ar distinction was made between fertilization and vitalization,
between bringing new life into being and reanimating the body which had
once been alive. The process of fertilization of the female and
animating a corpse or a statue were regarded as belonging to the same
category of biological processes. The sculptor who carved the
portrait-statues for the Egyptian's tomb was called _sa'nkh_, "he who
causes to live," and "the word 'to fashion' (_ms_) a statue is to all
appearances identical with _ms_, 'to give birth'".[44]

Thus the Egyptians themselves expressed in words the ideas which an
independent study of the ethnological evidence showed many other peoples
to entertain, both in ancient and modern times.[45]

The interpretation of ancient texts and the study of the beliefs of less
cultured modern peoples indicate that our expressions: "to give birth,"
"to give life," "to maintain life," "to ward off death," "to insure good
luck," "to prolong life," "to give life to the dead," "to animate a
corpse or a representation of the dead," "to give fertility," "to
impregnate," "to create," represent a series of specializations of
meaning which were not clearly differentiated the one from the other in
early times or among relatively primitive modern people.

The evidence brought together in Jackson's work clearly suggests that at
a very early period in human history, long before the ideas that found
expression in the Osiris story had materialized, men entertained in all
its literal crudity the belief that the external organ of reproduction
from which the child emerged at birth was the actual creator of the
child, not merely the giver of birth but also the source of life.

The widespread tendency of the human mind to identify similar objects
and attribute to them the powers of the things they mimic led primitive
men to assign to the cowry-shell all these life-giving and birth-giving
virtues. It became an amulet to give fertility, to assist at birth, to
maintain life, to ward off danger, to ensure the life hereafter, to
bring luck of any sort. Now, as the giver of birth, the cowry-shell also
came to be identified with, or regarded as, the mother and creator of
the human family; and in course of time, as this belief became
rationalized, the shell's maternity received visible expression and it
became personified as an actual woman, the Great Mother, at first nameless
and with ill-defined features. But at a later period, when the