The Didû dressed.
In allegorical language we speak often of the even scales of Justice, and in art the goddess is always represented with the Balance in her hand. In Egyptian symbolism and art, I think the two feathers represented the equal weights of the scales of Justice. In the great judgment hall of Osiris, the souls of men were weighed in the balance. The soul, or heart, of the dead Egyptian was placed in one scale, while a feather—or the figure of the goddess Mait, wearing on her head a single plume or feather—occupied the other. Mait was the goddess of Justice, and we often read also of “the two Maits who preside over Justice and Truth.”
There is a woodcut in Prof. Maspero’s Dawn of Civilization, p. 130, in which the head-dress—the symbolic head-dress—so often to be met with in Egyptian mythologic representations, is very clearly drawn. It was in studying this woodcut that the idea first suggested itself to my mind, that in this head-dress we may find a reference to the four constellations which, when the Zodiac was first imagined, marked the four colures—the four quarters of the heavens—that it was in fact an astronomic monogram, combining four figures in one.
In this head-dress very plainly are to be seen the horns of a ram, and those of a goat. Less convincingly, perhaps, the disc from which spring the goat’s horns suggests “the disc enclosing a scarabæus,”[111] under which form the sun as Khophri—“He who is”[112]—was sometimes represented by the Egyptians.
[111] Maspero, p. 139.
[112] Ibid. p. 138.
The two feathers in outline clearly show themselves, but to connect these two feathers with the scales of Libra is only adventured as a possible means of giving an astronomic value to the so often repeated combination of the forms in this head-dress.
As to Capricornus (the fourth of the constellations which marked the colures 6000 B.C.), (see [Plate XVIII.]), we do not meet with any representations, so far as I know, of a goat-fish on Egyptian monuments, but on Babylonian boundary stones and engraved gems this monster is often to be seen, exactly represented in form and attitude as on the Grecian sphere. The goat’s horns are all we find portrayed in ancient Egyptian art, and when they are portrayed they appear together with the ram’s horns, and often springing out of a ram’s head. For this curt reference to the goat (Capricornus) a reason may be found by remembering that this constellation, in opposition, presided—traditionally—over the least honoured season of the Egyptian year—the arid season preceding the inundations.
It should be borne in mind that all the Egyptian mythologic symbolism we have been considering must necessarily have only embodied traditions already even under the earliest dynasties extremely ancient; for it was, as may be seen in the Plates, about 6000 B.C. that the colures touched the extreme western degrees of the constellations Aries, Cancer, and Libra—and a point some degrees to the west of Capricornus, as it is now drawn. In each succeeding century the colures moved still more to the west, through the stars, and from 6000 down to 4000 B.C. they were no longer to be observed in the four already named constellations, but in Pisces, Gemini, Virgo, and Sagittarius.