III. A curious document, the first‐mentioned, truly. It is a papyrus of

the fifteenth century B.C., written during the reign of Ramses V., the last king of the eighteenth dynasty, and is the work of the scribe Thoutmes, who notes down some of the events with regard to defaulters occurring on the twelfth and thirteenth days of the month of Paophs. The document shows that in those days of “miracles” in Egypt the taxpayers were not found among the living alone, but every mummy was included. All and everything was taxed; and the Khou of the mummy, in default, was punished “by the priest‐exorciser, who deprived it of the liberty of action.” Now what was the Khou? Simply the astral body, or the aerial simulacrum of the corpse or the mummy—that which in China is called the Hauen, and in India the Bhût. Upon reading this papyrus to‐day, an Orientalist is pretty sure to fling it aside in disgust, attributing the whole affair to the crass superstition of the ancients. Truly phenomenal and inexplicable must have been the dullness and credulity of that otherwise highly philosophical and civilized nation if it could carry on for so many consecutive ages, for thousands of years, such a system of mutual deception! A system whereby the people were deceived by the priests, the priests by their King‐ Hierophants, and the latter themselves were cheated by the ghosts, which were, in their turn, but “the fruits of hallucination.” The whole of antiquity, from Menes to Cleopatra, from Manu to Vikramaditya, from Orpheus down to the last Roman augur, were hysterical, we are told. This must have been so, if the whole were not a system of fraud. Life and death were guided by, and were under the sway of, sacred “conjuring.” For there is hardly a papyrus, though it be a simple document of purchase and sale, a deed belonging to daily transactions of the most ordinary kind, that has not Magic, white or black, mixed up in it. It looks as though the sacred scribes of the Nile had purposely, and in a prophetic spirit of race‐ hatred, carried out the (to them) most unprofitable task of deceiving and puzzling the generations of a future white race of unbelievers yet unborn! Anyhow, the papyri are full of Magic, as are likewise the stelæ. We learn, moreover, that the papyrus was not merely a smooth‐surfaced parchment, a fabric made of Ligneous matter from a shrub, the pellicles of which superposed one over the other formed a kind of writing‐paper; but that the shrub itself, the implements and tools for fabricating the parchment, etc., were all previously subjected to a process of magical preparation—according to the ordinance of the Gods, who had taught that art, as they had all others, to their Priest‐Hierophants. There are, however, some modern Orientalists who seem to have an inkling of the true nature of such things, and especially of the analogy and the relations that exist between the Magic of old and our modern‐day phenomena. Chabas is one of these, for he indulges, in his translation of the “Harris” papyrus, in the following reflections: Without having recourse to the imposing ceremonies of the wand of Hermes, or to the obscure formulæ of an unfathomable mysticism, a mesmerizer in our own day will, by means of a few passes, disturb the organic faculties of a subject, inculcate the knowledge of foreign languages, transport him to a far‐distant country, or into secret places, make him guess the thoughts of those absent, read in closed letters, etc.... The antre of the modern sybil is a modest‐looking room, the tripod has made room for a small round table, a hat, a plate, a piece of furniture of the most vulgar kind; only the latter is even superior to the oracle of antiquity [how does M. Chabas know?], inasmuch as the latter only spoke,(454) while the oracle of our day writes its answers. At the command of the medium the spirits of the dead descend to make the furniture creak, and the authors of bygone centuries deliver to us works written by them beyond the grave. Human credulity has no narrower limits to‐day than it had at the dawn of historical times.... As teratology is an essential part of general physiology now, so the _pretended_ Occult Sciences occupy in the annals of humanity a place which is not without its importance, and deserve for more than one reason the attention of the philosopher and the historian.(455) Selecting the two Champollions, Lenormand, Bunsen, Vicomte de Rougé, and several other Egyptologists to serve as our witnesses, let us see what they say of Egyptian Magic and Sorcery. They may get out of the difficulty by accounting for each “superstitious belief” and practice by attributing them to a chronic psychological and physiological derangement, and to collective hysteria, if they like; still facts are there, staring us in the face, from the hundreds of these mysterious papyri, exhumed after a rest of four, five, and more thousands of years, with their magical containments and evidence of antediluvian Magic. A small library, found at Thebes, has furnished fragments of every kind of ancient literature, many of which are dated, and several of which have thus been assigned to the accepted age of Moses. Books or manuscripts on ethics, history, religion and medicine, calendars and registers, poems and novels—everything—may be had in that precious collection; and old legends—traditions of long forgotten ages (please to remark this: legends recorded during the Mosaic period)—are already referred to therein as belonging to an immense antiquity, to the period of the dynasties of Gods and Giants. Their chief contents, however, are formulæ of exorcisms against black Magic, and funeral rituals: true breviaries, or the _vade mecum_ of every pilgrim‐traveller in eternity. These funeral texts are generally written in hieratic characters. At the head of the papyrus is invariably placed a series of scenes, showing the defunct appearing before a host of Deities successively, who have to examine him. Then comes the judgment of the Soul, while the third act begins with the launching of that Soul into the divine light. Such papyri are often forty feet long.(456) The following is extracted from general descriptions. It will show how the moderns understand and interpret Egyptian (and other) Symbology. The papyrus of the priest Nevo‐loo (or Nevolen), at the Louvre, may be selected for one case. First of all there is the bark carrying the coffin, a black chest containing the defunct’s mummy. His mother, Ammenbem‐Heb, and his sister, Hooissanoob, are near; at the head and feet of the corpse stand Nephtys and Isis clothed in red, and near them a priest of Osiris clad in his panther’s skin, his censer in his right hand, and four assistants carrying the mummy’s intestines. The coffin is received by the God Anubis (of the jackal’s head), from the hands of female weepers. Then the Soul rises from its mummy and the Khou (astral body) of the defunct. The former begins its worship of the four genii of the East, of the sacred birds, and of Ammon as a ram. Brought into the “Palace of Truth,” the defunct is before his judges. While the Soul, a scarabæus, stands in the presence of Osiris, his astral Khou is at the door. Much laughter is provoked in the West by the invocations to various Deities, presiding over each of the limbs of the mummy, and of the living human body. Only judge: in the papyrus of the mummy Petamenoph “the anatomy becomes theographical,” “astrology is applied to physiology,” or rather “to the anatomy of the human body, the heart and the soul.” The defunct’s “hair belongs to the Nile, his eyes to Venus (Isis), his ears to Macedo, the guardian of the tropics; his nose to Anubis, his left temple to the Spirit dwelling in the sun.... What a series of intolerable absurdities and ignoble prayers ... to Osiris, imploring him to give the defunct in the other world, geese, eggs, pork, etc.”(457) It might have been prudent, perhaps, to have waited to ascertain whether all these terms of “geese, eggs, and pork” had not some other Occult meaning. The Indian Yogî who, in an _exoteric_ work, is invited to drink a certain intoxicating liquor till he loses his senses, was also regarded as a drunkard representing his sect and class, until it was found that the Esoteric sense of that “spirit” was quite different: that it meant divine light, and stood for the ambrosia of Secret Wisdom. The symbols of the dove and the lamb which abound now in Eastern and Western Christian Churches may also be exhumed long ages hence, and speculated upon as objects of present‐day worship. And then some “Occidentalist” in the forthcoming ages of high Asiatic civilization and learning, may write karmically upon the same as follows: “The ignorant and superstitious Gnostics and Agnostics of the sects of ‘Pope’ and ‘Calvin’ (the two monster Gods of the Dynamite‐Christian period) adored a pigeon and a sheep!” There will be portable hand‐fetishes in all and every age for the satisfaction and reverence of the rabble, and the Gods of one race will always be degraded into devils by the next one. The cycles revolve within the depths of Lethe, and Karma shall reach Europe as it has Asia and her religions. Nevertheless, This grand and dignified language [in the _Book of the Dead_], these pictures full of majesty, this orthodoxy of the whole evidently proving a very precise doctrine concerning the immortality of the soul and its personal survival, as shown by De Rougé and the Abbé Van Drival, have charmed some Orientalists. The psychostasy (or judgment of the Soul) is certainly a whole poem to him who can read it correctly and interpret the images therein. In that picture we see Osiris, the horned, with his sceptre hooked at the end—the original of the pastoral bishop’s crook or crosier—the Soul hovering above, encouraged by Tmei, daughter of the Sun of Righteousness and Goddess of Mercy and Justice; Horus and Anubis, weighing the deeds of the soul. One of these papyri shows the Soul found guilty of gluttony sentenced to be re‐born on earth as a hog; forthwith comes the learned conclusion of an Orientalist, “This is an indisputable proof of belief in _metempsychosis_, of transmigration _into animals_,” etc. Perchance the Occult law of Karma might explain the sentence otherwise. It may, for all our Orientalists know, refer to the physiological vice in store for the Soul when re‐incarnated—a vice that will lead that personality into a thousand and one scrapes and misadventures. Tortures to begin with, then metempsychosis _during_ 3,000 _years_ as a hawk, an angel, a lotus‐flower, a heron, a stork, a swallow, a serpent, and a crocodile: one sees that the consolation of such a progress was far from being satisfactory, argues De Mirville, in his work on the Satanic character of the Gods of Egypt.(458) Again, a simple suggestion may throw on this a great light. Are the Orientalists quite sure they have read correctly the “metempsychosis during 3,000 years”? The Occult Doctrine teaches that Karma waits at the threshold of Devachan (the Amenti of the Egyptians) for 3,000 years; that then the eternal _Ego_ is reincarnated _de novo_, to be punished in its new temporary personality for sins committed in the preceding birth, and the suffering for which, in one shape or another, will atone for past misdeeds. And the hawk, the lotus‐flower, the heron, serpent, or bird—every object in Nature, in short—had its symbolical and manifold meaning in ancient religious emblems. The man who all his life acted hypocritically and passed for a good man, but had been in sober reality watching like a bird of prey his chance to pounce upon his fellow‐ creatures, and had deprived them of their property, will be sentenced by Karma to bear the punishment for hypocrisy and covetousness in a future life. What will it be? Since every human unit has ultimately to progress in its evolution, and since that “man” will be reborn at some future time as a good, sincere, well‐meaning man, his sentence to be re‐incarnated as a hawk may simply mean that he will then be regarded metaphorically as such. That, notwithstanding his real, good, intrinsic qualities, he will, perhaps during a long life, be unjustly and falsely charged with and suspected of greed and hypocrisy and of secret exactions, all of which will make him suffer more than he can bear. The law of retribution can never err, and yet how many such innocent victims of false appearance and human malice do we not meet in this world of incessant illusion, of mistake and deliberate wickedness. We see them every day, and they may be found within the personal experience of each of us. What Orientalist can say with any degree of assurance that he has understood the religions of old? The metaphorical language of the priests has never been more than superficially revealed, and the hieroglyphics have been very poorly mastered to this day.(459) What says _Isis Unveiled_ on this question of Egyptian rebirth and transmigration, and does it clash with anything that we say now? It will be observed that this philosophy of cycles, which was allegorized by the Egyptian Hierophants in the “cycle of necessity,” explains at the same time the allegory of the “Fall of Man.” According to the Arabian descriptions, each of the seven chambers of the pyramids—those grandest of all cosmic symbols—was known by the name of a planet. The peculiar architecture of the pyramids shows in itself the drift of the metaphysical thought of their builders. The apex is lost in the clear blue sky of the land of the Pharaohs, and typifies the primordial point lost in the unseen Universe from whence started the first race of the spiritual prototypes of man. Each mummy from the moment that it was embalmed lost its physical individuality in one sense: it symbolised the human race. Placed in such a way as was best calculated to aid the exit of the “Soul,” the latter had to pass through the seven planetary chambers before it made its exit through the symbolical apex. Each chamber typified, at the same time, one of the seven spheres [of our Chain] and one of the seven higher types of physico‐spiritual humanity alleged to be above our own. Every 3000 years the soul, representative of its race, had to return to its primal point of departure before it underwent another evolution into a more perfected spiritual and physical transformation. We must go deep indeed into the abstruse metaphysics of Oriental mysticism before we can realise fully the infinitude of the subjects that were embraced at one sweep by the majestic thought of its exponents.(460) This is all Magic when once the details are given; and it relates at the same time to the evolution of our seven Root‐Races, each with the characteristics of its special guardian or “God,” and his Planet. The astral body of each Initiate, after death, had to reënact in its funeral mystery the drama of the birth and death of each Race—the past and the future—and pass through the seven “planetary chambers,” which, as said above, typified also the seven spheres of our Chain. The mystic doctrine of Eastern Occultism teaches that _“__The Spiritual Ego [not the astral Khou] has to revisit, before it incarnates into a new body, the scenes it left at its last disincarnation. It __ has to see for itself and take cognizance of all the effects produced by the causes [the Nidânas] generated by its actions in a previous life; that, seeing, it should recognize the justice of the decree, and help the law of Retribution [Karma] instead of impeding it.__”_(461) The translations by Vicomte de Rougé of several Egyptian papyri, imperfect as they may be, give us one advantage: they show undeniably the presence in them of white, divine Magic, as well as of Sorcery, and the practice of both throughout all the dynasties. The _Book of the Dead_, far older than _Genesis_(462) or any other book of the _Old Testament_, shows it in every line. It is full of incessant prayers and exorcisms against the Black Art. Therein Osiris is the conqueror of the “aerial demons.” The worshipper implores his help against Matat, “from whose eye proceeds the invisible arrow.” This “invisible arrow” that proceeds from the eye of the Sorcerer (whether living or dead) and that “circulates throughout the world,” is the evil eye—cosmic in its origin, terrestrial in its effects on the microcosmical plane. It is not the Latin Christians whom it behoves to view this as a superstition. Their Church indulges in the same belief, and has even a prayer against the “arrow circulating in darkness.” The most interesting of all those documents, however, is the “Harris” papyrus, called in France “_le papyrus magique_ de Chabas,” as it was first translated by the latter. It is a manuscript written in hieratic characters, translated, commented upon, and published in 1860 by M. Chabas, but purchased at Thebes in 1855 by Mr. Harris. Its age is given at between twenty‐eight and thirty centuries. We quote a few extracts from these translations: Calendar of lucky and unlucky days: ... He who makes a bull work on the 20th of the month of Pharmuths will surely die; he who on the 24th day of the same month pronounces the name of Seth aloud will see trouble reigning in his house from that day; ... he who on the 5th day of Patchous leaves his house falls sick and dies. Exclaims the translator, whose cultured instincts are revolted: If one had not these words under our eyes, one could never believe in such servitude at the epoch of the Ramessides.(463) We belong to the nineteenth century of the Christian era, and are therefore at the height of civilization, and under the benign sway and enlightening influence of the Christian Church, instead of being subject to the Pagan Gods of old. Nevertheless we personally know dozens, and have heard of hundreds, of educated, highly‐intellectual persons who would as soon think of committing suicide as of starting on any business on a Friday, of dining at a table where thirteen sit down, or of beginning a long journey on a Monday. Napoleon the Great became pale when he saw three candles lit on a table. Moreover, we may gladly concur with De Mirville in this, at any rate, that such “superstitions” are “the outcome of observation and experience.” If the former had never agreed with facts, the authority of the _Calendar_, he thinks, would not have lasted for a week. But to resume: _Genethliacal influences_: The child born on the 5th day of Paophi will be killed by a bull; on the 27th by a serpent. Born on the 4th of the month of Athyr, he will succumb to blows. This is a question of horoscopic predictions; judiciary astrology is firmly believed in in our own age, and has been proven to be scientifically possible by Kepler. Of the Khous two kinds were distinguished: first, the justified Khous, _i.e._, those who had been absolved from sin by Osiris when they were brought before his tribunal; these lived a second life. Secondly, there were the guilty Khous, “the Khous dead a second time;” these were the damned. Second death did not annihilate them, but they were doomed to wander about and to torture people. Their existence had phases analogous to those of the living man, a bond so intimate between the dead and the living that one sees how the observation of religious funeral rites and exorcisms and prayers (or rather magic incantations) should have become necessary.(464) Says one prayer: Do not permit that the venom should master his limbs [of the defunct], ... that he should be penetrated by any male dead, or any female dead; or that the shadow of any spirit should haunt him (or her).(465)