m of Mendes; he was the reigning Pharaoh. In his
fusion with Ra, who was threefold--Khepera, Ra, and Tum--he died each
day as an old man; he appeared in heaven at night as the constellation
Orion, which was his ghost, or was, perhaps, rather the Sumerian Zi,
the spiritual essence of life. Osiris, who resembled Tammuz, a god of
many forms also, was addressed as follows in one of the Isis chants:

There proceedeth from thee the strong Orion in heaven at evening,
at the resting of every day!
Lo it is I (Isis), at the approach of the Sothis (Sirius) period,
who doth watch for him (the child Osiris),
Nor will I leave off watching for him; for that which proceedeth
from thee (the living Osiris) is revered.
An emanation from thee causeth life to gods and men, reptiles and
animals, and they live by means thereof.
Come thou to us from thy chamber, in the day when thy soul
begetteth emanations,--
The day when offerings upon offerings are made to thy spirit,
which causeth the gods and men likewise to live.[309]

This extract emphasizes how unsafe it is to confine certain deities
within narrow limits by terming them simply "solar gods", "lunar
gods", "astral gods", or "earth gods". One deity may have been
simultaneously a sun god and moon god, an air god and an earth god,
one who was dead and also alive, unborn and also old. The priests of
Babylonia and Egypt were less accustomed to concrete and logical
definitions than their critics and expositors of the twentieth
century. Simple explanations of ancient beliefs are often by reason of
their very simplicity highly improbable. Recognition must ever be
given to the puzzling complexity of religious thought in Babylonia and
Egypt, and to the possibility that even to the priests the doctrines
of a particular cult, which embraced the accumulated ideas of
centuries, were invariably confusing and vague, and full of
inconsistencies; they were mystical in the sense that the
understanding could not grasp them although it permitted their
acceptance. A god, for instance, might be addressed at once in the
singular and plural, perhaps because he had developed from an
animistic group of spirits, or, perhaps, for reasons we cannot
discover. This is shown clearly by the following pregnant extract from
a Babylonian tablet: "_Powerful, O Sevenfold, one are ye_". Mr. L.W.
King, the translator, comments upon it as follows: "There