________________
"
101 to the departed, because death was considered as the beginning of a new life, a life that will never end.
With all this, mythology, as an inevitable disease of language, was terribly aggravated in Egypt by the early development of art and the forms which it assumed. The Power which the Egyptians recognised without any mythological adjunct, to whom no temple was ever raised (as little as there was in India a sanctuary dedicated to Para-Brahman, the Highest Brahman), 'who was not graven on stone,' whose shrine was never found with painted figures,' 'who had neither ministrants nor offerings,' and 'whose abode was unknown,' must practically have been forgotten by the worshippers of the magnificent temples of Memphis, Heliopolis, Abydos, Thebes, or Dendera, where quite other deities received the homage of prayer, and praise, and sacrifice. Efforts, however, are visible, in Egypt as in India, to cling to the notion of the unity of God. The self-existent, or selfbecoming One, the One, the One of One, the One without a second' (as in Sanskrit, svayambhu, Ekam advitîyam), the Beginner of becoming, from the first, who made all things, but was not made,' are expressions constantly met with in the religious texts, and applied to this or that god (henotheistically), each in his turn being considered as the supreme God of gods, the Maker and Creator of all things. Thus Râ, originally the sun, proceeding from Nu, the father of the gods,' and himself the father of Shu (air) and Tefnut (dew), was worshipped as the supreme celestial deity. Osiris, the eldest of the five children of Seb (earth) and Nut (heaven), 'greater than his father, more powerful than his mother,' the husband of Isis, the
LECTURE III.
