Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/174

 messenger or envoy. This latter word is used in the Bible not only for human envoys, either of private individuals or of the king, but of supernatural beings sent by God to accomplish His purposes. The Egyptian language has a word (aput) which is used exactly in the same manner. It occurs repeatedly in the Book of the Dead, particularly in the sense of messenger of divine vengeance. The Maxims of Ani speak of the Angel of Death.

Destiny.

The notion of Destiny, which plays so important a part in Greek mythology, does not appear to have been foreign to Egyptian thought. In two of the romantic tales which have reached us, the Hathors appear in the character of the Fates of classical mythology, or the Fairies of our own folk-lore. In the tale of the Two Brothers, they foretel a violent death to the newly-fashioned spouse of Bata. In the tale of the Doomed Prince, "when the Hathors came to greet him at his birth, they said that he would either die by a crocodile, a serpent or a dog." Hathor, in the more recent theology of the texts of Dendera, is not only the Sun himself with feminine attributes, but the universal God of Pantheism. Mythologically, however, she is, even in these very texts, the daughter of Rā and mother of Horus. Like Isis, she is in fact the Dawn, which from