forms, or annihilated.[77] Matter,
according to it, does not perish but only changes and the earth
itself, was deified as Seb, Isis, Ta-nen, and Ptah-Tatunen.

What then did matter become, it was transformed, the deities were
transformed. Matter was transformed,--this is explained to us through
the symbolism of the scarab, the hieroglyph of the word _Kheper_,
i.e., "to be," "to exist," "to become," "to create," "to emanate;" of
which, as I have said, the Great Sphinx is the symbol, and has
therefore the philosophical value of creator and created.[78] God and
His universe, existence and change or transformation, death and
dissolution, all which were only considered as regeneration and
re-birth in another form. Thence becomes apparent to us, the great
value and importance to the Egyptian people of the symbolism of the
scarab, it was, to them, the emblematic synthesis of their religion as
to-day to Christians, the Latin or the Greek cross, is the emblematic
synthesis of Latin or Greek Christianity. The philosophic Egyptian,
thought, the atoms and molecules of all bodies and of all matter,
were never destroyed or lost, they were always in motion but were
only transformed and changed, by death or the dissolution of forms.
Death on this earth did not destroy the personality of the human
being, that continued beyond death on our earth, and as to those who
had been good and pious during their life here, their personality
continued eternally; but the punishment of the wicked was, the
annihilation of that personality or an immobility which was almost the
same. The work entitled, Hermes Trismegistos, contains a resume of
that idea, saying, among other things: "What was composed is divided.
That division is not Death, it is the analysis of a combination; but
the aim of that analysis is not destruction, it is the renewment. What
is in effect the energy of life? Is it not movement? What then is
there in this world, immovable?"[79]

The everlasting interchange of life and death, flows throughout all
the religious philosophy of the Ancient Egyptians; basing itself on
the continual return of day from night and of day to night, and upon
the apparent course of the sun, they seem to have formulated the idea
of the immortality of the soul of man after death.

Herodotus tells us,[80] that the Egyptians believed, that the soul of
the departed passed into an animal, and after having gone through all
the ranks of the animal world, was at the