divinity being, of course, Osiris. But here again, as Dr. Wiedemann
says, it is an unfortunate fact that all the texts which we possess are,
in respect of the period of the origin of the Egyptian religion,
comparatively late, and therefore in them we find these three elements
mixed together, along with a number of foreign matters, in such a way as
to make it impossible to discover which of them is the oldest. No better
example can be given of the loose way in which different ideas about a
god and God are mingled in the same text than the "Negative Confession"
in the hundred and twenty-fifth chapter of the Book of the Dead. Here,
in the oldest copies of the passages known, the deceased says, "I have
not cursed God" (1. 38), and a few lines after (1. 42) he adds, "I have
not thought scorn of the god living in my city." It seems that here we
have indicated two different layers of belief, and that the older is
represented by the allusion to the "god of the city," in which case it
would go back to the time when the Egyptian lived in a very primitive
fashion. If we assume that God (who is mentioned in line 38) is Osiris,
it does not do away with the fact that he was regarded as a being
entirely different from the "god of the city" and that he was of
sufficient importance to have one line of the "Confession" devoted to
him. The Egyptian saw no incongruity in setting references to the "gods"
side by side with allusions to a god whom we cannot help identifying
with the Supreme Being and the Creator of the world; his ideas and
beliefs have, in consequence, been sadly misrepresented, and by certain
writers he has been made an object of ridicule. What, for example, could
be a more foolish description of Egyptian worship than the following?
"Who knows not, O Volusius of Bithynia, the sort of monsters Egypt, in
her infatuation, worships. One part venerates the crocodile; another
trembles before an ibis gorged with serpents. The image of a sacred
monkey glitters in gold, where the magic chords sound from Memnon broken
in half, and ancient Thebes lies buried in ruins, with her hundred