They were not all equally charged with it; some had more, others less, their energy being in proportion to the amount which they contained. The better supplied willingly gave of their superfluity to those who lacked it, and all could readily transmit it to mankind, this transfusion being easily accomplished in the temples. The king, or any ordinary man who wished to be thus impregnated, presented himself before the statue of the god, and squatted at its feet with his back towards it. The statue then placed its right hand upon the nape of his neck, and by making passes, caused the fluid to flow from it, and to accumulate in him as in a receiver. This rite was of temporary efficacy only, and required frequent renewal in order that its benefit might be maintained.
1 Drawn by Boudier from a photograph by M. Gay et, taken in
1889, of a scene in the hypostyle hall at Lûxor. This
illustration shows the relative positions of prince and god.
Anion, after having placed the pschent upon the head of the
Pharaoh Amenôthes III., who kneels before him, proceeds to
impose the sa.
By using or transmitting it the gods themselves exhausted their sa of life; and the less vigorous replenished themselves from the stronger, while the latter went to draw fresh fulness from a mysterious pond in the northern sky, called the "pond of the Sa."[*] Divine bodies, continually recruited by the influx of this magic fluid, preserved their vigour far beyond the term allotted to the bodies of men and beasts. Age, instead of quickly destroying them, hardened and transformed them into precious metals. Their bones were changed to silver, their flesh to gold; their hair, piled up and painted blue, after the manner of great chiefs, was turned into lapis-lazuli.[**]
* It is thus that in the Tale of the Daughter of the
Prince of Bakhtan we find that one of the statues of the
Theban Konsû supplies itself with sa from another statue
representing one of the most powerful forms of the god. The
pond of Sa, whither the gods go to draw the magic fluid,
is mentioned in the Pyramid texts.
** Cf. the text of the Destruction of Men (Il. 1, 2)
referred to above, where age produces these transformations
in the body of the sun. This changing of the bodies of the
gods into gold, silver, and precious stones, explains why
the alchemists, who were disciples of the Egyptians, often
compared the transmutation of metals to the metamorphosis of
a genius or of a divinity: they thought by their art to
hasten at will that which was the slow work of nature.
This transformation of each into an animated statue did not altogether do away with the ravages of time. Decrepitude was no less irremediable with them than with men, although it came to them more slowly; when the sun had grown old "his mouth trembled, his drivelling ran down to earth, his spittle dropped upon the ground."
None of the feudal gods had escaped this destiny; for them as for mankind the day came when they must leave the city and go forth to the tomb.[*]
* The idea of the inevitable death of the gods is expressed
in other places as well as in a passage of the eighth
chapter of the Booh of the Dead (Naville's edition), which
has not to my knowledge hitherto been noticed: "I am that
Osiris in the West, and Osiris knoweth his day in which he
shall be no more;" that is to say, the day of his death
when he will cease to exist. All the gods, Atûmû, Horus, Râ,
Thot, Phtah, Khnûmû, are represented under the forms of
mummies, and this implies that they are dead. Moreover,
their tombs were pointed out in several places in Egypt.
The ancients long refused to believe that death was natural and inevitable. They thought that life, once began, might go on indefinitely: if no accident stopped it short, why should it cease of itself? And so men did not die in Egypt; they were assassinated. The murderer often belonged to this world, and was easily recognized as another man, an animal, some inanimate object such as a stone loosened from the hillside, a tree which fell upon the passer-by and crushed him. But often too the murderer was of the unseen world, and so was hidden, his presence being betrayed in his malignant attacks only. He was a god, an evil spirit, a disembodied soul who slily insinuated itself into the living man, or fell upon him with irresistible violence—illness being a struggle between the one possessed and the power which possessed him. As soon as the former succumbed he was carried away from his own people, and his place knew him no more. But had all ended for him with the moment in which he had ceased to breathe? As to the body, no one was ignorant of its natural fate. It quickly fell to decay, and a few years sufficed to reduce it to a skeleton. And as for the skeleton, in the lapse of centuries that too was disintegrated and became a mere train of dust, to be blown away by the first breath of wind. The soul might have a longer career and fuller fortunes, but these were believed to be dependent upon those of the body, and commensurate with them. Every advance made in the process of decomposition robbed the soul of some part of itself; its consciousness gradually faded until nothing was left but a vague and hollow form that vanished altogether when the corpse had entirely disappeared. Erom an early date the Egyptians had endeavoured to arrest this gradual destruction of the human organism, and their first effort to this end naturally was directed towards the preservation of the body, since without it the existence of the soul could not be ensured. It was imperative that during that last sleep, which for them was fraught with such terrors, the flesh should neither become decomposed nor turn to dust, that it should be free from offensive odour and secure from predatory worms.