onflict of good and evil in the natural world.

But it seems very likely that it was the object of the priests to elevate
this Osiris worship to a still higher meaning, making it an allegory of
the struggles, sorrows, and self-recovery of the human soul. Every human
soul after death took the name and symbols of Osiris, and then went into
the under-world to be judged by him. Connected with this was the doctrine
of transmigration, or the passage of the soul through various bodies,--a
doctrine brought out of Egypt by Pythagoras. These higher doctrines were
taught in the mysteries. "I know them," says Herodotus, "but must not tell
them." Iamblicus professes to explain them in his work on the Mysteries.
But it is not easy to say how much of his own Platonism he has mingled
therewith. According to him, they taught in the mysteries that before all
things was one God immovable in the solitude of unity. The One was to be
venerated in silence. Then Emeph, or Neph, was god in his
self-consciousness. After this in Amun, his intellect became truth,
shedding light. Truth working by art is Pthah, and art producing good is
Osiris.

Another remarkable fact must be at least alluded to. Bunsen says, that,
according to the whole testimony of the monuments, Isis and Osiris not
only have their roots in the second order, but are also themselves the
first and the second order. Isis, Osiris, and Horus comprise all Egyptian
mythology, with the exception of Amun and Neph. Of this fact I have seen
no explanation and know of none, unless it be a sign of the purpose of the
priests to unite the two systems of spiritualism and nature-worship into
one, and to elevate and spiritualize the lower order of gods.

One reason for thinking that the religious system of the priests was a
compromise between several different original tendencies is to be found in
the local worship of special deities in various places. In Lower Egypt the
highest god was Pthah, whom the Greeks identified with Vulcan; the god of
fire or heat, father of the sun. He was in this region the chief god,
corresponding to Ammon in Upper Egypt. Manetho says that Pthah reigned
nine thousand years before the other gods,--which must mean that this was
by far the oldest worship in Egypt. As Ammon is the head of a cosmogony
which proceeds according to emanation from spirit down to matter, so Pthah
is at the beginning of a cosmogony which ascends by a process of evolution
from matter working up t