recited them with that true intonation--_ma khrou_--which renders
them all-powerful, and every one, whether god or man, to whom he
imparted them, and whose voice he made true--_sma khrou_--became like
himself master of the universe. He had accomplished the creation not
by muscular effort to which the rest of the cosmogonical gods primarily
owed their birth, but by means of formulas, or even of the voice alone,
"the first time" when he awoke in the Nu. In fact, the articulate word
and the voice were believed to be the most potent of creative forces,
not remaining immaterial on issuing from the lips, but condensing, so
to speak, into tangible substances; into bodies which were themselves
animated by creative life and energy; into gods and goddesses who lived
or who created in their turn. By a very short phrase Tumu had called
forth the gods who order all things; for his "Come unto me!" uttered
with a loud voice upon the day of creation, had evoked the sun from
within the lotus. Thot had opened his lips, and the voice which
proceeded from him had become an entity; sound had solidified into
matter, and by a simple emission of voice the four gods who preside over
the four houses of the world had come forth alive from his mouth without
bodily effort on his part, and without spoken evocation. Creation by the
voice is almost as great a refinement of thought as the substitution
of creation by the word for creation by muscular effort. In fact, sound
bears the same relation to words that the whistle of a quartermaster
bears to orders for the navigation of a ship transmitted by a speaking
trumpet; it simplifies speech, reducing it as it were to a pure
abstraction. At first it was believed that the creator had made the
world with a word, then that he had made it by sound; but the further
conception of his having made it by thought does not seem to have
occurred to the theologians. It was narrated at Hermopolis, and the
legend was ultimately universally accepted, even by the Heliopolitans,
that the separation of Nuit and Sibu had taken place at a certain spot
on the site of the city where Sibu had ascended the mound on which
the feudal temple was afterwards built, in order that he might better
sustain the goddess and uphold the sky at the proper height. The
conception of a Creative Council of five gods had so far prevailed at
Hermopolis that from this fact the city had received in remote antiquity
the name of the "House of the Five;" i