the Book of the Dead ( PDF )

The Legend Of RA And Isis.
spiritual light were vouchsafed from time to time. All eastern nations have experienced difficulty in
separating spiritual from corporeal conceptions, and the Egyptian is no exception to the rule; but if he
preserved the gross idea of a primeval existence with the sublime idea of God which he manifests in
writings of a later date, it seems that this is due more to his reverence for hereditary tradition than to
ignorance. Without attempting to decide questions which have presented difficulties to the greatest
thinkers among Egyptologists, it may safely be said that the Egyptian whose mind conceived the
existence of an unknown, inscrutable, eternal and infinite God, who was One-whatever the word One
may mean here and who himself believed in a future life to be spent in a glorified body in heaven, was
not a being whose spiritual needs would be satisfied by a belief in gods who could eat, and drink, love
and hate, and fight and grow old and die. He was unable to describe the infinite God, himself being
finite, and it is not surprising that he should, in some respects, have made Him in his own image.
[1. The variant version has, "I brought into my own mouth my name as a word of power, and I straightway came into
being."
2 The papyrus from which these extracts are taken is in the British Museum, No. 10188. A hieroglyphic transcript and
translation will be found in Archæologia, vol. lii., pp. 440-443. For the passages quoted see Col. 26, l. 22; Col. 27, l. 5; and
Col. 28, l. 20; Col. 29, l. 6.]
{p. ci}
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