god is here mentioned in his aspect of the night Sun as opposed to R[=a]
the day Sun, and a comparison of the Sun's daily death with the death of
the deceased is intended to be made. The deposit of the head of the God-man
Osiris at Abydos has already been mentioned, and the belief that it
was preserved there was common throughout Egypt. But in the text quoted
above the deceased says, "My head shall not be separated from my neck,"
which seems to indicate that he wished to keep his body whole,
notwithstanding that Osiris was almighty, and could restore the limbs
and reconstitute the body, even as he had done for his own limbs and
body which had been hacked to pieces by Set. Chapter XLIII of the Book
of the Dead [Footnote: See _The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day_, p.
98.] also has an important reference to the head of Osiris. It is
entitled "The Chapter of not letting the head of a man be cut off from
him in the underworld," and must be of considerable antiquity. In it the
deceased says: "I am the Great One, the son of the Great One; I am Fire,
and the son of the Fire, to whom was given his head after it had been
cut off. The head of Osiris was not taken away from him, let not the
head of the deceased be taken away from him. I have knit myself together
(_or_ reconstituted myself); I have made myself whole and complete; I
have renewed my youth; I am Osiris, the lord of eternity."

From the above it would seem that, according to one version of the
Osiris story, the head of Osiris was not only cut off, but that it was
passed through the fire also; and if this version be very ancient, as it
well may be and probably is, it takes us back to prehistoric times in
Egypt when the bodies of the dead were mutilated and burned. Prof.
Wiedemann thinks [Footnote: See J. de Morgan, _Ethnographie
Prehistorique_, p. 210.] that the mutilation and breaking of the bodies
of the dead were the results of the belief that in order to make the KA,
or "double," leave this earth, the body to which it belonged must be
broken, and he instances the fact that objects of every kind were broken
at the time when they were placed in the tombs. He traces also a
transient custom in the prehistoric graves of Egypt where the methods of
burying the body whole and broken into pieces seem to be mingled, for
though in some of them the body has been broken into pieces, it is
evident that successful attempts have been made to reconstitute it by
laying the pieces as