, writing. The _popular_ divinity was Osiris, the god at once
of the Nile and the realms below. Typhon, the scorching wind of the
desert which dries up the waters of the Nile, was the antagonist and the
murderer of Osiris; and at a more advanced stage of religious
speculation the two may have represented the conflicting powers of Good
and Evil. Sacrifices were offered for the ordinary purposes--to
conciliate the favor of the gods, to requite their benefits, and to
avert their wrath. Typhonian, that is, red-haired men, were immolated
when they fell into the hands of the natives in honor of Osiris, whose
name is concealed in that of the fabled Busiris. That the practice of
offering human sacrifices is compatible with a high degree of
civilization we know from the examples of Greece, of Rome, and Mexico.
There were great gatherings in honor of the gods, in the nature of
pilgrimages or holy fairs, which were celebrated with festivity, with
noisy music, with illuminations, and with license. There were mysteries,
which were not, in Egypt at least, initiations into any thing different
from the popular religion; but merely representations--celebrated amidst
nocturnal gloom--of the sufferings of Osiris. If strangers in Egypt
underwent painful initiation, it was an initiation into the knowledge of
the priests, and not into their mysteries. The Egyptians believed in the
existence of the soul after death; they believed that it would be judged
in Amenthe by Osiris and his forty-two assessors, before whom it was
brought by Analis; they had an Elysium, surrounded by waters, where the
Osirian--that is, the happy dead--ploughed, sowed, reaped, and threshed,
as on earth--a singular want of fancy. Retributive pains, by fire and
steel, are also supposed to have been detected among the paintings. At
the same time they held and taught to the Greeks the doctrine of
metempsychosis. It is difficult to reconcile with either of these
notions their belief that the spirit dwelt in the body so long as the
body could be rescued from decay, and the reason which they give for
bestowing such prodigality of labor on their sepulchres--that the tomb
was man's eternal home. The darkness of uninterpreted hieroglyphics
still rests to a great extent on the religious creed and practices of
the Egyptians. But three things we think we can discern from the
information which Mr. Kenrick has collected:--1. That the Egyptian
religion was in all essential respects like