“The symbolisation of the word on the reverse is simpler, though the meaning is more abstruse. The first symbol means ‘men’, ‘abiding’, and the second, ‘ab’, ‘the heart’. So that we get ‘abiding of heart’, or in our own language ‘patience’. And this is the hekau to control the Lower World!”
He closed the box, and motioning us to remain as we were, he went back to his room to replace the Jewel in the safe. When he had returned and resumed his seat, he went on:
“That Jewel, with its mystic words, and which Queen Tera held under her hand in the sarcophagus, was to be an important factor—probably the most important—in the working out of the act of her resurrection. From the first I seemed by a sort of instinct to realise this. I kept the Jewel within my great safe, whence none could extract it; not even Queen Tera herself with her astral body.”
“Her ‘astral body’? What is that, Father? What does that mean?” There was a keenness in Margaret’s voice as she asked the question which surprised me a little; but Trelawny smiled a sort of indulgent parental smile, which came through his grim solemnity like sunshine through a rifted cloud, as he spoke:
“The astral body, which is a part of Buddhist belief, long subsequent to the time I speak of, and which is an accepted fact of modern mysticism, had its rise in Ancient Egypt; at least, so far as we know. It is that the gifted individual can at will, quick as thought itself, transfer his body whithersoever he chooses, by the dissolution and reincarnation of particles. In the ancient belief there were several parts of a human being. You may as well know them; so that you will understand matters relative to them or dependent on them as they occur.
“First there is the ‘Ka’, or ‘Double’, which, as Doctor Budge explains, may be defined as ‘an abstract individuality of personality’ which was imbued with all the characteristic attributes of the individual it represented, and possessed an absolutely independent existence. It was free to move from place to place on earth at will; and it could enter into heaven and hold converse with the gods. Then there was the ‘Ba’, or ‘soul’, which dwelt in the ‘Ka’, and had the power of becoming corporeal or incorporeal at will; ‘it had both substance and form.... It had power to leave the tomb.... It could revisit the body in the tomb ... and could reincarnate it and hold converse with it.’ Again there was the ‘Khu’, the ‘spiritual intelligence’, or spirit. It took the form of ‘a shining, luminous, intangible shape of the body.’... Then, again, there was the ‘Sekhem’, or ‘power’ of a man, his strength or vital force personified. These were the ‘Khaibit’, or ‘shadow’, the ‘Ren’, or ‘name’, the ‘Khat’, or ‘physical body’, and ‘Ab’, the ‘heart’, in which life was seated, went to the full making up of a man.
“Thus you will see, that if this division of functions, spiritual and bodily, ethereal and corporeal, ideal and actual, be accepted as exact, there are all the possibilities and capabilities of corporeal transference, guided always by an unimprisonable will or intelligence.” As he paused I murmured the lines from Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”:
“‘The Magnus Zoroaster....
Met his own image walking in the garden.’”
Mr. Trelawny was not displeased. “Quite so!” he said, in his quiet way. “Shelley had a better conception of ancient beliefs than any of our poets.” With a voice changed again he resumed his lecture, for so it was to some of us:
“There is another belief of the ancient Egyptian which you must bear in mind; that regarding the ushaptiu figures of Osiris, which were placed with the dead to its work in the Under World. The enlargement of this idea came to a belief that it was possible to transmit, by magical formulae, the soul and qualities of any living creature to a figure made in its image. This would give a terrible extension of power to one who held the gift of magic.