Wherefore it came about that the Egyptians began to have a sort of notion of _two_ souls--one the half-material _ka_, which remained in the tomb; the other of an immaterial nature, which moved about.
But this notion of two souls arose because the Egyptians were _more_ precise and logical than most peoples have been in their speculations as to the future state. Among other races we see a constant confusion between the idea of resting in the tomb, and the idea of journeying to another land generally in the wake of the sun. And the food and drink placed on the tomb, instead of being the simple nourishment of the dead, were designed merely as a temporary provision for him _on his way_ to the land of souls.
The expectation of a journey after death to reach the home of shades is all but universal; and the opinion that the home of the departed lies in the west is of an almost equally wide extension. The Egyptian religion, with its wonderful Book of the Dead, gives as much weight to this side of belief as to the other notion of resting in the tomb. To lengthen out the soul’s journey, which was fancied to last thousands of years, and give incident where all must have been really imaginary, the actual journey of the mummy to its resting-place was lengthened after life to portray the more ghostly wanderings of the spirit. As a rule, the cities of the living in Egypt lay upon the eastern bank of the Nile; the tombs, the cities of the dead, on the left or western bank, generally just within the borders of the desert. Wherefore, as the body was carried across the Nile to be buried in the desert, so the soul was believed to begin his journey in the dim twilight region of Apap, king of the desert, to cross a river more than once, to advance _towards the sun_, light gradually breaking upon him the while, until at last he enters the ‘Palace of the Two Truths,’ the judgment-hall of Osiris (the sun). Last of all, he walks into the sun itself, or is absorbed into the essence of the deity.
In these two notions we have, I think, the germ of almost all the most ancient belief touching the soul’s future. A confusion between the two notions would imagine the soul making a journey through the earth to an underground land of shades. So far as we know, this was the prevailing feeling among the Hebrews. Old Hebrew writers (with whom the hopes of immortality were not strong) speak of going down into the grave,[95] a place thought of as a misty, dull, unfeeling, almost unreal abode.