Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/196

 as ploughing and hoeing, sowing and reaping, rowing on the canals and collecting the harvests daily. Warriors and kings who in the course of ages had risen to the head of a mighty empire, still looked forward towards these delights with the same religious faith which inspired them when, on the great panegyrical festival of the ithyphallic Amon, they received the iron sickle from the hands of a priestly ministrant, cut the ears of cORN, and presented them as an offering to the god presiding over vegetation and increase. We are told that the height of the corn in the fields of Aarru is seven cubits, and that that of the ears is two (in some readings, four) cubits. This blissful place is surrounded by a wall of steel, and it is from its gate that the sun comes forth in the eastern sky.

Transformation.

2. But the happy dead is not confined to this locality, or to the human form, or to an earthly mode of existence. He has the range of the entire universe in every shape and form that he desires. This is repeatedly stated in the Book of the Dead, and twelve of the chapters consist of formulas through which certain transformations are operated. The forms assumed, according to these chapters, are the turtle-dove, the