shows that the commencement of the Isis
festival dated from the time when Isis assumed a phylactery, or amulet, to
indicate that she had conceived.

Another inscription shows that Tiberius Claudius had caused the house to
be renovated for "the mighty goddess Isis, the life giving mistress of
Abaton, the good Hathor, the queen of the land of Nubia, the divine mother
of the golden (Nub) Horus, the benevolent sister of Osiris, the great
protectress who guards his son." As Tiberius Claudius, in this text named
himself her loving son, it is obvious that the day had passed away when
solely her own divine son Horus would be the one legitimate and divine
heir to the Egyptian throne. It is interesting to surmise what became of
the children whose "divine births" continued to be celebrated as a sacred
occurrence to which even a Roman Emperor yielded homage. The natural
sequence would have been that, accompanied by a band of devoted followers,
the sons of the sun, the young bulls, _i. e._ the ka, or divine twain, and
their sisters, would seek distant lands in which jointly to establish new
kingdoms on the ancient, familiar plan.

Collectively, the preceding evidence has afforded a realization of some of
the curious but natural results of the prolonged cult of the dual
principles of nature in Egypt, the most remarkable being, perhaps, the
creation of a distinct, "divine" caste of individuals, from the naive
adoption of marriage and birth as consecrated religious rites, symbolical
of the union of heaven and earth and the production of new life. While at
one time, and in certain localities, this mode of symbolism obviously took
the upper hand and fostered the growth of the artificial idea of the
"divine rights of royalty," there are evidences that, simultaneously, the
union of the dual principles of nature was symbolized in one or more
different archaic and primitive ways. These appear to have been separately
adopted in various centres of thought where the disastrous and debasing
consequences of the association of the idea of sex with the cult of heaven
and earth, light and darkness, etc., were realized with disapproval.

We thus find that, even at Edfu, the ceremonial rite of lighting new
sacred fire by means of a wooden instrument and friction was performed on
the great Isis festival which was marked by the "divine birth." According
to the calendar of Canopus this fell on the first day of Payni, and a
prescribed illumination of the