Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/460

 152 Colour Sy}7ibolisi)i.

yellow forms, and Isis fans her wings to restore the " breath of life " to the dead god, it may well be the yellow colour was regarded as an indication that an animating influence had passed from the twin goddesses into the body of the dead god who is being reanimated.

Apparently Osiris, on his bier, assumes the colour of the animating substance which the yellow goddesses symbolise or personify. Was that substance obtained from vegeta- tion or from a mineral ? The possibility that it was of mineral origin is suggested by the fact that in a Solar- Osirian chapter of the Book of the Dead occurs the passage : " Brought to thee are blocks of silver and (masses) of malachite." These words are addressed to the dead Pharaoh who enters the solar ship for which the mother- goddess Hathor " makes the rudders." ^ Here the life- giving Hathor attends on the dead and provides her life-giving metals, as Isis and Nephthys attend on Osiris when he is being reanimated and, further, when they support him in his green form in the Judgment Hall.

The yellow colour of the goddesses, and of Osiris when he is being reanimated by the goddesses, may have sym- bolized solar gold. The golden sun, or the sun of gold, was the source of the " vital spark," and Hathor personified gold. In most countries yellow is the colour of gold, of the golden sun and of fire. In China it is an earth colour as well as a solar colour — perhaps the colour of the earth when it is under solar influence ; it is even in that country a water colour — a yellow spring bubbles up in the cavern of the yellow dragon. The life-substance of the yellow dragon is in the yellow water, and the dragon itself was, we are informed, " born from yellow gold." ^ The Yellow dragon is also called the " Golden dragon," just as the " Yellow Demeter " of Greece is called the " Golden Demeter."

^ Breasted, Religions and Thought in Ancient Egypt, p. 279. 2 De Visser, The Dragon in China and Japan, p. 87.