the contrary, is
that it will be born in a new body, as at each preceding step in
the series of its transmigrations. Secondly, the mutilation of the
body in embalming forbids the belief in its restoration to life.
The brain was extracted, and the skull stuffed with cotton. The
entrails were taken out, and sometimes, according to Porphyry2 and
Plutarch,3 thrown into the Nile; sometimes, as modern examinations
have revealed, bound up in four packages and either replaced in
the cavity of the stomach or laid in four vases beside the mummy.
It is absurd to attribute, without clear cause, to an enlightened
people the belief that these stacks of brainless, eviscerated
mummies, dried and shrunken in ovens, coated with pitch, bound up
in a hundredfold bandages, would ever revive, and, inhabited by
the same souls that fled them thirty centuries before, again walk
the streets of Thebes! Besides, a third consideration demands
notice. By the theory of metempsychosis universally acknowledged
to have been held by the Egyptians it is taught that souls at
death, either immediately, or after a temporary sojourn in hell or
heaven has struck the balance of their merits, are born in fresh
bodies; never that they return into their old ones. But the point
is set beyond controversy by the discovery of inscriptions,
accompanying pictures of scenes illustrating the felicity of
blessed souls in heaven, to this effect: "Their bodies shall
repose in their tombs forever; they live in the celestial regions
eternally, enjoying the presence of the Supreme God." 4 A writer
on this subject says, "A people who believed in the transmigration

1 Herod. lib. ii. cap. 123.

2 De Abstinentia, lib. iv. cap. 10.

3 Banquet of the Seven Wise Men.

4 Champollion, Descr. de l'Egypte, Antiq. tom ii. p. 132. Stuart's
Trans. of Greppo's Essay, p. 262.

of souls would naturally take extraordinary pains to preserve the
body from putrefaction, in the hope of the soul again joining the
body it had quitted." The remark is intrinsically untrue, because
the doctrine of transmigration coexists in reconciled belief with
the observed law of birth, infancy, and growth, not with the
miracle of transition into reviving corpses. The notion is
likewise historically refuted by the fact that the believers of
that doctrine in the thronged East have never preserved the body,
but at once buried or burned it. The whole Egyptian theology is
much more closely allied to the Hindu,