to worship. On the lips of the others the priests
held always a finger. Crocodiles were less distant, hyenas more
approachable, and the Egyptian, barred from the divine, found it on
earth. He prayed to scorpions, sang hymns to scarabs, coaxed the
jackal with psalms; with dances he placated the ibis. It was
ridiculous but human. He too would have a part, however insensate, in
the dreams of all mankind.

Yet, had he looked not down but up, he would have lifted at least a
fringe of the Isian veil. The sun, taken as a symbol only, the symbol
of life, death, and resurrection--phases which its rising, setting,
and return suggest--was the deity, the one really existing god.
Nominally, figuratively, even concretely, there were others; a whole
host, a hierarchy vaster than the Aryans knew; a great crowd of
divinities less grandiose than gaudy, that swarmed in space, strolled
through the dawns and dusk, thronged the temples, eyed the quick,
confronted the dead. They were but appearances, mere masks,
expressions, hypostases, eidolons of Ra.

Ra was the celestial pharaoh. But not originally. Originally he was
part of a triad which itself was part of a triple trinity. Ra then was
but one divinity among many gods. These ultimately lost themselves in
him so indistinguishably that there are litanies in which the names of
seventy-five of them are used in addressing him. Regarded as the
unbegotten begetter of the first beginning, he succeeded in achieving
the incomprehensible. He became triune and remained unique. He was
Osiris, he was Isis, he was Horus. At once father, mother, and son, he
fecundated, conceived, produced, and was.

From him gods and goddesses emanated in sidereal fireworks that
illuminated the heavens, dazzled the earth, then melted into each
other, faded away or, occasionally, flared afresh in a glare
dispelling and persistent. Among these latter was Amon. Glimmering
primarily in provincial obscurity at Thebes, the thin fire of his
shrine mounted spirally to Ra, fused its flames with his, expanding
and uniting so inseparably with them, that the two became one. Amon
means _hidden_; Amon-Ra, _the hidden light_.

In the infinite, time is not. In heaven there is no chronology. The
date of any god's accession to supremacy there is, consequently, apart
from mortal ken. None the less that of Amon-Ra is known. At the
beginning of the earthly reign of Amonhoteph III., an edict,
scrupulously executed throughout Egypt, dete