The goodness which had gained him the title of Onnophris while he sojourned here below, inspired him with the desire and suggested the means of opening the gates of his paradise to the souls of his former subjects. Souls did not enter into it unexamined, nor without trial. Each of them had first to prove that during its earthly life it had belonged to a friend, or, as the Egyptian texts have it, to a vassal of Osiris—amakhû khir Osiri—one of those who had served Horus in his exile and had rallied to his banner from the very beginning of the Typhonian wars.
2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Naville Bas Ægyptische
Todtenbuch, vol. i. pl. cxxviii. Ai.
These were those followers of Horus—Shosûû Horû—so often referred to in the literature of historic times.[*]
* Cf, p. 252. The Followers of Horns, i.e. those who had
followed Horus during the Typhonian wars, are mentioned in a
Turin fragment of the Canon of the Kings, in which the
author summarizes the chronology of the divine period. Like
the reign of Râ, the time in which the followers of Horus
were supposed to have lived was for the Egyptians of classic
times the ultimate point beyond which history did not reach.
Horus, their master, having loaded them with favours during life, decided to extend to them after death the same privileges which he had conferred upon his father. He convoked around the corpse the gods who had worked with him at the embalmment of Osiris: Anubis and Thot, Isis and Nephthys, and his four children—Hâpi, Qabhsonûf, Amsît, and Tiûmaûtf—to whom he had entrusted the charge of the heart and viscera. They all performed their functions exactly as before, repeated the same ceremonies, and recited the same formulas at the same stages of the operations, and so effectively that the dead man became a real Osiris under their hands, having a true voice, and henceforth combining the name of the god with his own.
1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Guieysse-Lefébure, Le
Papyrus de Soutimès, pl. viii. The outlines of the original
have unfortunately been restored and enfeebled by the
copyist.