mary attribute of deity. Every day
of every year was passed by the one in easing the pangs of women in
travail; by the other, in choosing for each baby a name of an auspicious
sound, and one which would afterwards serve to exorcise the influences
of evil fortune. No sooner were their tasks accomplished in one place
than they hastened to another, where approaching birth demanded their
presence and their care. From child-bed to child-bed they passed, and if
they fulfilled the single offices in which they were accounted adepts,
the pious asked nothing more of them. Bands of mysterious cynocephali
haunting the Eastern and the Western mountains concentrated the whole
of their activity on one passing moment of the day. They danced and
chattered in the East for half an hour, to salute the sun at his rising,
even as others in the West hailed him on his entrance into night.[**]

* Raninit presides over the child's suckling, but she also
gives him his name, and hence, his fortune. She is on the
whole the nursing goddess. Sometimes she is represented as a
human-headed woman, or as lioness-headed, most frequently
with the head of a serpent; she is also the urseus, clothed,
and wearing two long plumes on her head, and a simple urous,
as represented in the illustration on p. 169.

** This is the subject of a vignette in the _Book of the
Dead_, ch. xvi., where the cynocephali are placed in echelon
upon the slopes of the hill on the horizon, right and left
of the radiant solar disk, to which they offer worship by
gesticulations.

It was the duty of certain genii to open gates in Hades, or to keep the
paths daily traversed by the sun.[*] These genii were always at their
posts, never free to leave them, and possessed no other faculty than
that of punctually fulfilling their appointed offices. Their existence,
generally unperceived, was suddenly revealed at the very moment when the
specific acts of their lives were on the point of accomplishment. These
being completed, the divinities fell back into their state of inertia,
and were, so to speak, reabsorbed by their functions until the next
occasion.[***]

* Maspero, _Etudes de Mythologie et d'Archeologie
Egyptiennes_, vol. ii. pp. 34, 35.

*** The Egyptians employed a still more forcible expression
than our word "absorption" to express this idea. It was said
of objects wherein these genii conceal