Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/473

 Colour Symbolisju. 165

are become silver, his limbs gold, and his hair pure lapis lazuli." 1

Osiris, who, as green malachite powder, came down to Egypt in the Green Nile, entered the mother-tree, the sycamore, to be reborn as the living Horus. The sycamore was Hathor (" House of Horus "). Before the malachite Osiris could emerge in his new copper form he had to be burned. This fact caused the myths relating to the vege- tation forms of the deities to grow highly complex. Even in the Pyramid Age the fusion of beliefs regarding the Green Nile in its relation to vegetation, and of malachite and copper in their relation to the Nile and vegetation, became productive of the following mysterious text :

" Hail to thee, sycamore, which encloses the god, under which the gods of the Nether sky stand, whose tips are scorched, whose middle is burned, who art just in suffering." ^

As Breasted notes, this is " the earliest native mention of the ceremony of enclosing an image of Osiris in a tree and burning it." The god was the malachite which had entered the womb of the mother tree. After the burning, the Red Horus emerged. Like the soul of Bata, in the story of the " Two Brothers," the soul of Horus might assume a vegetable or animal form, but there was malachite, the father of copper, in all things that contained life-substance. This idea of soul transformation is found in the Book of the Dead, where the soul of the dead may assume " the form of a falcon of gold, a divine falcon, a lily, a Phoenix, a heron, a swallow, a serpent, etc." ^ The reference to gold is interesting, for in early times the Egyptians appear to have regarded copper as a form of gold. Anion's image of gold was " his august emanation of pure gold." ^ The

1 A. Wiedemann, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, p. 58.

2 Breasted, op. cit. p. 28.

' Breasted, op. cit. p. 296. * Ibid. p. 245.