the rights of
all the feudal gods in their own principalities, his sovereignty after
death exempted him no more than the meanest of his subjects from that
painful torpor into which all mortals fell on breathing their last. But
popular imagination could not resign itself to his remaining in that
miserable state for ever. What would it have profited him to have
Isis the great Sorceress for his wife, the wise Horus for his son,
two master-magicians--Thot the Ibis and the jackal Anubis--for his
servants, if their skill had not availed to ensure him a less gloomy
and less lamentable after-life than that of men. Anubis had long before
invented the art of mummifying, and his mysterious science had secured
the everlasting existence of the flesh; but at what a price!

[Illustration: 256.jpg THE OSIRIAN MUMMY PREPARED AND LAID UPON THE
FUNERARY COUCH BY THE JACKAL ANUBIS.1]

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Rosellint, _Monumenti
Civili_, pl. cxxxiv. 2. While Anubis is stretching out his
hands to lay out the mummy on its couch, the soul is
hovering above its breast, and holding to its nostrils the
sceptre, and the wind-filled sail which is the emblem of
breath and of the new life.

For the breathing, warm, fresh-coloured body, spontaneous in movement
and function, was substituted an immobile, cold and blackish mass, a
sufficient basis for the mechanical continuity of the double, but which
that double could neither raise nor guide; whose weight paralysed and
whose inertness condemned it to vegetate in darkness, without pleasure
and almost without consciousness of existence. Thot, Isis, and Horus
applied themselves in the case of Osiris to ameliorating the discomfort
and constraint entailed by the more primitive embalmment.

[Illustration: 257.jpg THE RECEPTION OP THE MUMMY BY ANUBIS AT THE DOOR
OP THE TOMB, AND THE OPENING OF THE MOUTH. 1]

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a painting in the tomb of a
king in the Theban necropolis.

They did not dispense with the manipulations instituted by Anubis,
but endued them with new power by means of magic. They inscribed the
principal bandages with protective figures and formulas; they decorated
the body with various amulets of specific efficacy for its different
parts; they drew numerous scenes of earthly existence and of the life
beyond the tomb upon the boards of the coffin and upon the walls of
the sepulchral chamber. When the body had been made