galloped to escape the night serpent; another section believed that the world was embraced by the "Great Circle"—Ocean—and that the Nile flowed from sea to sea; a third conception was of a heavenly and an underground Nile. There were also two Paradises—the Osirian and the Ra (sun god's). Osiris judged men according to their deeds. He was an agricultural deity, and the early system of Egyptian ethics seems to have had its origin in the experiences enshrined in the text: "Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap". Admission to the Paradise of the sun cult was secured, on the other hand, by the repetition of magical formulæ. Different beliefs obtained also regarding the mummy. In the Book of the Dead it would appear that the preservation of the body was necessary for the continued existence of the soul. Herodotus, however, was informed that after a period of 3000 years the soul returned to animate the dead frame, and this belief in transmigration of souls is illustrated in the Anpu-Bata story, and is connected with a somewhat similar conception that the soul of a father passed to a son, who thus became "the image of his sire", as Horus was of Osiris, and "husband of his mother".
Of special interest in this connection are the various forms of the archaic chaos-egg myth associated with the gods Ptah, Khnûmû, Seb, Osiris, and Ra. As the European giant hides his soul in the egg, which is within the duck, which is within the fish, which is within the deer and so on, and Bata hides his soul in the blossom, the bull, and the tree ere he becomes "husband of his mother", so does Osiris "hide his essence in the shrine of Amon", while his manifestations include a tree, the Apis bull, the boar, the goose, and the Oxyrhynchus fish. Similarly when Set was slain he became a "roaring serpent", a hippopotamus, a crocodile, or a boar. The souls of Ra,
