Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/163

 standing close to the king, just as the royal ka is represented on Egyptian monuments down to the times of Vespasian. The notion was deeply rooted in all the branches of the Indo-European family, and has been preserved in many of the superstitions still current among us. You remember how in the novel of Waverley the Highland chieftain saw his own wraith. The water-wraith would in classical language be called the genius of the stream or of the billows, and this not in mere poetical phraseology, but in the severe prose of every-day life. The belief itself is not limited to the Egyptian and Indo-European families, but is nearly universal. "Everywhere," as Mr. Herbert Spencer tells us, "we find expressed or implied the belief that each person is double; and that when he dies, his other self, whether remaining near at hand or gone far away, may return, and continues capable of injuring his enemies and aiding his friends." But the development of his belief among the Egyptians is in many of its details surprisingly similar to the corresponding process among Indo-Europeans.

The Egyptian word corresponding to the Latin genius is ka. Its original signification, as I have recently endeavoured to show, in a paper read before the Society of Biblical Literature, is image. The use of the Greek