were carried on
the shoulders by long staves passed through rings. In others the statues
of the gods were carried, and arks like those of the Jews, overshadowed by
the wings of the goddess of truth spread above the sacred beetle.

The prophets were the most highly honored of the priestly order. They
studied the ten hieratical books. The business of the stolists[159] was to
dress and undress the images, to attend to the vestments of the priests,
and to mark the beasts selected for sacrifice. The scribes were to search
for the Apis, or sacred bull, and were required to possess great learning.

The priests had no sinecure; their life was full of minute duties and
restrictions. They seldom appeared in public, were married to one wife,
were circumcised like other Egyptians, and their whole time was occupied
either in study or the service of their gods. There was a gloomy tone to
the religion of Egypt, which struck the Greeks, whose worship was usually
cheerful. Apuleius says "the gods of Egypt rejoice in lamentations, those
of Greece in dances." Another Greek writer says, "The Egyptians offer
their gods tears."

Until Swedenborg[160] arrived, and gave his disciples the precise measure
and form of the life to come, no religion has ever taught an immortality
as distinct in its outline and as solid in its substance as that of the
Egyptians. The Greek and Roman hereafter was shadowy and vague; that of
Buddhism remote; and the Hebrew Beyond was wholly eclipsed and overborne
by the sense of a Divine presence and power immanent in space and time. To
the Egyptian, this life was but the first step, and a very short one, of
an immense career. The sun (Ra) alternately setting and rising, was the
perpetually present type of the progress of the soul, and the Sothiac
period (symbolized by the Phoenix) of 1421 years from one heliacal rising
of Sirius at the beginning of the fixed Egyptian year to the next, was
also made to define the cycle of human transmigrations. Two Sothiac
periods correspond nearly to the three thousand years spoken of by
Herodotus, during which the soul transmigrates through animal forms before
returning to its human body. Then, to use the Egyptian language, the soul
arrived at the ship of the sun and was received by Ra into his solar
splendor. On some sarcophagi the soul is symbolized by a hawk with a human
head, carrying in his claws two rings, which probably signify the two
Sothiac cycles of its transmigrations.