Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/247

 double world, as Amon. Thy soul is the pillar and the ark of the two heavens. Thy form emanated at first whilst thou shinest as Amon, Rā and Ptah. &hellip; Shu, Tefnut, Nut and Chonsu are thy form, dwelling in thy shrine under the types of the ithyphallic god, raising his tall plumes, king of the gods. &hellip; Thou art Mentu Rā. Thou art Sekar; thy transformations are into the Nile. Thou art Youth and Age. Thou givest life to the earth by thy stream. Thou art heaven, thou art earth, thou art fire, thou art water, thou art air, and whatever is in the midst of them."

This very remarkable hymn is put in the mouth of the gods of the elements, eight in number, four male and four female. What these elements are is not perfectly clear. They used to be thought peculiar to the Ptolemaic period, and were then supposed to have been borrowed from the four Greek elements. Earth, Air, Fire and Water, but they have been recognized in much earlier texts. They are, in fact, the eight gods mentioned in the seventeenth chapter of the Book of the Dead, and belong to the oldest cosmogonical part of the religion. This chapter, as we have already seen, speaks of a time when as yet there was no firmament, and when these eight divinities were set up as the gods of Hermopolis; in other words, when chaos disappeared, and the elements began to rule with fixed and unchangeable laws.

Another hymn, copied by Brugsch at the same