ing.
It prowled like a marauder about fields and villages, picking up and
greedily devouring whatever it might find on the ground--broken meats
which had been left or forgotten, house and stable refuse--and,
should these meagre resources fail, even the most revolting dung and
excrement.[**]

* _Teti_, 11. 74, 75. "Hateful unto Teti is hunger, and
he eateth it not; hateful unto Teti is thirst, nor hath he
drunk it." We see that the Egyptians made hunger and thirst
into two substances or beings, to be swallowed as food is
swallowed, but whose effects were poisonous unless
counteracted by the immediate absorption of more satisfying
sustenance.

** King Teti, when distinguishing his fate from that of the
common dead, stated that he had abundance of food, and hence
was not reduced to so pitiful an extremity. "Abhorrent unto
Teti is excrement, Teti rejecteth urine, and Teti abhorreth
that which is abominable in him; abhorrent unto him is
faecal matter and he eateth it not, hateful unto Teti is
liquid filth." (_Teti_, 11. 68, 69_). The same doctrine is
found in several places in the Book of the Dead_.

This ravenous sceptre had not the dim and misty form, the long shroud
of floating draperies of our modern phantoms, but a precise and definite
shape, naked, or clothed in the garments which it had worn while yet
upon earth, and emitting a pale light, to which it owed the name of
Luminous--_Khu, Khuu_.[*] The double did not allow its family to
forget it, but used all the means at its disposal to remind them of
its existence. It entered their houses and their bodies, terrified them
waking and sleeping by its sudden apparitions, struck them down with
disease or madness,[**] and would even suck their blood like the modern
vampire.

* The name of luminous was at first so explained as to make
the light wherewith souls were clothed, into a portion of
the divine light. In my opinion the idea is a less abstract
one, and shows that, as among many other nations, so with
the Egyptians the soul was supposed to appear as a kind of
pale flame, or as emitting a glow analogous to the
phosphorescent halo which is seen by night about a piece of
rotten wood, or putrefying fish. This primitive conception
may have subsequently faded, and _khu the glorious one_, one
of the _manes_, may have become one of those flatter