Chapter CLXV. of the same book, has as a vignette or picture: The god Khem, ithyphallic, with the body of a scarab, etc., line 11 reads: "I do all thy words. Saying (them) over the image of the god raising the arm, having the double plume upon his head, the legs separated and the body of the scarabæus."
The rising sun or Horus, in whose arms it was asserted, the dead arose into the upper life, was represented by the scarabæus under the name of Khepra, Khepera, or Khepri, this name among its other meanings signifying: "The itself transforming," and this is hieroglyphically written by the use of the scarabæus. The body of Khepera as a deity is surmounted in some of the representations, by a scarab in place of a human head.
In chapter XXIV. of the Book of the Dead, we read: "Khepra transforms itself, (or, gives itself a form to itself,) on high, from the thigh of its mother." This is more fully developed in a papyrus in the Louvre which reads: "The majesty of this great god attains that reign (the twelfth division of the subterranean world, responding to the twelfth hour of the night,) which is the end of absolute darkness. The birth of this great god, when it became Khepra, took place in that region * * * It went out from the inferior region. It joined the boat mad. It raised itself above the thighs of Nut."
"O Khepra who created itself on high, from the thigh of its mother, i.e., Nu, or Nut."[68]
Nut was the goddess personifying the vault of heaven, the sky, and the space, in which the sun was supposed to have been born. The scarab it must be remembered was in the Egyptian thought, an androgyne.
In a papyrus now in Turin, Italy, we may read: "I am Khepera, the morning; Ra, the midday; Tum, the evening." It is said of Khepra as of Horus, that it produced the Ma, i.e., the law or harmony which uphold the universe, and it is merged with a form of Horus, under the name of: "Harmakhis-Khepra who gives itself its form." One of the parts played by Khepra in Ancient Egyptian thought, is condensed in that figure which we find on the top of some of the Osirian naos's or arks, the scarab in the middle of the disk emerging from the horizon.
The perpetuity of the transformations or the power to become, whenever it pleased, the form it desired; was everywhere recalled to the mind of the people of Ancient Egypt, by the symbolic figure of the scarab, the hieroglyph of the words: To become, to be, to be existing, as also creator, an amulet of power above all others. "Khepra in its bark is Har-em-Khu (or, Harmakhis) himself," (chapter XVII. Book of the Dead, line 79.) The latter is the sun re-born every day at sunrise in the East under the name of Horus, it is: "Horus in the horizon," the conqueror of darkness. The scarab as Tum-Ra-Khepra is the, "illuminator of the double earth at its going out of the under-world, great god, and master of the Ma:" that is, of the Harmony and Law, whereby the universe came into being and exists.
The similarity attached to the idea in the symbolism of the sphinx, causes the close student of Egyptology to see, that the scarab and the sphinx represent similar ideas. The Great Sphinx of Gizeh near the Great Pyramids, is an image of Ra-Harmakhis or, "Horus in the two horizons," (the rising and the setting sun;) one of the names of the sphinx is seshep (i.e., to make the light.) The sphinx is said to be, an emblem of energy and force united to intellect, it is one of the very earliest of the Ancient Egyptian emblems, that of Gizeh was old and needing repairs when the Pyramids were being built; (circa 3733 B.C.) That abstraction does not appear to me, to be beyond the philosophy of the archaic Egyptians. The head of the Great Sphinx signified the Khu, or intellectual part of the soul, in their psychology; and the lion-shaped body, signified force, vitality or energy, the life principle or Ka.[69]
The promise of the resurrection of the soul was symbolized, by the Great Sphinx of Gizeh, old at the beginning of the Ancient Empire; by the Phœnix, and by the Scarab, the antiquity of the symbolism of which no Egyptologist has yet fathomed. We have it set forth in writing on the inscriptions of the earliest Dynasties.[70]
On a stele found between the paws of the Great Sphinx of Gizeh is: "The majesty of this beautiful god speaks by its own mouth, as a father speaks to his child, saying: Look to me, let thine eye rest on me, my son Thutmes! I, thy father, Harmakhu-Khepra-Ra-Tum, I give thee the kingdom." This monarch was Thutmes IVth (1533 B.C.)[71]