den times. A snake, the relic of the household
goddess, is often kept as a kind of pet in the houses of the peasants.
Barren women still go to the ruined temples of the forsaken gods in the
hope that there is virtue in the stones; and I myself have given
permission to disappointed husbands to take their childless wives to
these places, where they have kissed the stones and embraced the figures
of the gods. The hair of the jackal is burnt in the presence of dying
people, even of the upper classes, unknowingly to avert the jackal-god
Anubis, the Lord of Death. A scarab representing the god of creation is
sometimes placed in the bath of a young married woman to give virtue to
the water. A decoration in white paint over the doorways of certain
houses in the south is a relic of the religious custom of placing a
bucranium there to avert evil. Certain temple-watchmen still call upon
the spirits resident in the sanctuaries to depart before they will enter
the building. At Karnak a statue of the goddess Sekhmet is regarded
with holy awe; and the goddess who once was said to have massacred
mankind is even now thought to delight in slaughter. The golden barque
of Amon-Ra, which once floated upon the sacred lake of Karnak, is said
to be seen sometimes by the natives at the present time, who have not
yet forgotten its former existence. In the processional festival of
Abu'l Haggag, the patron saint of Luxor, whose mosque and tomb stand
upon the ruins of the Temple of Amon, a boat is dragged over the ground
in unwitting remembrance of the dragging of the boat of Amon in the
processions of that god. Similarly in the _Mouled el Nebi_ procession at
Luxor, boats placed upon carts are drawn through the streets, just as
one may see them in the ancient paintings and reliefs. The patron gods
of Kom Ombo, Horur and Sebek, yet remain in the memories of the peasants
of the neighbourhood as the two brothers who lived in the temple in the
days of old. A robber entering a tomb will smash the eyes of the figures
of the gods and deceased persons represented therein, that they may not
observe his actions, just as did his ancestors four thousand years ago.
At Gurneh a farmer recently broke the arms of an ancient statue, which
lay half-buried near his fields, because he believed that they had
damaged his crops. In the south of Egypt a pot of water is placed upon
the graves of the dead, that their ghost, or _ka_, as it would have been
called in old times,