There, before the "Lords of truth and justice," the soul had to plead its cause, and there it had to repeat, with an amount of assurance and success which would depend upon its conduct in the light, that negative confession which we read in chapter cxxv. of the "Book of the Dead," which contains an epitome of Egyptian morality.[1] But those incorruptible judges were not guided solely by the testimony of the ba in its own favour. They weighed its actions in a pair of scales and gave judgment according to their weight.[2] The impious soul was flogged, was delivered to storm and tempest, and, after centuries of suffering, underwent a second death, the death of annihilation. The just soul, on the other hand, had to conquer in many a combat before
.jpg)
Fig. 183.—Hunting scene upon a tomb at Gournah. (Champollion, pl. 171.)
it was admitted to contemplate the supreme verities. During its transit across the infernal regions, hideous forms of evil sprang up before it and did their best to arrest its progress by terrifying
relations and friends had to ask no permission before they placed him in it; it was in the other world that he was brought up for judgment, and had to fear the sentence of an august tribunal.
2 This weighing of the actions of the deceased was represented in the illustrated specimens of the Ritual of the Dead and upon the walls of the tombs, and perhaps upon those monuments decorated with Egyptian motives which were sprinkled by the Phœnicians over the whole basin of the Mediterranean. Coming under the eyes of the Greeks, it was modified by their lively imaginations into that (
Greek characters), or weighing of souls, which we find in the Iliad (xxii. 208-212), where success in a combat between two heroes depends upon the result of that operation. (See Alfred Maury, Revue archéologique, 1844, pp. 235-249, 291-307; 1845, pp. 707-717, and De Witte, ibidem, 1844, pp. 647-656.)
