d rationalized to blend with the
former complex in an increasingly involved synthesis. It was only when
the elaborate scaffolding of material factors was cleared away that a
more ethereal conception of "the soul" was sublimated.

APPENDIX B.

I should like to emphasize the fact that my protest (on p. 63) was
directed against the claim that the custom of offering food and drink to
the dead was inspired _primarily_ to prevent them from troubling the
living. Its original purpose was to sustain and reanimate the dead; but,
of course, when its real meaning was forgotten, it was explained in a
great variety of ways by the people who made a practice of presenting
offerings to the dead without really knowing why they did so.

Dr. Alan Gardiner himself has made a statement which casual readers
(i.e., those who do not discriminate between the motive for the
invention of a procedure and the reasons subsequently given for its
continuance) might regard as a contradiction of my quotation from his
writings on p. 62. Thus he says: "Any god could doubtless attack human
beings, but savage and malicious deities, like Seth [Set], the murderer
of Osiris, or Sakhmet, [Sekhet], the 'lady of pestilence' (_nb-t 'idw_),
were doubtless most to be feared." [This attitude of the malignant
goddesses is revealed in a most obtrusive form in the village deities of
the Dravidians of Southern India.] "The dead were specially to be
feared; nor was it only those dead who were unhappy or unburied that
might torment the living, for the magician sometimes warns them that
their tombs are endangered" (Article "Magic (Egyptian)," _Hastings'
Encycl. Ethics and Religion_, p. 264).

But it is important to bear in mind, as the same scholar has explained
elsewhere ["Life and Death (Egyptian)," _Hastings' Encycl._, p. 23]:
"Nothing could be farther from the truth [than the statement that 'the
funerary rites and practices of the Egyptians were in the main
precautionary measures serving to protect the living against the dead'];
it is of fundamental importance to realize that the vast stores of
wealth and thought expended by the Egyptians on their tombs--that wealth
and that thought which created not only the pyramids, but also the
practice of mummification and a very extensive funerary literature--were
due to the anxiety of each member of the community with regard to his
own individual future welfare, and not to feelings of respect, or fear,
or duty felt towards t