ne face: when Horus opened his eyelids
in the morning, he made the dawn and day; when he closed them in the
evening, the dusk and night were at hand.

* The name of Ra has been variously explained. The
commonest etymology is that deriving the name from a verb
ra, _to give, to make to be_ a person or a thing, so that Ra
would thus be the great organizer, the author of all things.
Lauth goes so far as to say that "notwithstanding its
brevity, Ra is a composite word (r-a, _maker--to be_)" As a
matter of fact, the word is simply the name of the
planet applied to the god. It means the _sun_, and nothing
more.

[Illustration: 117.jpg THE COW HATHOR, THE LADY OP HEAVEN.3]

3 Drawn by Boudier, from a XXXth dynasty statue of green
basalt in the Gizeh Museum (Maspero, _Guide du Visiteur_, p.
345, No. 5243). The statue was also published by Mariette,
_Monuments divers_, pl. 96 A-B, and in the _Album
photographique du Musee de Boulaq_, pl. x.

Where the sky was looked upon as the incarnation of a goddess, Ra was
considered as her son,[**] his father being the earth-god, and he was
born again with every new dawn, wearing a sidelock, and with his finger
to his lips as human children were conventionally represented.

** Several passages from the Pyramid texts prove that the
_two eyes_ were very anciently considered as belonging to
the face of Nuit, and this conception persisted to the last
days of Egyptian paganism. Hence, we must not be surprised
if the inscriptions generally represent the god Ra as coming
forth from Nuit under the form of a disc, or a scarabaeus,
and born of her even as human children are born.

He was also that luminous egg, laid and hatched in the East by the
celestial goose, from which the sun breaks forth to fill the world with
its rays.[**]

** These are the very expressions used in the seventeenth
chapter of the _Book of the Dead_ (Naville's edition, vol.
i. pl. xxv. lines 58-61; Lepsius, _Todtenbuch_, pl. ix. 11.
50, 51).

[Illustration: 118.jpg THE TWELVE STAGES IN THE LIFE OF THE SUN AND ITS
TWELVE FORMS THROUGHOUT THE DAY. 1]

1 The twelve forms of the sun during the twelve hours of
the day, from the ceiling of the Hall of the New Year at
Edfu. Drawing by Faucher-Gudin.

Nevertheless, by an anomaly not uncommon in religions, the egg did not
alwa