Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/471

 Colour Symbolism. 165

of Heaven." Hathor was the goddess of the Sinaitic malachite mines and of Mefkat (Malachite city) in Egypt.

Colour symbolism and metal symbolism are found to be as closely associated at an early period in Egypt as they later were in the widespread doctrine of the World's Ages.

Horus, the copper son of the malachite Osiris, whose body was dismembered, is associated with the " Mesniu," the metal workers. The weapons of these metal workers were forged in the place called " mesnet " (the foundry). The worshippers of Horus of Behutet described their god as " the Lord of the Forge City," i.e. Edfu, where, accord- ing to tradition, Horus first established himself as the great master of metal workers. Budge, who reminds us that Edfu itself " was regarded as the foundry wherein the great disk of the sun was forged," quotes from Dr. Brugsch the significant passage, " when the doors of the foundry are opened the Disk riseth up." ^ The foundry of Edfu was therefore the foundry of the Underworld.

Horus was not only the divine coppersmith, but, as has been indicated, was in one of his phases a personification of the red copper extracted from the green Osiris. " Horus dwelling in his sun disk," Horus in his " green bed " was the copper within the malachite, and the malachite was " the beautiful green disk " which was the creator ; it was the malachite sun of the Underworld whence all things had their origin. Out of darkness came light, out of death came life, out of the green malachite Osirian sun of the Underworld came the red copper sun of Horus. The green floating island of the Nile, on which Horus hid from his. black enemy Set, appears to have been originally the green malachite sun that drifted on the Nile of the Underworld. Horus was a giant, eight cubits (nearly 14 feet) in stature, but when Set approached his island he concealed himself in a tiny chapel half a cubit long.- Having the nature of

1 Gods oj the Egyptians, vol. i. p. 476. ^ Breasted, op. cit. p. 29.