s, and death is life in a land of light.

It was because of this that the pharaohs seated themselves colossally
before the temple doors. It was because of it that their palaces were
inns and their tombs were homes. It was because of it that their
sepulchres were built for eternity and the tenements of their souls
placed there embalmed. It was because of this that the triumphs of men
were inscribed in the halls of the gods. Instead of seeking to be
absorbed, it was their own inextinguishable individuality that they
endeavoured to assert. Tombs, tenements, triumphs, these all were
preparations for the Land of Light.

The land was Alu, the asphodel meadows of the celestial Nile that
wound through the Milky Way. To reach it a passport, vise'd by Osiris,
sufficed. The first draft of that passport was held to have been
written on tablets of alabaster, in letters of lapis lazuli, by an
eidolon of Ra, who, known in Egypt as Thoth, elsewhere was Hermes
Thrice the Greatest.

At Memphis, Hermes was regarded as representing the personification of
divine wisdom, or, more exactly perhaps, the inventive power of the
human mind. A little library of forty-two books--which a patricist
saw, but not being initiate could not read--was attributed to him.[17]
The books contained the entire hieratic belief. Fragments that are
held to have survived in an extant Greek novel are obviously Egyptian,
but as obviously Alexandrine and neo-platonic. In the _editio
princeps_ Pheidias is mentioned. Mention of Michel Angelo would have
been less anachronistic. The original books are gone, all of them,
forever, perhaps, save one, chapters of which are as old as the fourth
dynasty and, it may be, are still older. Pyramid texts of the fifth
dynasty show that there then existed what to-day is termed _The Book
of the Dead_, a copy of which, put in a mummy's arms, was a talisman
for the soul in the Court of Amenti, a passport thence to the Land of
Light.

[Footnote 17: Clemens Alexandrinos: Stromata vi.]

"There is no book like it, man hath not spoken it, earth hath not
heard it"--very truthfully it recites of itself. One copy, known as
the Louvre Papyrus, presents the _Divine Comedy_, as primarily
conceived and illustrated by an archaic Dore. Text and vignettes
display the tribunal where the souls of the dead are judged.

In the foreground is an altar. Adjacent is a figure, half griffon,
half chimera, the Beast of Amenti, perhaps too of the Apocalypse.