This is one of the problems which must be left to be determined by further researches into unwritten history, or perhaps by a fuller understanding of Egyptian symbols. That a great deal of symbolical teaching was wrapped up in the Egyptians’ worship of animals may be gathered by the lesson which they drew from the natural history of the sacred beetle, whose habit of burying in the sand of the desert a ball of clay, full of eggs, which in due course of time changed into chrysalises and then into winged beetles, furnished them with their favourite emblem of the resurrection of the body and the continued life of the soul through the apparent death-sleep--an emblem which was wanting to no temple, and without which no body was ever buried. Thinking of this, we must allow that their eyes were not shut to the teaching of the ‘visible things’ which in the ages of darkness yet spoke a message from God.
We have now gone over the most important of the Egyptian gods, connecting them with the natural appearances which seem to have inspired them, so as to give the clue to a comparison with the nature-gods of the Aryans, of which we shall speak in the next chapter. There were, of course, other objects of worship, not so easily classed, among which we ought to mention Hapi, the personification of the river Nile; Sothis, the dog-star, connected with Isis; and two more of the funeral gods--Anubis, who in his nature-aspect may be possibly another personification of air and wind, and who is always spoken of as the friend and guardian of pure souls, and represented at the death-bed sometimes in the shape of a human-headed bird as helping the new-born soul to escape from the body; and Thmei, the goddess of Truth and Justice, who introduces the soul into the hall of judgment. The evil powers recognized among the ancient Egyptians were principally embodiments of darkness and of the waste of the desert, and do not appear to have had any distinct conception of moral evil associated with them. They are, however, spoken of in the book of the dead as enemies of the soul, who endeavour to delude it and lead it out of its way on its journey across the desert to the abode of the gods. Amenti was no doubt the desert, but not only the sunlit desert the Egyptians could overlook from their western hills--it included the unknown world beyond and underneath, to which they supposed the sun to go when he sank below the horizon, and where, following in his track, the shades trooped when they had left their bodies. The story of the trials and combats of the soul on its journey through Amenti to the judgment-hall, and its reception by the gods, is written in the most ancient and sacred of Egyptian books, the Ritual, or Book of the Dead, which has been translated into French by M. de Rougé, and later by M. Pierret, and into English by Dr. Birch. The English translation is to be found in the Appendix to the fifth volume of Bunsen’s _Egypt’s Place in History_.