It concludes with a book entitled ‘The Book of Deliverance in the Hall of the twofold Justice (Reward and Punishment), and the Book of Redemption.’
With such a deep and mystic literature, encompassing the gods, nature, and man, in life and death, it is no wonder that a mystic and symbolic art should have succeeded in Egypt.
Their mythology was not less profound than that of the Trans-Himâlâyans; there was more of symmetry, at least architectural symmetry, in their conceptions and representations than in those of the Brahmans, though Egyptian priests and Brahmans have apparently taken their conceptions from one and the same source. The Egyptian had eight gods of the first order, twelve gods of the second, and seven gods of the third order, pointing by these very numbers to an astronomical basis, thus:—
1. The cosmical forces of creative nature.
2. The twelve months of the year.
3. The seven days of the week.
Astronomy is the first powerful divisor of time and the supreme lord of agriculture. Only when the ‘Sacred Nile’ deposited its fructifying alluvium on the barren limestone of the valleys, formed by the Libyan and Arabian mountain ranges, man could exist and develop in that region. The regular inundation appeared to have taken place under the influence of the sun, moon, and stars. The sun (Osiris) was, therefore, believed to call forth the Nile (Isis) from regions unknown down to our own days, and sun and water became, as with the Indians (Indra and Agni), the first visible, creative forces of nature.
The eight gods of the first order were:—
I. Amn (Brahm), Am-Ra, Ammon, the Greek Zeus (the son of Kronos and Rhea), the Roman Jupiter; the ‘Concealed God,’ the ‘Lord of Heaven,’ the ‘Lord of Thrones’; the first creative, incomprehensible, invisible force of the universe. The Brahmă of the Indians, the Zeruane-Akerene of the Persians.
II. Khem (Kama), the generative God of Nature, Brahmā. He was worshipped, under the second Thinite Dynasty, under the symbol of the goat. The primitive, active, or male element of nature.