And of the tongue.…
It (the mind) is the one that bringeth forth every successful issue.
It is the tongue that repeats the thoughts of the mind.[30]
The mind was the essence of life: the tongue, which formed the word, was the active agent of the mind (heart).
As “the stuffing of the corpse with jade took the place of embalming”[31] in China, the custom of placing a jade amulet on the tongue is of marked significance. It is quite evidently an imported custom. The cicada takes the place of the Egyptian scarabæus, the beetle-god of Egypt, named Khepera and called in the texts “father of the gods”. In ancient Egypt scarabs were placed on the bodies and in the tombs of the dead to protect heart (mind) and tongue and ensure resurrection. A text sets forth in this connection: “And behold, thou shalt make a scarab of green stone, with a rim of gold, and this shall be placed in the heart of a man, and it shall perform for him the ‘Opening of the Mouth’ ”. The scarab is to be anointed with “ānti unguent” and then “words of power” are to be recited over it. In “words of power” the deceased addresses the scarab as “my heart, my mother: my heart whereby I came into being”.
The beetle-god, in whose form the scarab was made, “becomes”, as Budge says, “in a manner a type of the dead body, that is to say, he represents matter containing a living germ which is about to pass from a state of inertness into one of active life. As he was a living germ in the abyss of Nu (the primeval deep) and made himself emerge therefrom in the form of the rising sun, so the germ of the living soul, which existed in the dead body of man, and was to burst into new life in a new world by [[224]]means of the prayers recited during the performance of appropriate ceremonies, emerged from its old body in a new form either in the realm of Osiris or in the boat of Ra (the sun-god).”[32]
This Egyptian doctrine was symbolized by the beetle which rolls a bit of dung in the dust into the form of a ball, and then, having dug a hole in the ground, pushes it in and buries it. Thereafter the beetle enters the subterranean chamber to devour the ball. This beetle also collects dung to feed the larvæ which ultimately emerge from the ground in beetle form.
As the Chinese substituted jade for pearls, so did they substitute the cicada for the dung-beetle.
The cicada belongs to that class of insect which feeds on the juices of plants. It is large and broad with brightly-coloured wings. The male has on each side of the body a sort of drum which enables it to make that chirping noise called “the song of the cicada”, referred to by the ancient classical poets. When the female lays her eggs she bores a hole in a tree and deposits them in it. Wingless larvæ are hatched, and they bore their way into the ground to feed on the juices of roots. After a time—in some cases after the lapse of several years—the cicada emerges from the ground, the skin breaks open, and the winged insect rises in the air. The most remarkable species of the cicada is found in the United States, where it passes through a life-history of seventeen years, the greater part of that time being spent underground—the larval stage. In China the newly-hatched larva sometimes bores down into the earth to a depth of about twenty feet.
“The observation of this wonderful process of nature,” says Laufer, “seems to be the basic idea of this (cicada) amulet. The dead will awaken to a new life from his [[225]]grave as the chirping cicada rises from the pupa buried in the ground. This amulet, accordingly, was an emblem of resurrection.” Laufer quotes in this connection from the Chinese philosopher Wang Chʼung, who wrote: “Prior to casting off the exuviæ, a cicada is a chrysalis. When it casts them off, it leaves the pupa state, and is transformed into a cicada. The vital spirit of a dead man leaving the body may be compared to the cicada emerging from the chrysalis.”[33]