apyrus or engraved upon stone the journeyings of the
soul into the world of shades. The soul--the mental personality--which
demands "osirification," and invokes the Ego, its god and projector,
beseeching him to draw it to himself that it may live with him, is the
lower "I." This "I" has not exhausted the "desire to live" on earth;
its desire is impressed on the germs it has left in the causal body,
and brings the Ego back to incarnation; this is the reason it prays
and desires the resurrection[117] of its "living soul," the Ego.
Denon, in his _Journeyings in Egypt_, has made known to us the Sha-En
(the book of metamorphoses), written in hieratic signs and republished
in Berlin, by Brugsch, in the year 1851. Explicit mention is here made
of reincarnations, and it is stated that they are very numerous.

The third part of the _Book of the Dead_ sets forth a detailed account
of the resurrection of an Osiris; the identification of the departed
one with Osiris, God of Light, and his sharing in the life, deeds, and
power of the God; in a word, it is the final reintegration of the
human soul with God.

The loftiest and most suggestive of Egyptian palingenetic symbols is
unquestionably that of the egg. The deceased is "resplendent in the egg
in the land of mysteries." In Kircher's _Oedipus Egyptiacus_[118] we
have an egg--the Ego freed from its vehicles--floating over the mummy;
this is the symbol of hope and the promise of a new birth to the soul,
after gestation in the egg of immortality.[119]

The "winged globe," so widely known in Egypt, is egg-shaped, and has
the same meaning; its wings indicate its divine nature and prevent it
from being confused with the physical germ. "Easter eggs" which are
offered in spring, at the rebirth of Nature, commemorate this ancient
symbol of eternal Life in its successive phases of disincarnation and
rebirth.

CHALDAEA.

It is said that the Magi taught the immortality of the soul and its
reincarnations, but that they considerably limited the number of
these latter, in the belief that purification was effected after a
restricted number of existences on the soul returning to its heavenly
abode.

Unfortunately we know nothing definite on this special point in
Chaldaean teaching, for some of the most important sources of
information were destroyed when the library of Persepolis was burnt by
the Macedonian vandal, Alexander the Great, whilst Eusebius--whom
Bunsen criticises so harshly[12