Once started on so strange a set of ideas, the Egyptians proceeded to evolve a worship of the scarab which grew ever and developed, as they thought the scarab itself did, practically out of nothing. The immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body were the central ideas of Egyptian religion; the thinkers of Thebes and Memphis instantly perceived a fanciful analogy between the scarab rising from its bed of dirt and the mummy reviving when the expected day of resurrection should at last arrive. As a consequence of this analogy, the scarab was made sacred: it was reverenced during its life and often preserved after its death, like the mummied cats and hawks and sacred Apis bulls which formed such special objects of veneration to the devout of Egypt. All sorts of mystic relations were also discovered before long in the scarab: its "toes" were counted as thirty, and held to symbolize the days of the month: it was said to be male only, without a female, and so to typify the creative power and the paternal or masculine principle in nature. Sun-worship, as we know, formed a large part of the later (though not of the most primitive) Egyptian religion: and the ball rolled by the scarab was therefore supposed to personify Ra, the great sun-god. In one way or another, the sanctity and the mystic implications of the scarab grew and grew, age after age, until at last scarab-worship became one of the chief practical elements in the religion of Egypt. There was a scarab-headed god, and scarab hieroglyphs appear on the face of all the monuments.
It is as a charm or amulet, however, that the ancient Egyptian imitation scarab is best known. From a very early period in the history of the Nile valley it became usual for luck's sake to bury some of these sacred beetles with the mummy, perhaps alive (in which case most of them would no doubt creep out again) and perhaps also dead. A few real scarabs have thus been found here and there in tombs. But for the most part, just as the Egyptians buried little porcelain images to accompany the mummy, so they buried porcelain or stone scarabs; and these were rather closely imitated from the living insect, but made still more sacred by being enamelled or engraved with the holy name of some king or god. Scarabs of this kind, inscribed with sacred words, and regarded as talismans, form some of the commonest objects disinterred in all the Egyptian excavations: one of them, from a specimen in the British Museum, is illustrated in No. 7. Comparison with the live beetles in the other engravings will show how well the Egyptians copied nature in this instance.