"Will the Prince of Egypt, O sacred Apis, be a successful king, when he shall come to the throne?"
The reply to the question was to be found in the first words Remeses should hear spoken by any one when he left the temple. He immediately departed from the peristyle, and we returned through the solemn avenue to the portico. As we descended the steps, a seller of small images of the bull called out, in reply to something said by another—
"He will never get there!"
"Mark those words, Sesostris!" he said, not unimpressed by them; "my mother is to outlive me, or Mœris will seize the throne from me!"
"Do you put faith in this omen?"
"I know not what to answer you, my Sesostris. You have, no doubt," he added, "after all I have said, marvelled at my offering to Apis. But it is hard to destroy early impressions, even with philosophy, especially if the mind has no certain revelation to cling to, when it casts off its superstitions. But here I must leave you, at the door of the hierarch's palace. This noble priest is head of the priesthood of Pthah, a part of whose temple, as you have seen, is devoted to Apis,—or rather the two temples subsist side by side. You saw him last week at our palace. He has asked you to be his guest while here. Honor his invitation, and he will not only teach you much that you desire to know, but will visit with you the great pyramidal temple of Cheops."
Having entered the palace, and placed me under the hospitality of the noble Egyptian hierarch therein, the prince took leave of me. I would like to describe to you the taste and elegance of this abode, my dear mother; its gardens, fountains, flower-courts, paintings, and rich furniture. But I must first say a little more about the god Apis, who holds so prominent a place in the mythology of Egypt. In the hieroglyphic legends he is called Hapi, and his figurative sign on the monuments is a bull with a globe of the sun upon his head, and the hieroglyphic cruciform emblem of Life drawn near it. Numerous bronze figures of this bull are cast, whereupon they are consecrated, distributed over Egypt, and placed in the tombs of the priests. The time to which the sacred books limit the life of Apis is twenty-five years, which is a mystic number here; and if his representative does not die a natural death by that time, he is driven to the great fountain of the temple, where the priests were accustomed to bathe him (for he is fed and tended with the greatest delicacy, luxury, and servility by his priestly curators), and there, with hymns chanted and incense burning, they drown him amid many rites and ceremonies, all of which are written in the forty-two books of papyrus kept in the sacred archives of the oldest temple.
No sooner does the god expire, than certain priests, who are selected for the purpose, go in search of some other bull; for they believe that the soul of Osiris has migrated into another body of one of these animals, or "Lords of Egypt," as I have heard them called. This belief of the constant transfer of himself by Osiris from the body of one bull to another, is but the expression of a popular notion here, that souls of men transmigrate from body to body; and my opinion is confirmed by a scene depicted in the judgment-hall of Osiris, where the god is represented as sending a soul, whose evil deeds outweighed his good ones, back to earth, and condemning it to enter the body of a hog, and so begin anew, from the lowest animal condition, to rise by successive transmigrations through other beasts, higher and higher; until he became man again, when, if he had acquired virtue in his probation, he was admitted to the houses of the gods and became immortal.
The prince assures me that the belief in the transmigration of souls is almost universal in the Thebaïd, as well as among the lower orders in the northern nomes; and that the universal reverence for animals is, without doubt, in a great measure to be traced to this sentiment. A monstrous doctrine of the perpetual incarnation of deity in the form, not of man, but of the brute, seems to be the groundwork of all religious faith in Egypt. This idea is the key to the mysteries, inconsistencies, and grossness of their outward worship; the interpreter of their animal Pantheon.
"There is a tradition," said to me, to-day, the prince-priest Misrai, with whom I am now remaining, "that when Osiris came down to earth, in order to benefit the human race by teaching them the wisdom of the gods, evil men, the sons of Typhon, pursued to destroy him, when he took refuge in the body of a bull, who protected and concealed him. After his return to the heavens, he ordained that divine honors should be paid to the bull forever."