ablish in them the authority of Osiris and of the solar
cycle. In all of them he built, side by side with the sanctuary of the
Typhonian divinities, a temple to himself, in which he was enthroned
under the particular form he was obliged to assume in order to vanquish
his enemies. Metamorphosed into a hawk at the battle of Hibonu, we
next see him springing on to the back of Sit under the guise of a
hippopotamus; in his shrine at Hibonu he is represented as a hawk
perching on the back of a gazelle, emblem of the nome where the struggle
took place. Near to Zalu he became incarnate as a human-headed lion,
crowned with the triple diadem, and having feet armed with claws which
cut like a knife; it was under the form, too, of a lion that he was
worshipped in the temple at Zalu. The correlation of Sit and the
celestial Horus was not, therefore, for these Egyptians of more recent
times a primitive religious fact; it was the consequence, and so to
speak the sanction, of the old hostility between the two gods.

[Illustration: 289.jpg]

Horus had treated his enemy in the same fashion that a victorious
Pharaoh treated the barbarians conquered by his arms: he had constructed
a fortress to keep his foe in check, and his priests formed a sort of
garrison as a precaution against the revolt of the rival priesthood and
the followers of the rival deity. In this manner the battles of the gods
were changed into human struggles, in which, more than once, Egypt was
deluged with blood. The hatred of the followers of Osiris to those of
Typhon was perpetuated with such implacability, that the nomes which had
persisted in adhering to the worship of Sit, became odious to the
rest of the population: the image of their master on the monuments was
mutilated, their names were effaced from the geographical lists, they
were assailed with insulting epithets, and to pursue and slay their
sacred animals was reckoned a pious act. Thus originated those
skirmishes which developed into actual civil wars, and were continued
down to Roman times. The adherents of Typhon only became more confirmed
in their veneration for the accursed god; Christianity alone overcame
their obstinate fidelity to him.[*]

* This incident in the wars of Horus and Sit is drawn by
Faucher-Gudin from a bas-relief of the temple of Edfu. On
the right, Har-Huditi, standing up in the solar bark,
pierces with his lance the head of a crocodile, a partisan
of Sit, lyi