the
final abode of the souls of the righteous was not upon earth. The
goddess Nut is sometimes represented as a female along whose body the
sun travels, and sometimes as a cow; the tree sacred to her was the
sycamore.

6. Osiris was the son of Seb and Nut, the husband of Isis and the
father of Horus. The history of this god is given elsewhere in this
book so fully that it is only necessary to refer briefly to him. He
was held to be a man although of divine origin; he lived and reigned
as a king on this earth; he was treacherously murdered by his brother
Set, and his body was cut up into fourteen pieces, which were
scattered about Egypt; after his death, Isis, by the use of magical
formulae supplied to her by Thoth, succeeded in raising him to life,
and he begot a son called Horus; when Horus was grown up, he engaged
in combat with Set, and overcame him, and thus "avenged his father";
by means of magical formulae, supplied to him by Thoth, Osiris
reconstituted and revivified his body, and became the type of the
resurrection and the symbol of immortality; he was also the hope, the
judge, and the god of the dead, probably even in pre-dynastic times.
Osiris was in one aspect a solar deity, and originally he seems to
have represented the sun after it had set; but he is also identified
with the moon. In the XVIIIth dynasty, however, he is already the
equal of R[=a], and later the attributes of God and of all the "gods"
were ascribed to him.

7. Isis was the wife of Osiris and mother of Horus; as a nature
goddess she had a place in the boat of the sun at the creation, when
she probably typified the dawn. By reason of her success in
revivifying her husband's body by means of the utterance of magical
formulae, she is called the "lady of enchantments." Her wanderings in
search of her husband's body, and the sorrow which she endured in
bringing forth and rearing her child in the papyrus swamps of the
Delta, and the persecution which she suffered at the hands of her
husband's enemies, form the subject of many allusions in texts of all
periods. She has various aspects, but the one which appealed most to
the imagination of the Egyptians, was that of "divine mother"; in this
character thousands of statues represent her seated and suckling her
child Horus whom she holds upon her knees.

8. Set was the son of Seb and Nut, and the husband of Nephthys. At a
ve