* Maspero, Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie
Égyptiennes, vol. ii. pp. 34, 35.
*** The Egyptians employed a still more forcible expression
than our word "absorption" to express this idea. It was said
of objects wherein these genii concealed themselves, and
whence they issued in order to re-enter them immediately,
that these forms ate them, or that they ate their own
forms.
2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from Champollion's copies, made
from the tombs of Beni-Hassan. To the right is the sha,
one of the animals of Sit, and an exact image of the god
with his stiff and arrow-like tail. Next comes the safir,
the griffin; and, lastly, we have the serpent-headed saza.
Scarcely visible even by glimpses, they were not easily depicted; their real forms being often unknown, these were approximately conjectured from their occupations. The character and costume of an archer, or of a spear-man, were ascribed to such as roamed through Hades, to pierce the dead with arrows or with javelins. Those who prowled around souls to cut their throats and hack them to pieces were represented as women armed with knives, carvers—donît—or else as lacerators—nokit. Some appeared in human form; others as animals—bulls or lions, rams or monkeys, serpents, fish, ibises, hawks; others dwelt in inanimate things, such as trees,[*] sistrums, stakes stuck in the ground;[**] and lastly, many betrayed a mixed origin in their combinations of human and animal forms. These latter would be regarded by us as monsters; to the Egyptians, they were beings, rarer perhaps than the rest, but not the less real, and their like might be encountered in the neighbourhood of Egypt.[***]
* Thus, the sycamores planted on the edge of the desert
were supposed to be inhabited by Hâthor, Nûît, Selkît, Nît,
or some other goddess. In vignettes representing the
deceased as stopping before one of these trees and receiving
water and loaves of bread, the bust of the goddess generally
appears from amid her sheltering foliage. But occasionally,
as on the sarcophagus of Petosiris, the transformation is
complete, and the trunk from which the branches spread is
the actual body of the god or goddess. Finally, the whole
body is often hidden, and only the arm of the goddess to be
seen emerging from the midst of the tree, with an
overflowing libation vase in her hand.
** The trunk of a tree, disbranched, and then set up in the
ground, seems to me the origin of the Osirian emblem called
tat or didu. The symbol was afterwards so
conventionalized as to represent four columns seen in
perspective, one capital overtopping another; it thus became
the image of the four pillars which uphold the world.
*** The belief in the real existence of fantastic animals
was first noted by Maspero, Études de Mythologie et
d'Archéologie Égyptiennes, vol. i. pp. 117, 118, 132, and
vol. ii. p. 213. Until then, scholars only
recognized the sphinx, and other Egyptian monsters, as
allegorical combinations by which the priesthood claimed to
give visible expression in one and the same being to
physical or moral qualities belonging to several different
beings. The later theory has now been adopted by Wiedemann,
and by most contemporary Egyptologists.
How could men who believed themselves surrounded by sphinxes and griffins of flesh and blood doubt that there were bull-headed and hawk-headed divinities with human busts? The existence of such paradoxical creatures was proved by much authentic testimony; more than one hunter had distinctly seen them as they ran along the furthest planes of the horizon, beyond the herds of gazelles of which he was in chase; and shepherds dreaded them for their flocks as truly as they dreaded the lions, or the great felidse of the desert.[*]
* At Beni-Hassan and in Thebes many of the fantastic animals
mentioned in the text, griffins, hierosphinxes, serpent-
headed lions, are placed along with animals which might be
encountered by local princes hunting in the desert.
This nation of gods, like nations of men, contained foreign elements, the origin of which was known to the Egyptians themselves. They knew that Hâthor, the milch cow, had taken up her abode in their land from very ancient times, and they called her the Lady of Pûanît, after the name of her native country. Bîsû had followed her in course of time, and claimed his share of honours and worship along with her. He first appeared as a leopard; then he became a man clothed in a leopard's skin, but of strange countenance and alarming character, a big-headed dwarf with high cheek-bones, and a wide and open mouth, whence hung an enormous tongue; he was at once jovial and martial, the friend of the dance and of battle.[*]
* The hawk-headed monster with flower-tipped tail was
called the saga.