LITMIR.BIZ

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      The old belief or instinct is still strong in the child. He revenges himself upon the ball or stone that has struck him as though it too were a living being. In the Mosaic law it is laid down that “if an ox gore a man or a woman that they die, then the ox shall be surely stoned”; and similar penalties were enforced against animals which had injured man, not only in the Middle Ages, but even in the eighteenth century. Thus a pig was burned at Fontenay-aux-Roses, in 1266, for having devoured a child; and in 1389 a horse was brought to trial at Dijon for the murder of a man, and condemned to death. In Brazil, in 1713, an action was brought against the ants who had burrowed under the foundations of a monastery, and, after counsel had been heard on both sides, they were solemnly condemned to banishment by the judge; while, in 1685, the bell of the Protestant chapel at La Rochelle was first scourged for having abetted heresy, then catechised and made to recant, and finally baptized.22

      The early Egyptians were not more enlightened than the orthodox theologians of La Rochelle. For them, too, action must have implied life, and the distinction between object and subject had not yet been realised. Hence the belief that objects as well as persons had each its Ka, a belief which was strengthened by the fact that they all alike cast shadows before them, as well as the further belief that the nature of the Ka was in either case the same. Hence it was, moreover, that the ushebti-figures and other sepulchral furniture were broken in order that their Kas might be released from them, and so accompany [pg 058] the Ka of the dead man in his wanderings in the other world. As life and the power of movement deserted the corpse of the dead man as soon as his Ka was separated from it, so too the Ka of the ushebti passed out of it when its form was mutilated by breakage. The life that was in it had departed, as it were, into another world.

      It is even possible that the very word Ka had originally a connection with a root signifying “to live.” At any rate, it was identical in spelling with a word which denoted “food”; and that the pronunciation of the two words was the same, may be gathered from the fact that the Egyptian bas-reliefs sometimes represent the offerings of food made to the dead or to the gods inside the arms of the symbol of the Ka23. When we remember that vivande is nothing more than the Latin vivenda, “the things on which we live,” there arises at least the possibility of an etymological connection between the double and the principle of life which it once symbolised.24

      Now, in my Hibbert Lectures on the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, I pointed out that the early Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia held a belief which is almost precisely the same as that of the Egyptians in regard to the Ka. In Babylonia also, everything had its Zi or “double,” and the nature of this Zi is in no way distinguishable from that of the Egyptian Ka. As in Egypt, moreover, the gods had each his Zi as well as men and things, and, as in Egypt, it was the Zi of the god rather than the god himself which was primarily worshipped. So marked is the resemblance between the [pg 059] two conceptions, that in working it out on the Babylonian side, I could not resist the conviction that there must have been some connection between them. That was sixteen years ago. Since then discoveries have been made and facts brought to light which indicate that a connection really did exist between the Babylonia and the Egypt of the so-called prehistoric age, and have led me to believe, with Hommel, de Morgan, and others, that Babylonia was the home and cradle of the Pharaonic Egyptians. In Sumerian the word Zi signified “life,” and was denoted by the picture of a flowering reed. It was the life on which was imprinted the form of the body that was for a time its home, and its separation from the body meant the death of the latter. The Sumerians never advanced to the further stage of making the vital principle itself a separable quality; perhaps the original signification of the word which it never lost would have prevented this. But they did go on to transform the Zi into a spirit or demon, who, in place of being the counterpart of some individual person or thing, could enter at will into any object he chose. Even in Egypt, traces of the same logical progress in ideas may perhaps be found. If Professor Maspero is right in his interpretation of certain passages in the Pyramid texts and Ptolemaic papyri, “The double did not allow its family to forget it, but used all the means at its disposal to remind them of its existence. It entered their houses and their bodies, terrified them, waking and sleeping, by its sudden apparitions, struck them down with disease or madness, and would even suck their blood like the modern vampire25.” Such a [pg 060] conception of the Ka, however, if ever it existed, must have soon passed away, leaving behind it but few vestiges of itself.

      I have dwelt thus long on the doctrine of the Ka or double on account both of its importance and of the difficulties it presents to the modern scholar. Its discovery by Professor Maspero and Sir P. Le Page Renouf cleared away a host of misconceptions, and introduced light into one of the darkest corners of Egyptian religion26. And however strange it may seem to us, it was in thorough accordance with the simple logic of primitive man. Given the premisses, the conclusion followed. It was only when the Egyptian came to progress in knowledge and culture, and new ideas about his own nature were adopted, that difficulties began to multiply and the theory of the Ka to become complicated.

      Among these new ideas was that of the Khu or “luminous” part of man. On the recently discovered monuments of the early period, the Khu holds a place which it lost after the rise of Memphite influence with the Third Dynasty. We find it depicted on the tombstones of Abydos embraced by the down-bent arms of the Ka. The Khu, therefore, was conceived of as comprehended in the human Ka, as forming part of it, though at the same time as a separate entity. It was, in fact, the soul of the human Ka, and was accordingly symbolised by the crested ibis27. It may be that it was in the beginning nothing more than the phosphorescent light emitted by decaying vegetation which the belated [pg 061] wayfarer took for a ghost; the ginn (jinn) of the modern Egyptian fellah are similar lights which flash up suddenly from the ground. But the earliest examples of its use on the monuments are against such an ignoble origin, and suggest rather that it was the glorified spirit which mounted up like a bird in the arms of its Ka towards the brilliant vault of heaven. It is not until we come to the decadent days of the Greek and Roman periods that the Khu appears in a degraded form as a malignant ghost which enters the bodies of the living in order to torment them. No traces of such a belief are to be found in older days. The Pyramid texts speak of “the four Khu of Horus,” “who live in Heliopolis,” and were at once male and female, and of the Khu who brandish their arms and form a sort of bodyguard around the god of the dead. They are identified with the fixed stars, and more especially with those of the Great Bear, and in the euhemeristic chronicles of Egyptian history they become the “Manes” of Manetho, the semi-divine dynasty which intervened between the dynasties of the gods and of men.28

      The Khu thus forms a link between men and the gods, and participates in the divine nature. It is the soul regarded as a godlike essence, as coming down from heaven rather than as mounting up towards it. It is not only disembodied, but needs the body no longer; it belongs to the Ka, which still lives and moves, and not to the mummified corpse from which the vital spark has fled. It waits on the god of the dead, not on the dead themselves.

      It seems probable, therefore, that in the part of Egypt in which the doctrine of the Khu grew up, mummification was not practised; and the probability is strengthened by the fact that, before the rise of the Third Dynasty, [pg 062] embalming was apparently not frequent in Upper Egypt, even in the case of the kings. But, however this may be, one thing is certain. The conception of the Khu cannot have originated in the same part of the country, or perhaps among the same element in the population, as a parallel but wholly inconsistent conception which eventually gained the predominance. According to this conception, the imperishable part of man which, like the Ka, passed after death into the other world, was the Ba or “soul.” Like the Khu, the Ba was pictured as a bird; but the bird is usually given a human head and sometimes human hands.29 But, while the Khu was essentially divine, the Ba was essentially human. It is true that the Ba, as well as the Khu, was assigned to the gods—Ra of Heliopolis was even credited with seven; but whereas man possessed a Khu or luminous soul because he was likened to the gods, the gods possessed a Ba because they were likened to men.

      The relation between the two is brought out very clearly in the philosophy of the so-called Hermetic books, which endeavoured to translate the theology of Egypt into Greek thought. There we are told that the Khu is the intelligence (νοῦς), of which the Ba or soul (ψυχή) is as it were the envelope. As long as the soul is imprisoned in the earthly

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