CHAPTER CXII.
Chapter whereby one knoweth the Powers of Pu.[([1])]
Oh thou of corpselike form who art in Chait and Ânpit;([2]) thou goddess of the Net,([3]) who art in Pu; ye who preside over the untilled lands, ye stars and constellations([4]).... Know ye wherefore Pu hath been given to Horus?
I know it if ye know it not.
It was Râ who gave it to him in amends of the blindness in his eye, in consequence of what Râ said to Horus: “Let me look at what is happening in thine eye to-day,” and he looked at it.
Râ said to Horus, “Look, pray, at that black swine.”
He looked, and a grievous mishap afflicted his eye.
Horus said to Râ, “Lo, my eye is as though the eye of Sutu had made a wound in my own eye.” And wrath devoured his heart.
And Râ said to the gods, “Let him be laid upon his bed, that he may recover.”
It was Sutu who had taken the form of a black swine, and he wrought the wound which was in the eye of Horus.
And Râ said to the gods, “The swine is an abomination to Horus; may he get well.” And the swine became an abomination to Horus.([5])
And the circle of gods said, who were with him when Horus came to light in his own children:([6]) “Let the sacrificial victims([7]) for him be of his oxen, of his goats, and of his swine.”
As for Emsta, Hapi, Tuamautef, Kebhsenuf, Horus is their father and Isis their mother.
And Horus said to Râ, “Give me then two([8]) brothers in Pu and two brothers in Nechen, of this my own body; and that they may be with me as an everlasting renewal, through which the earth flourisheth and storms are quenched.”
And his name became that of Horus upon his Column.
I know the Powers of Pu: they are Horus, Emsta and Hapi.
Notes.
[1.] On the situation of Pu, see chapter 18, [note 6]. The Pyramid Texts (Pepi I, 684) speak of the
“those of the Red Crown who are in Pu.”
[2.] Thou of corpselike form in Chait and Ânpit. The sign of the plural, here as elsewhere, is quite consistent with its application to a single person.
Chait is the name[[95]] of the 16th, or Mendesian, Nome of Northern Egypt, and Ânpit was its metropolis. The nome is mentioned in the inscription of Amten in the third dynasty. The god is Osiris. He is invoked in the “Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys,” and asked to come to Tattu, Ânpit and Chait, which are but different names of one Sanctuary, Cf. Brugsch, Zeitschr., 1871, p. 81, and his translation of the Mendesian Tablet, Zeitschr., 1875.
[3.] Thou goddess of the Net
. This name corresponds to the Greek Diktynna. The reason why a goddess representing Heaven should be so called may be understood by the Homeric epithet πολυωπόν applied to a net.
If, however, the deity was male, according to the other reading, the reference is τὸν τῆς Ἴσιδος τρόφιμον Δίκτυν, who was drowned in the river. Plut., de Iside and Os., 8.
[4.] Ye who preside, etc. Brugsch (Zeitschr., 1876, p. 3) identifies the Egyptian
,
with the ψιλοτόπος of the Demotic and Greek contracts. The remainder of this invocation is so corrupt that the sense cannot be safely guessed at.
[5.] See Herodotus, II, 47, without attaching too much importance to details. The pig was certainly not considered impure (μιαρός) in the days of the third or fourth dynasty, when Amten, who had risen to the highest dignities, enumerates swine among the domestic animals it is natural to possess. And impure animals were not offered in sacrifice. But long before the days of Herodotus a change had taken place in the Egyptian religion as to the nature of Sutu.
Plutarch and Aelian are to be read with the like caution. Some of their information is correct, but it is mixed up with much error.
[6.] The variants
and
are noteworthy.
[7.] Sacrificial victims
. The substitution in Egypt of animal for human sacrifice is (I believe) entirely without foundation. And the supposed evidence of human sacrifices drawn from certain pictures has (I believe) been misinterpreted..
[8.] The four children of Horus were also his brothers. He asks for two of them to be with him in each of his two cities, Pu and Nechen. The true sense of the passage is entirely lost in the later recensions and in translations made from them.
[95]. Not Ḥāmeḥit, which is the name both of the Uu of the nome and of the goddess worshipped in it, whose emblem is the fish
.