happened. Those who were poor and friendless, as well as vicious, were put into the ground where the rejection took place; and this was the shore where their melancholy ghosts wandered, if poets say true, pining for the Elysian fields which lay beyond; those Elysian fields being the beautiful meadows which, in the principal burial-place of the Nile valley, at Memphis, extended beyond the lake of the dead, all flowery with lotus and blossoming reeds.

"After permission to pass on had been given by the judges, an eulogy on the deceased, and a prayer to the gods for his welfare in Hades, were read by one of the officiating priests; and Charon proceeded in his ferrying. When the opposite shore was reached, and the procession landed, the ground was sprinkled before the wheels of the funeral car; and sometimes palmbranches were strewn in the way.† The body was sometimes crowned with amaranth or other everlastings, or with bay-leaves or fresh flowers.".

Thus much before the sealing up of the tomb. What afterwards?

"As he had passed the external judgment, he was believed by the mourners without to be assured of re-union, in his immortal essence, with the Supreme, from whom all being emanates. The family have likened him, in the preparation of his body, to Osiris, and have painted the emblems of Osiris on his envelope; and will henceforth call him by that sacred name. The offerings they bring, and will continue to bring occasionally, are not consecrated to their mortal comrade, but to the portion of divinity which dwelt in him.-They place behind their altar of offerings the images of Isis and Nepthys, the First and the Last and believe that the First and the Last attend at the head and feet of the body, as long as it remains in the tomb.§ They think of him as finding his way in the untried regions, which they yet seem to themselves to know so familiarly. He leaves behind him the eulogy which is inscribed on the entrance wall of his tomb, and is met by Thoth, the conductor of the dead, by whom he is fetched away, and led on to a more fearful judgment than that man's judgment by the shore of the lake which he has passed with honour. He is announced, according to his legend, thus: Arrival of a soul in Amenti.' His secret faults, and his sins of omission, of which men could be no judges, are now to come under review; and Thoth, whose legend || declares him 'the Secretary of Justice of the other great gods,' is to pro

duce his book, in which he has recorded the whole moral life of the soul come to judgment.-The forty-two heavenly assessors are believed to represent the forty-two sins which the Egyptians believed man to be subject to. Each searched the newly-arrived soul, and declared its condition in respect to the particular sin. Then came the trial of the balance. The symbol of the actions of the candidate are placed in one scale, and the symbol of integrity in the other. Thoth looks on, ready to record. Horus holds the hand of the candidate, and the dog watches the process, ready to turn on the condemned if his scale should be 'found wanting.' If all is well, he advances in front of the balance, and finds the infant Horus seated on his lotus-blossom before the throne; and on the throne is the Judge, prepared to welcome him by raising the end of his sceptre, and to permit him to enter among the gods within. Of the happy state, little was revealed, because, as it was declared, 'the heart of man could not conceive of it.' Almost the only particular declared was that there was a tree of Life, on whose fruit the gods wrote the names of mortals destined to immortality, and whose fruit made those who ate of it to be as gods. His relatives thought of him as wearing on his head, as a mark of his justification, the feather of integrity: and they wrote beside his name, from that time forward, the name of the goddess of Justice; a practical equivalent to that of affixing the epithet 'justified' to his name. This goddess of Justice, Thmei, is present during the trial of the soul: and she is identified in the sculptures by her legend 'Thmei, who lives in Amenti, where she weighs hearts in the balance;-no sinner escapes her.'t

"The survivors of any one for whom a burial has been obtained, but who might be suspected of unfitness for the heavenly mansions, were enabled to form but too clear an idea of his fate; for the pains of the wicked could be conceived of by human imagination, though the immortal pleasures of the just could not. The purgatory of the Egyptians was in fact described definitely enough: and the representations of it in the tombs give a strange sensation to the gazer before he has become accustomed to them. At the extreme end of a large tomb at Thebes, I saw some marks on the black and stained wall which made me hold my candle nearer, and persevere till I had made out the whole sculpture, which gave me at last the impression of a bad dream. A hopeless-looking pig, with a bristling back, was in a boat, the stern of which was towards the heavenly regions. Two monkeys were with it, one at the bow, and the other whipping or driving the pig. This was a wicked soul,

"The Persea."

+"Champollion: Lettres sur l'Egypte."

sent back to earth under, the conduct of the agents of Thoth. The busy and gleeful look of the monkeys, and the humbled aspect of the pig were powerfully given. This was the lowest state of the punished soul; but it would have to pass through some very mournful ones, and for a very long time,-to be probably a wolf, a scorpion, or a kite, or some other odious creature, in weary succession,-for a term of from three thousand to ten thousand years. This was called passing through its'orbit of necessity.'

In connection with Egypt, nothing has excited more universal interest than the Pyramids. The science, skill, and labour, and the appliances of art unknown to us now employed in their construction, and their enduring character, excite wonder and astonishment. The Great Pyramid is the oldest known monument in the world. Its date is no longer a mystery; it is now known to be the work of men who lived 5,000 years ago. The names of the Pharoahs who raised these edifices have been found inscribed in it, and they are the same as those given by Herodotus and Manetho. But the purposes they were designed to serve is still matter of controversy. That these purposes were connected with magic and necromancy was first suggested to my mind by a spirit, communicating through an entranced person, who affirmed himself to be an Egyptian who lived when the Great Pyramid was being built. I have since met with quite an unexpected confirmation of this theory.

In an able article which appeared in The Builder (September 24, 1864), reviewing the hypothesis put forward by Mr. John

Those who care to make further researches into this subject may consult among other works Wilkinson's Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, Kenrick's Ancient Egypt, Pettigrew's History of Egyptian Mummies, Mr. Child's Progress of Religious Ideas, Alger's Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, Part II, chapter v., and, above all, Bunsen's Egypt's Place in Universal History. The following is one of many passages that might be quoted from the last named work, shewing the high estimate its author had formed of both the positive and comparative excellence attained in ancient Egypt:

"From the very earliest time they (the Egyptians) abolished human sacrifices, which they declared to be an abomination unto the gods; whereas in Palestine, Syria, and cultivated Phoenicia and Carthage, sacrifices continued to be offered to Moloch, as being the very climax in religious worship. Many indeed of the Kings of Judah and Israel caused their children to pass through the fire.' Egypt was rich in culture, and possessed a high national civilization in the times of Abraham and Joseph, which they owed to the ethic character of their religion, and the intellectuality of their religious philosophy. The oracles of the gods were communicated alike to kings and priests. Incubation in the temples, dreams, and most probably clairvoyance, were the mediums by which the religious feelings were worked up above those of the waking state. No trace is found in Egypt of the intoxicating potions, the beating of drums, the ringing of bells, and that violent excitement so rife among the Turanian. Iranian and Semetic races. Everything we know of their domestic and social relations is worthy of our highest respect. Even in Egypt civil liberty is old, and despotism was a dynastic innovation."

Taylor and Professor Smyth that the Great Pyramid was designed as a standard of measurement-an hypothesis regarded by the reviewer as highly improbable. Mr. John E. Dove, puts forward some speculations on the subject of a highly interesting kind, and which we proceed to lay before our readers. He

says:

"But if this new hypothesis must go the way of all the others, is there no possibility of otherwise accounting for the certainly strange and mysterious conformation of the Great Pyramid? This we will say,-that if the mystery shall ever be revealed, this must be done through a consideration of the ancient practices and doctrines, as well as structures, of the ancient Egyptians themselves; aided, probably, by a like consideration of structures analogous or similar to the Egyptian Pyramids, and of practices and doctrines connected with such structures, among other

nations.

"But what are the peculiarities of the Egyptian Pyramids, and especially of the Great Pyramid ?

sons.

"To whatever other purposes these pyramids (perhaps the Great Pyramid excepted) may have been originally devoted,at least in their first design, we believe there can be no doubt that they were used for the burial of kings or other great perGenerally speaking, they were built of solid masonry, with comparatively little open space in their interior: indeed, a long low narrow passage, or transe,' leading downwards to a subterranean chamber, in which was a sarcophagus, or stone coffin, occupied by a mummy, and covered by a ponderous lid, cemented down, may be said to have essentially constituted the entire As for the Great Pyramid, however, there is arrangement. this peculiarity, that, while it possesses the descending passage and the subterranean or sepulchral chamber, another and ascending passage strikes off out of the descending one, far short of its sepulchral issue; and, after opening up suddenly into a still ascending or sloping and magnificent gallery, of great height, ends in the vestibule or outer chamber leading to the hall, or large and well-ventilated apartment, in which stands the open chest without a lid,' which has so often been visited and described. This chest, or kist, then the one only thing in the pyramid's huge entrails,' as Sandys has it, is the evident analogue of the subterranean sarcophagus or coffin of the other pyramids; but it is without a sign of ever having had a lid, and is the sole occupant of a splendid hall of polished granite, 34 feet 3 inches long, 17 feet 1 inch broad, 19 feet 1 inch high, and placed 138 feet up from the ground-base of the pyramid on the rock; beneath which base, still 90 feet 8 inches further down, is the subterranean or sepulchral chamber. The king's hall,

moreover, is most skilfully and thoroughly well ventilated by two air channels, running upwards, one to the northern surface of the pyramid, 233 feet long, and the other to the southern, 174 feet long; so that the chamber is regarded as one much more likely to have been used by the living than by the dead. Still, the likeness to the other pyramids might lead us to consider it merely as the abode of that death on which the Egyptians were ever meditating, were it not that there are historical records, such as that of Diodorus, that it never was used for burial; and there are no traces of grooves, catch-pins, or other fastenings for a lid, nor of any process of cementation, whereby the lid of a sarcophagus was as usual fastened down.*

"If this apartment never was the abode of death, however, it must undoubtedly have been used for an analogous purpose; and, considering the known practices of magicians, such as the ancient Egyptian hierophants were, the very obvious purpose of using it in that similitude of death-the oracular entrancement of initiation (in those 'dead in the flesh but quickened by the spirit,' in fact), which they are known to have practised in what was called 'the temple sleep,' and 'the blessed life of the gods,' at once presents itself. This similitude of death was the psychopompos, or death in a higher sense,' which they ascribed to their Hermetic or Mercurial god. The death of the pit of corruption' beneath, was thus probably contrasted with the holy death of the god-possessed hierophants above; and, in the attainment of the higher state, or the exchange of this life for the blessed life of the gods,' as Iamblichus, on the Egyptian Mysteries, describes it, the novitiates incurred certain obstacles and terrors of darkness and light, and ran certain risks of falling into the pit, or of otherwise ending their career far short of the high and grand ulterior object which the hierophants had in view.

"But do we find anything similar to such magical structures and practices amongst other nations? Unquestionably we do.

The Mithratic cavern, or cell, of the Cabiri, according to Faber, though sometimes subterraneous, also sometimes lay concealed in the centre of enormous buildings of the pyramidal form; or, as in the tower of Belus at Babylon, in a temple at the top of the pyramid, with a shrine at the bottom. The temple of Belus, which was reached by a winding passage round the pyramid, stood exactly in such a position as the temple of Buddha now does in modern Chaityas in Ava and Siam,-at the top of seven stories. Like the Great Pyramid itself, the Tower of Belus-at that great centre of sorcery or magical

"On this question see also a review of Taylor's work in the Builder of 17th December, 1859."