. Similarly his conception of
the mechanism of the heavens must be a tangibly mechanical one. He must
think of the starry firmament as a substantial entity which could not
defy the law of gravitation, and which, therefore, must have the same
manner of support as is required by the roof of a house or temple. We
know that this idea of the materiality of the firmament found elaborate
expression in those later cosmological guesses which were to dominate
the thought of Europe until the time of Newton. We need not doubt,
therefore, that for the Egyptian this solid vault of the heavens had a
very real existence. If now and then some dreamer conceived the great
bodies of the firmament as floating in a less material plenum--and such
iconoclastic dreamers there are in all ages--no record of his musings
has come down to us, and we must freely admit that if such thoughts
existed they were alien to the character of the Egyptian mind as a
whole.

While the Egyptians conceived the heavenly bodies as the abiding-place
of various of their deities, it does not appear that they practised
astrology in the later acceptance of that word. This is the more
remarkable since the conception of lucky and unlucky days was carried
by the Egyptians to the extremes of absurdity. "One day was lucky
or unlucky," says Erman,(3) "according as a good or bad mythological
incident took place on that day. For instance, the 1st of Mechir, on
which day the sky was raised, and the 27th of Athyr, when Horus and, Set
concluded peace together and divided the world between them, were lucky
days; on the other hand, the 14th of Tybi, on which Isis and Nephthys
mourned for Osiris, was an unlucky day. With the unlucky days, which,
fortunately, were less in number than the lucky days, they distinguished
different degrees of ill-luck. Some were very unlucky, others only
threatened ill-luck, and many, like the 17th and the 27th Choiakh, were
partly good and partly bad according to the time of day. Lucky days
might, as a rule, be disregarded. At most it might be as well to visit
some specially renowned temple, or to 'celebrate a joyful day at home,'
but no particular precautions were really necessary; and, above all,
it was said, 'what thou also seest on the day is lucky.' It was quite
otherwise with the unlucky and dangerous days, which imposed so many
and such great limitations on people that those who wished to be prudent
were always obliged to bear them in mind when det