Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/458

150 across the Pacific to America. In China we find the custom of associating the internal organs with the coloured cardinal points was not accompanied by the custom of mummification. The Chinese, however, as De Groot and Laufer have shown, believed that the body was preserved from decay by amulets of jade, gold, etc. Unlike the Maya, they associated the heart and kidneys with the other internal organs. The explanation may be that the Egyptian doctrines reached China in their later form—that is, after the embalmers in the Nile valley began to replace the internal organs in the body and to associate these with the heart and kidneys, thus extending the responsibilities of the Horus gods. If, as a result of carelessness, or doctrinal changes, we do not find uniformity in this connection in Egypt during its late period, we should not expect to find complete uniformity outside that area of origin and especially when it is borne in mind that the influences of other cultures were operating constantly between Egypt and China and in China itself. It is really, one must repeat, the fundamental habit of connecting the internal organs with the coloured cardinal points of the compass that specially interests us here. This habit arose from a mass of complex customs and ideas that have a history in Egypt alone. It would be ridiculous to assume that such complex customs and ideas had independent origin in different parts of the world, and that such peoples as the Indonesians, Polynesians and pre-Columban Americans began spontaneously to practise methods of surgery which the Egyptians had taken 1700 years to develop.

There are other important problems on which light is thrown by the evidence of colour symbolism, but it is impossible here even to refer to them. I shall devote the remaining part of my paper to the colour symbolism of Egypt, with special reference to the Green