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Rh  seems to have afforded the people the means of understanding what they had before misinterpreted, and thenceforward they were true monotheists. The pagan Arabs before Mohammed were polytheists of the lowest type. It was due to foreign influences that they adopted monotheism. The Aryans, on the other hand, had this idea from a remote time, though the importance they attached to the conflict of good and evil is apt to make us forget it in the use of the term dualism. The ancient Aryan religions which admit a pantheon imagine it to be presided over by a chief divinity, thus preserving in an alloyed form the original monotheistic idea. It is in this feature of Egyptian doctrine, if anywhere, that we may trace an Aryan element in Egypt, unless we may suppose that the Egyptian priests attained the monotheistic idea by philosophic inquiry: if so, but this is a rash hypothesis, they must have done this at a remote age, for the "Ritual" is, in part at least, as early as the period of the oldest monuments.

The Egyptian pantheon, at first sight very complex, may be reduced to system by a study of the order of the great gods. The two chief forms of that order are made inconsistent by the addition at the head of two divinities of inferior consequence in their attributes, the gods of Memphis and Thebes. This was undoubtedly due to political causes, and marks the ascendency of the priests of the two ancient capitals. Leaving these gods out, the order resolves itself into two groups, the sun-gods and the family of Osiris. The true heads of these groups are Ra, the sun, and Osiris. It is very noteworthy that these gods only and goddesses who were female forms of Osiris were worshipped throughout Egypt, Osiris everywhere, and Ra by combination with other gods, and as the representative of kingly power in the sky, as well as under the type of the king as Ra on earth. The myth of Ra and that of Osiris are strikingly alike. Ra as Osiris is the sun in constant conflict with evil. The enemy of Ra is the great serpent Apap, whom he vanquishes. The enemy of Osiris is his own brother or son Set, physical evil, who vanquishes him, to be finally overcome by Horus the solar son of Osiris. Ra has no consort but a very inferior divinity, a female sun. Osiris has Isis to wife, whose worship almost equalled his. That which distinguishes the myth of Osiris from that of Ra is its human aspect. It is solar up to a certain point in the conflict of light and darkness, and the setting of the old sun seemingly to perish and reappear in new young splendor in its rising. But in the destruction of Osiris by evil, the temporary triumph of evil, and its final defeat and the destruction of its force by Horus and wisdom (Thoth), and in the revival of Osiris, we see the story of human life in its war with physical evil, its death, and its resurrection, in its war with moral evil, its temporary fall, and final triumph. Thus while the myth of Ra remained a part of religion, that of Osiris became the part to which the affections of the Egyptians attached themselves. Osiris became, as the hidden sun, the ruler of the underworld, and so the judge of the dead, then represented as a mummy. It was to him or to a member of his family that the prayers for the dead were addressed. As the Egyptian entered into the divine underworld (Karneter), the west, the hidden land (Amenti), he placed himself under the protection of the sun of the night. Yet more, as one who hoped to be justified, he took the name of his judge, and an Osiris went through the ordeals of the hidden world, hoping for a new life in the Elysian fields. Thus Osiris became essentially the ruler of the unseen world, Ra became the ruler of the visible universe but these ideas interchanged, Osiris appears as the Nile and as the source of productiveness, Ra as the ruler of the hidden land. Yet Osiris remained the judge of the dead, and hence the prevalence and strength of his worship. It would be impossible to explain the existence side by side of two forms of the same myth, for this is the meaning of the two groups of great gods, did we not see in it the history of the early growth of the Egyptian religion. In a very remote age the doctrines of Heliopolis, the city of the sun, and of Abydos, the ancient city of Osiris, were thus united. Menes, the first king, came from Thinis, so close to Abydos as to have become almost if not quite a suburb of the city which eclipsed it, and founded Memphis nearly opposite to Heliopolis. Thus the two systems, that of the worship of Osiris at Abydos, and that of the worship of Ra at Heliopolis, were brought so near that it was necessary that they should either be amalgamated, or that one should give way to the other. Hence the two groups of the great gods.

It is a long step from the lofty ideas that these archaic systems suggest to the figures under which the gods were represented, and the symbols regarded as their living forms. Osiris has indeed a human shape, but Ra is usually hawk-headed, and Thoth, the god of wisdom, has the head of