It maybe said that the dawn of African civilization came full circle in Egypt, but that the earliest glimmer of the light which turned the darkness into day for all the earth first issued from the inner land. The veriest beginning must have been coeval with the creature that first developed a thumb to wield a weapon or to shape an implement for human use, when in the far-off past but little difference could have been detected between the monkey and the pygmy race of human aborigines. It is improbable that we shall get back any nearer to a beginning for the human being among the types extant than with those forest dwarfs, of whom a recent traveller says: 'They have no records or traditions of the past, no regard for time, nor any fetish rites; they do not seek to know the future by occult means, as do their neighbours; in short, they are, to my thinking, the closest link with the original Darwinian anthropoid apes extant.'[1] These little folk of the forest are still upon the lowest step in the ascent of man. Not because they have retrograded, but because they have never grown. So far as is known, the pygmies have no verbal language of their own, whatsoever words they may have gathered from outsiders. Otherwise, language with them is the same as it was in the beginning, with a few animal sounds and gesture-signs. They have no totems, no signs of tattoo scored upon their bodies, no rites of puberty, no eating of the parent in honour for the primitive sacrament. Judging from specimens of the pygmies that have been brought to England from the Ituri Forest, the foundation of the negroid features, the thick lips and large, spreading nostrils, was laid in the pygmean phase of development, but up to the present time the pygmy has only reached the 'peppercorn' stage of hair, and has not yet attained the 'kinky' locks of the full-blooded negro.

A German traveller lately claimed to have discovered a people in the forests of Borneo who show some vestige of the ancestral tail. He saw the tail on a child about six years old belonging to the Poenan tribe. There was the appendage, sure enough—not very long, but plainly visible, hairless, and about the thickness of a man's little finger[2]. Also the persistent [p.250] rumour that some remains of a semi-simian race are vet extant among the hidden secrets of the old dark land is not incredible to the evolutionist. According to Lady Lugard, there is a tribe in Nigeria who are reputed not to have lost their tails[3]. The African pygmies, however, have not publicly proclaimed the tail.

The one sole race that can be traced among the aborigines all over the earth, above ground or below, is the dark race of a dwarf negrito-type, and the only one possible motherland on earth for these preliminary people is Africa. No other country possesses the necessary background as a basis for the human beginnings. And so closely were the facts of nature observed and registered by the Egyptians that the earliest divine men in their mythology are portrayed as pygmies. Following the zootypes, the primitive human form of Elder Horus was that of Bes, the dancing dwarf. Bes is a figure of Child-Horus in the likeness of a negroid pygmy. He comes capering into Egypt along with the Great Mother, Apt, from Puanta in the far-off south. In reality, Bes-Horus is the earliest form of the pygmy Ptah. In both the dwarf is the type of man in his most primitive shape. The seven powers that cooperate with Ptah are also represented as seven pygmies. Thus the anthropomorphic type comes into view as a pygmy! Moreover, Ptah, the divine dwarf, is the imperfect progenitor of the perfect man in his son Atum. In this way the Egyptian wisdom registers the fact that the pygmy was the earliest human figure known, and that this was brought into Egypt from the forests of inner Africa and the record made in the mythology. In this mode of registering the natural fact the Egyptians trace their descent from the folk who were the first in human form—that is, from the pygmies.

We have now to summarize a few of the pre-Egyptian evidences for the inner African beginnings.

In one of the later chapters of the Book of the Dead[4]—later, that is, in position—there are some ancient mystical names which are said to have been uttered in the language of the Nahsi (the negroes), the Anti, and the people of Ta-Kenset, or Nubia. Dr. Birch thought this and other chapters were modern because of the presence of Amen-Ra[5]. But the later insertion of a divine name or title does not prove the fundamental matter of the chapter to be late. In this the Great Mother is saluted as the Supreme Being, 'the Only One,' by the name of Sekhet-Bast, the goddess of sexual passion and strong drink, who is the mistress of the gods, not as wife, but as the promiscuous concubine—she who was 'uncreated by the gods,' and who is 'mightier than the gods.' To her the eight gods offer words of adoration. Therefore they were not then merged in the put-circle of the nine. It is noticeable too that Sekhet is not saluted as the consort of Ptah. Sekhet was undoubtedly far more ancient than Ptah. But the point is that the outlandish names applied to her in this chapter are quoted from the language of the negroes, therefore parts of the Ritual had been composed in those languages; and if in the languages, then in the lands where these languages were spoken, including the country of the Nahsi, who were so despised by the dynastic Egyptians. This we claim as a partial recognition of the [p.251] southern origin of the Egyptian mythology. In agreement with this, the Great Mother may be identified in chapter 143 as Apt of Nubia, who had a shrine at Nepata on her way to Egypt, Khept, or Khebt[6]. In a text upon a stele among the Egyptian monuments at Dorpat it is said to the worshipper, 'Make adoration to Apt of the dom-palms, to the lady of the two lands.'[7] In this text the old first mother Apt appears as goddess of the mama-tree, that is the dom-palm, which in Egypt is a native of the south. This points to the farther south as the primeval home and habitat of the most ancient hippopotamus goddess, she who thus preceded Hathor in the southern sycamore as Mother-earth or Lady of the Tree, and who in the dom-palm was the 'mama' or mother of the inner Africans.

The King of Egypt as the Suten dates from Sut. The dignity is so ancient that the insignia of the pharaohs evidently belong to a time when the Egyptians wore nothing but the girdle of the negro, and when it was considered a special distinction that the king should complete this girdle with a piece of skin in front and adorn it with the tail of a lioness behind. The oldest and most primitive form of the sacred house in Egypt known from inscriptions of the ancient empire is a hovel dedicated to Sut for a temple. It looks like a hut of wattle-work without daub, and is a prehistoric type of building in the Nile valley, belonging to a civilization immeasurably lower than that of Egypt[8]. Sut the son of Apt was the deity of the first Egyptian nome. Sut is synonymous with the south from which he came with Horus-Behutet, who halted by the way as deity of the second nome. Milne-Edwards has shown the African origin of the ass[9], and this was preserved by the Egyptians in its pristine purity of form. The serpents of equatorial Africa have their likeness in the huge reptiles portrayed in pictures of the Egyptian underworld. The sycamore fig of Hathor and the palm tree of Taht were imported into Egypt from Central Africa. The burying-places of Abydos, especially the most ancient, have furnished millions of shells, pierced and threaded as necklaces, all of which belong to the species of cowries used as money in Africa at the present day[10]. The hoes and wooden stands for headrests used by the Egyptians have their prototypes among the East Central African tribes[11]. Dr. Peters found various customs among the Wakintu in Uganda which made him think the people were connected with the ancient Egyptians. One of these was the practice of embalming the dead and of excavating the rocks. Also their burial mounds are conical, he says, and look like pyramids[12].

One might fill a volume with figures from inner Africa that were developed and made permanent in the symbolism of Egypt.

'My lord the lion' is an African expression used by the Kaffirs and others in speaking of the lordly animal, also of the chief as lion-lord. So likewise in Egypt Osiris as king of the gods was 'my lord the crocodile,' and King Assa is also called 'my lord the king,' as a crocodile[13]. Again, the lion of Motoko is a totem with the Kaffirs in the neighbourhood of Fort Salisbury, Mashonaland. They have a priest of the lion-god called the Mondoro, who is venerated as a sort of spirit in lion shape[14].

[p.252] Sacrifices are offered annually to the lion-god at the Zimbabwe of Mashonaland; and it is held by the natives that all true men pass into the lion form at death, precisely the same as it is with the manes in the Egyptian Ritual, who exclaims, on living a second time, 'I am the lord in lion form,'[15] and who rises again when divinized in that image of superhuman power. Such types were inner African when totemic, and, as the lion of Motoko shows, they were also venerated as representatives of spiritual or superhuman powers which were deified in Egypt as the crocodile divinities Apt, Neith, and Sebek, and the lion-gods Shu, Tefnut, Sekhet, Horus, and Atum-Ra.

In the Egyptian judgment scenes the baboon or cynocephalus sits upon the scales as the tongue of the balance and a primitive determinative of even-handed justice. This was an inner African type, now continued in Egypt as an image of the judge. In a Namaqualand fable the baboon sits in judgment on the other animals. The mouse had torn the tailor's clothes and laid it to the cat, the cat lays it to the dog, the dog to the wood, the wood to the fire, the fire to the water, the water to the elephant, and the elephant to the ant; whereupon the wise judge orders the ant to bite the elephant, the elephant to drink the water, the water to quench the fire, the fire to burn the wood, the wood to beat the dog, the dog to bite the cat, and the cat to bite the mouse; and thus the tailor gets satisfaction from the judgment of the wise baboon, whose name is van in Namaqua, whilst that of the cynocephalus is aan in Egyptian. This in the European folktales is the well-known nursery legend of 'the pig that wouldn't go.' How then did this Bushman or Hottentot fable get into the lowermost stratum of the folktales in England? We answer, the same way that 'Tom Thumb' did, and 'Jack the Giant-killer,' the 'House that Jack Built,' and many more which are the poor relations reduced from the mythology of Egypt to become the märchen of the world. Again, the youthful hero who is Horus in Egypt, Heitsi Eibib among the Hottentots, and the redoubtable little Jack in Britain, is also an inner African figure under the name of Kalikalange. The missionary Macdonald says, 'We know a boy who assumed, much at his own instance, the name of Kalikalange, the hero about whom there are so many native tales, reminding one of the class of tales to which Jack the Giant-killer belongs.'[16] This is the hero who slays the giant or dragon of drought and darkness, or cuts open the monster that swallowed him; who rescues the lunar lady from her imprisonment, and who makes the ascent to heaven by means of a tree, a stalk, or, as in the case of Child-Horus, a papyrus reed. In his Uganda Protectorate[17] Sir H. Johnston has reproduced a local legend of creation derived from the natives, which contains certain constituent elements of the nursery tale of Jack the Giant-killer. 'Kintu was the first man. When he came from the unknown he found nothing in Uganda—no food, no water, no animals, nothing but a blank. He had a cow with him, and on this he lived.' The cow represented the earth as giver of food. Kintu is a form of the universal hero, the hero to whom the tests are applied for discovering whether or no he is the real heir. Kintu eats or [p.253] disposes of 10,000 carcases of roasted cows, and thus proves himself to be the man indeed, as does Jack who outwits the giant in a similar manner. The story includes the beanstalk (or the bean), with other fragments found in the European märchen, including the bringing of death into the world through the disobedience of Kintu, the first man, or by his violating the law of taboo. The Wakintu of Uganda or Rhodesia derive their name from Kintu, the first man of the Central African legends.

In a Zulu legend the underworld is the land of cannibals. Here dwells the devourer from whom the youthful hero makes his escape, together with his sister, by climbing up a tree into the sky country, just as Horus climbs the tree of dawn in coming forth from the underworld. We read in the Ritual of a golden dog-headed ape which is 'three palms in height, without legs or arms.' The speaker in this character says, 'My course is the course of the golden cynocephalus, three palms in height, without legs or arms, in the temple of Ptah.'[18] What this means no mortal knows. It is known, however, that the dog-headed ape as Ani the saluter was emblematic of the moon. Now, in the Kaffir story of Simbukumbukwana there is a child born without legs or arms, who obviously represents the moon in its changes. He began to speak on the day of his birth. 'The girl that was first born who grew up in the valley and lived in the hole of an ant heap,' is called his sister. She has the power to give him legs and arms by repeating his name and saying, 'Have legs and arms!' and to deprive him of them by saying 'Shrink, legs and arms!' This, as a figure of waning and waxing, helps us to understand the dog-headed ape of gold as an image of the moon in the waxing and waning halves of the lunation. In 'the story of the glutton' the conquerors of the swallower are the mother and her twins. These, in an Egyptian form of the mythos, are Sut and Horus, the twin brethren, who war against the monster as two lions, the rehu, on behalf of their mother, who is the lady of light in the moon[19]. In this way we can trace some of the oldest of the folktales concerning the deluge and the lost paradise, the hero as the wonder-working child who climbs a tree or stalk and slays the monster of the dark, to inner Africa, and follow these and others in the mythology of the Egyptians on their way to becoming the universal legends of the human race.

The mythology, religious rites, totemic customs, and primitive symbolism of Egypt are crowded with survivals from identifiable inner African origins. The Egyptian ka or image of a spiritual self was preceded by various rude but representative images of the dead. Livingstone tells us that the natives about Lake Moere make little idols of a deceased father or mother. To these they present beer, flour, and bhang; they light a fire for the spirits to sit round and smoke in concert with their living relatives[20]. The Ewe-speaking natives of the Gold Coast also have their kra or eidolon, which existed from before the birth of a child and is exactly identical with the Egyptian ka.[21] It is a common practice with the Bantu tribes described by the author of The Uganda Protectorate[22] for the [p.254] relatives of deceased persons to carve crude little images as likenesses of the dead, and set them up for worship or propitiation. Offerings are made to these in place of the later ka of the Egyptians. The earlier type of the departed was a bodily portrait. Hence the mummy. The ka is a later spirit likeness. But both imply the same recognition of the ancestral spirits that live on after death. The spirit huts provided for the honoured dead in the dense forests of Central Africa, as by the Wanyamwezl for their mitsimo, by the Congo pygmies[23], and by the Nilotic negroes, which the Portuguese called devil houses, are prototypes of the ka-chambers in Egyptian tombs. Erecting a little hut for the spirits is a recognized mode of propitiation. Lionel Décle, as we have seen, describes his Wanyamwezi as making little huts of grass or of green boughs even when on the march, and offering them to the mitsimo or spirits of their ancestors[24].

One of the funeral offerings found in Theban tombs is a loaf of bread in the shape of a cone (our pastille), or a model in burnt terracotta that images the loaf. Why the offering should be conical is admittedly unknown. This typical cone is inner African, and in a most peculiar way. The Yao people have the custom of making an offering to the dead in a conical form. They do not know how to make bread, but their offering to the spirits consists of a little flour. This they let fall slowly from the fingers on the ground, so that it may form a pile in the shape of a sugar-loaf. If the cone should shape perfectly it is an omen that the offering is acceptable to the spirits. It may be suggested in passing that the conical shape of the pile in flour and the funerary loaf was derived from that of the grave-mound of earth or stones dropped over the buried corpse as the still earlier tribute offered to the dead. British peasants give the name of 'fairy loaves' to the fossil echini or sea-urchins found in Neolithic graves. Obviously these loaves were representative of funerary food that was likewise offered to the dead. The skeleton of a young woman clasping a child in her arms was discovered in a round barrow on Dunstable Downs, the burial mound being edged round with these fairy loaves.

Again, in the mysteries of the Yao people the young girls are initiated by a female who is called 'the cook,' 'the cook of the mystery' (mtelesi wa unyago). This is the instructress who makes the mystery or is the 'cook' that prepares it, and who is mistress of the ceremony. She is the wise woman who initiates the girls, and anoints their bodies with an oil containing various magical ingredients. She clothes them in their earliest garment, the primitive loincloth, that was first assumed at puberty with proud pleasure, and afterwards looked upon askance as the sign of civilized woman's shame. Now this primitive personage has been divinized as the cook in the Kamite pantheon. In Egyptian, tait signifies to cook, and this is the name of a goddess Tait who is the cook in paradise and the preparer of the deceased in the greater mysteries of the Ritual, where she is the cook of the mystery more obviously than a cook as preparer of food. Deceased, in speaking of his investiture for the garden of Aarru, cries, 'Let my vesture be girt on me by Tait!' [p.255]—that is, by the goddess who is the divine cook by name, and who clothes the initiate in the garment or girdle that here takes the place of the loincloth in the more primitive mysteries of inner Africa[25].

The Egyptian record when correctly read will tell us plainly that the human birthplace was a land of the papyrus reed, the crocodile, and hippopotamus; a land of the great lakes in Karua, the Koloë of Ptolemy, or in Apta at the horn point of the earth—that is, in Equatoria, from whence the sacred river ran to brim the valley of the Nile with plenty. The track of civilization with cities springing in its footprints is seaward from the south, not upward from Lower Egypt, which was a swamp when Upper Egypt was already the African home of civilization. The Egyptians always gave priority to the south over the delta in the north. Also the south was and is the natural habitat of the oldest fauna and most peculiar of the sacred zootypes. It is in vain we judge of the race by the figures and faces of the rulers portrayed in monumental times. Primary data must be sought for amongst the Fellaheen and corroborated by the skulls. Captain Burton wrote to me in 1883, saying, 'You are quite right about the African origin of the Egyptians, and I have sent home a hundred skulls to prove it.' (Does anyone know what became of these skulls?)[26]

The African legends tell us that the Egyptians, Zulus, and others looked backward to a land of the papyrus reed as the primeval country of the human race, and that on this, as we shall see, the Egyptians founded their circumpolar paradise in the astronomical mythology. There is a widespread African tradition, especially preserved by the Kaffir tribes, that the primeval birthplace was a land of reeds. The Zulus told the missionary Callaway that men originally 'came out of a bed of reeds.' This birthplace in the reeds was called 'Uthlanga,' named from the reed. No one knew where it was, but all insisted that the natal reed-bed of the race was still extant[27]. It was a sign of lofty lineage for the native aristocracy to claim descent from ancient Uthlanga, the primeval land of birth. The Basutos identify Uthlanga the human birthplace with a cavern in the earth that was surrounded by a morass of reeds. They also cling so affectionately to the typical reed that when a child is born they suspend a reed above the hut to announce the birth of the babe, thus showing in the language of signs that the papyrus reed is still a type of the primitive birthplace in which Child-Horus was cradled on the flower of the papyrus plant or reed. The Zulu birthplace in the bed of reeds was repeated and continued in the nest of reeds and the morass that were mythically represented as the birthplace of the child, which was constellated as the uranograph of Horus springing from the reed. What indeed is the typical reed of Egypt, first in the upper, next in the lower land, but a symbol of the birthplace in the African bed of reeds? Lower Egypt, called Uat in the hieroglyphics, has the same name as the papyrus reed. Also Uati is a title of the great mother Isis who brought forth Child-Horus on her lap of the papyrus flower. Uat in Egyptian is the name of Lower Egypt; uat is the oasis, uat is the water, uat is wet, fresh, evergreen. Uat is the reed of Egypt, the papyrus reed, and a name of the most ancient mother in the Kamite mythology.

[p.256] Seb, the father of food, is clothed with papyrus reeds. The Mount of Earth was imaged as a papyrus-plant in the water of space. Lastly, the Mount of Amenta in the Ritual rises from a bed of papyrus reeds.

Horapollo says of the Egyptians, 'To denote ancient descent they depict a roll of papyrus, and by this they signify primeval food.'[28] This is the same as with the Zulus. The papyrus reed, uat, was turned into a symbol of most ancient descent precisely because it had been the primeval food of the most ancient people, a totem of the most ancient mother of the race when called Uati in Egypt, and a type of the African paradise. As the symbolism shows, people were sometimes derived from and represented by the food on which they lived. Thus the papyrus reed that symbolizes ancient food and long descent would be the sign of the people who once lived on or who ate the shoots of the water plant. The Egyptians continued to be eaters of the lotus and papyrus shoots. Theirs was the land of the reed, and they, like the Zulus or the Japanese or the Pueblos, were the reed people in accordance with the primitive mode of heraldry, just as with the Arunta tribes the witchetty-grub people are those who live on the witchetty-grub as their special totemic food. In later times the papyrus plant was eaten by the Egyptians as a delicacy. Its shoots were gathered for that purpose annually. Bread made from the roots and the seed of the lotus was the gourmand's delight. Lily loaves are mentioned in the Papyrus Anastasi.[29] It is said in the Hymn to the Nile[30] that when food is abundant the poor man disdains to eat the lotus or papyrus plant, which shows that it had been his diet when other food was scarce. The lotus and the papyrus are the two water plants worn as a headdress by the two figures that represent the Nile south and north, and who are often seen binding the flowers to the sam symbol of Upper and Lower Egypt, as if joining the two countries together as the one land of the reed. Uthlanga is not irrecoverable. We glean from other Zulu legends that this was the African birthplace in the bed of reeds, where the two children, black and white, were born of dark and day, and where the race of the reed people broke off in the beginning. This cradle of creation is repeated mythically with Child-Horus in his nest of reeds or bed of the papyrus plant, when the field of reeds was figured in the heavens as the primitive paradise of food and drink.

In the so-called 'cosmogony' of the Japanese it is set forth that the first thing in which life appeared on earth at the beginning was the reed, and the earliest land or 'country-place stand' (Kunitoko tachi) was the land of the reed. Japan was named as the central land of the reed expanse from the fields of reed, whether geographical on the earth or astronomical in the fields of heaven. The 'great reed' of the Japanese mythos is identical with the papyrus reed that represented the mount of earth in Egypt or the lotus of Meru in India. Any country figured as being atop of the reed would be the midland of the world, as Japan is said to be, and the Kamite reed will explain why the land of the Kami should be called Ashi-hara, the place of reeds, when the reed is identified with the papyrus plant. Ashi-hara no naka tsu Kuni, 'the Middle Kingdom of the Reed Plain,' which [p.257] lies upon the summit of the globe, is an ancient name for Japan. This, if mundane, corresponds to the land of the papyrus reed in equatorial Africa, the summit of our earth or, if only mythical, i.e., astronomical, to the reed field of the Aarru paradise upon the summit of the mount in heaven. Again, the great reed standing up out of the water is identical with the typical mount of earth in the Navajo mythology. As the mount grew higher, higher grew the reed. At the time of the deluge all that lived took refuge there, and were rescued from the drowning waters by the reed. This is the papyrus reed which cradled Horus amid the waters, like the infant Moses in the ark of bulrush, applied in a folktale on a larger scale[31].

It is now proposed to seek for the birthplace of the beginnings in Central Africa, the land of the papyrus reed, around the equatorial lakes, by the aid of the Egyptian astronomical mythology and the legendary lore. In the first place, the kami of Egypt, like the kami of Japan, identify themselves by name as the reed-people. And the goddess Uati is the African great mother in the bed of reeds. For it was thence, in the region of the two lakes and in the land of the papyrus reed, that souls in the germ first emanated as the soul of life from water. The Kaffir tradition thus appears to preserve the natural fact which the Egyptians rendered mythically by means of the reed plant as a symbol of the primeval birthplace on earth with Horus issuing from the waters on the reed, which became the lap of life, the cradle and the ark of the eternal child, who is also called the shoot of the papyrus, the primitive natzer.

A spring of water welling from abysmal depths of earth, that furnished food in the papyrus reed and other edible plants, is the earliest form in which the source of life was figured by the Kamite mystery teachers. This is recorded in the Ritual[32]. It was in the birthplace of the reeds and of the reed people in the region of the reeds that light first broke out of darkness in the beginning in the domain of Sut, and where the twin children of darkness and of light were born. The Mother-earth as womb of universal life was the producer of food in various kinds, and the food was represented as her offspring. Horus on his papyrus imaged food in the water plant as well as in the later lentils, the branch of the tree, or in general vegetation. The stands of the offerings presented to the gods in the Ritual are commonly crowned with papyrus plants, which commemorate the food that was primeval. Thus the doctrine of life issuing in and from the papyrus reed was Egyptian as well as Japanese. Naturally the earliest life thus emanating from the water was not human life, but this would be included sooner or later in the mythical representation. Hence the legend of the first man, or person who issued from a reed in the water of the deluge. In this American Indian version the reed is a figure of the birthplace instead of the Zulu bed of reeds, or Uthlanga, the land of reeds, but the typical origin is the same; and as Egyptian the mythos is to be explained.

The origin of a saviour in the guise of a little child is traceable to Child-Horus, who brought new life to Egypt every year as the messu of the inundation. This was Horus in his pre-solar and prehuman characters of the fish, the shoot of the papyrus, or the branch of endless years. In a later stage the image of Horus on his papyrus [p.258] represented the young god as solar cause in creation. But in the primitive phase it was a soul of life or of food ascending from the water in vegetation, as he who climbs the stalk, ranging from Child-Horus to the Polynesian hero, and to Jack ascending heavenward by means of his beanstalk. Now, of all the lands on earth there is no reed land to be compared with the land of the reeds round the equatorial lakes, where the papyrus grows about the waters in jungles and forests so dense that a charging herd of hippopotami could hardly penetrate the bush, which stands out of the water full fifteen feet in height[33], and there if anywhere upon this earth Uthlanga, the original reed land or birth land in the reeds, will yet be found. That is the natural fact which underlies the mythical representation when the Egyptians show us Horus 'on his papyrus' rising from his natal bed of the papyrus plant. Child-Horus on his papyrus is the reed-born in mythology who reflects the natural fact of the human birthplace in the field, the bed, or nest of reeds on earth or in heaven—that is, the African oasis of the beginning, whether the offspring represents food or other elemental force. Now the Egyptian Aarru or paradise, established by Ra, was 'a field of reeds' in seven divisions, and these were papyrus reeds which sprang up from the marshes. Thus the Kamite paradise was a land of the papyrus plant repeated on the summit of the mount in heaven at the north celestial pole[34]. According to their way of registering a knowledge of the beginnings, the Egyptians were well acquainted with the equatorial regions, which they designated 'Apta,' earth. This was afterwards reproduced at the highest point above the uppermost point, the mount, or literally the 'horn-point' of the when the primeval birth land was repeated as the land of rebirth for spirits in heaven.

It has now to be shown that much of the sign-language of astronomy which still survives on the celestial globe is interpretable on the ground and for the reason that the fundamental data of the underlying mythos was Egyptian, although the commencement in Africa may have been indefinitely earlier than the fulfilment in Egypt. From the beginning certain types evolved in the Egyptian mythology have been configurated in the planisphere, many of which remain extant on the celestial globe today. As a concept of primitive thought life came into the world by water. Hence in the mysteries of Osiris water is the throne of the eternal. Earth itself was the producer or the mother of the element, the wet-nurse in mythology, and water was her child by whom an ever-renewing source was imaged as a type in Child-Horus, the eternal child. Water, we shall see, was self-delineated as very heaven. Drought was self-delineated as a huge black reptile coiling round the mount of earth night after night and drinking up the water of light day after day. Darkness and light were self-delineated as two immense, wide-winged birds, one black and one white, which overspread the earth. The great squat-headed evil Apap in the Egyptian drawings is probably a water reptile, and possibly represents the mysterious monster of the lakes in the legends of Central Africa. But, wheresoever its habitat in nature, it supplied one of the types that were depicted in the astronomical ceiling of Kam—the types that have now to be followed [p.259] by means of the mythography in the sign-language of the starry sphere, amongst which Apap, the 'hellish snake' of drought and dearth and darkness, still survives as our own constellation 'Hydra,' the enormous reptile imaged in the celestial waters of the southern heaven. The hero of light that pierced the serpent of drought or the dragon of darkness was also represented as the golden hawk (later eagle), and at Hermopolis the Egyptians showed the figure of a hippopotamus upon which a hawk stood fighting with a serpent[35]. Now, as the hippopotamus was a zootype of the Mother-earth in the water of space, the hawk and serpent fighting on her back portrayed the war of light and darkness which had been fought from the beginning, the war that was a primary subject figured in the astronomical mythology. The hawk represented Horus, who was the bruiser of the serpent's head. Thus the same conflict that was portrayed at Hermopolis may be seen in the constellation of Serpentarius as a uranograph depicted in the planisphere.

The Egyptians called the equator Ap-ta, as the highest land or summit of the earth. This, the earthly Apta in the equatorial regions, was then rendered mythically as the Apta or highest point of the northern heavens in the astronomical representation. And naturally the chief facts of the earthly paradise were repeated for a purpose in the circumpolar highland. Hence the Aarru paradise, as a field of papyrus reeds oozing with the water of life that supplied the world, from the two great lakes into which the element divided at the head of the celestial river or the White Nile of the 'Milky Way.' In coming down the Nile from Karua, the lake country, the migrants had to pass through parching desert sands, which made the south a synonym for Sut, as it is in Egyptian. Their future heaven was in the north, whence came the blessed breezes with the breath of healing from the very land of life. And all the time ahead of them was that fixed polar star in the north—fixed, that is, as a centre of rest and peace amidst the starry revolutions of the heavens. Emerging from the wilderness, they saw in Egypt an oasis watered by the river Nile. Cooler breezes brought the breath of life to meet them on the way, and plenty of sweet, fresh water realized the heaven of the African. The kami found their old lost paradise in 'Uat,' the name signifying green, fresh, well-watered. Uat was literally the land of wet as water. Here then was heaven in the north, heaven as the north, heaven in the water and the breezes of the north. And on this they founded a celestial garden or enclosure, which was configurated by them in the northern heaven as the primitive paradise of edible plants and plenty of water. The river Nile was traced back by the Egyptians to a double source. This in later times was localized at Elephantine, but not originally. The Nile was known to issue from the two great lakes which were the southern source of the river according to the Ritual. A tablet discovered at Gebel Silsileh refers to two of the ancient festivals of the Nile which had fallen into disuse in the time of Rameses II. In this, it is said, 'I know what is written in the bookstore kept in the library, that whenever the Nile cometh forth from the two fountains, the offerings of the gods are to be plenty.'[36] The river was timed [p.260] to come forth from its double welling-place on the 15th of Epiphi, and the inundation to reach Gebel Silsileh, or Khennut, on the 15th of Taht. The first of these dates corresponds to our May the 31st; the second to August the 4th. This allows two months and three day's for the inundation to travel from its swollen and overflowing double-breasted source, wheresoever that was localized, to Gebel Silsileh. The length of the river from the Victoria Nyanza to the sea is now estimated at 3,370 miles. It is less than 3,000 to Silsileh, and water flowing at the rate of only two miles an hour would make 3,120 miles in sixty-five days. This seems to afford good evidence that the two fountains were identified with the two lakes, and that the double source was afterwards repeated locally lower down at Elephantine. The Egyptians had tracked the river to its sources 'in the recesses,' called 'the Tuat of the south,' and the inundation to the bursting forth and overflowing of the southern lakes at high flood[37].

The mother of water in the northern heaven was imaged as the water-cow. Another type of the birthplace was the thigh or haunch of the cow, and one of the two lakes at the head of the Milky Way in the region of the northern pole was called the 'lake of the thigh.' The Osiris[38], on attaining the divine regions of water, air, and food, or, as we say, heaven, exultingly exclaims, 'I alight at the thigh of the lake.' This was the thigh of the cow that was constellated in heaven at least twice over, as a sign of the birthplace, when the birth was water, or Horus, the child of the inundation. Now the name of Tanganyika, from the African 'tanga' for 'the thigh' and 'nyika' for the water, signifies the lake of the thigh or haunch. But the thigh is only a symbol which in sign-language denotes the birthplace that was imaged more completely by the cow itself; the water-cow of Apt, in Apta, which represented earth as the great mother and giver of the water that, according to the legend, burst forth from the abyss in the deluge of the inundation when the lake was formed at first. The lake of the thigh Tanga­nyika was constellated in the northern heaven by name as a uranograph, and this lake of the thigh or haunch was the lake of the water-cow. Hence we find the cow and the haunch are blended together in one group of stars that is labelled the 'Meskhen,' as the womb or birthplace at the summit of the pole. (See p.289,) And, although this lake in Africa is a little over the line to the south, it is near enough to have been reckoned on it, and therefore to have been the earthly prototype of the great lake at the horn-point of the northern pole which the Ritual denominates the 'lake of equipoise' as well as the lake of the thigh. Amongst the other signs that were configurated at the summit of the northern heaven as object-pictures of the old primeval homeland were the fields of the papyrus reed, the waters welling from unfathomable depths, the ancient mother as the water-cow of Apt, who was the living image of Apta as the birthplace in the reeds. Thus, with the aid of their uranographs the Egyptian mystery teachers showed the birthplace in the fields of the papyrus plant; the reed bed in Uthlanga, where the black and white twins of darkness and day were born; the birthplace of the water flowing from its secret source in the land of the two lakes called 'the [p.261] lake of equipoise' and 'the lake of the thigh,' or Tanga, whence the name Tanganyika. There was the water that for ever flowed in fields for ever fresh and green, which figured now the water of life that has no limit, and the food that is eternal in the Kamite eschatology. In the astronomy Apta was the mount of earth as a figure of the equator, whereas the summit of the circumpolar paradise was the mount of heaven as a figure of the pole. In the final picture to the Ritual[39] the mount of Amenta stands in a morass of the papyrus reed. The cow that represented the great mother is portrayed in the two forms of Apt the water-cow and Hathor the milch-cow, as the typical mother amongst the reeds in the place of birth on the earth and thence of rebirth in heaven. Thus, as we interpret it, the imagery of Equatoria was commemorated in the uranographic representation or sign-language of the astronomical mythology.

Sir Harry Johnston sees traces of the Egyptian or Hamitic influence amongst the more primitive dwarfs and negroes of the equatorial regions, but this he speaks of as the result of a returning wave from the Nilotic races[40]. Assuredly the Kamite race of migratory colonizers on the lower Nile did return in later times in search of the old home. Their voyages by water and travels by land had become the subject of popular tales. But this was as travellers, adventurers, naturalists, and miners who explored their hinterland, dug for metals or gems, imported strange animals, and transplanted precious trees to furnish incense for the goddesses and gods. It was not the grown­up, civilized ruti of Egypt, who called themselves 'the men' par excellence, that went back to beget the ape-like race of negroid dwarfs in the central regions of Africa, or to people the impenetrable forests with non-civilized, ignorant, undeveloped manikins. That was not the route of evolution.

It is an ancient and world-travelling tradition that heaven and earth were close together in the beginning. Now the heaven signified in the oldest of all mythologies, the Kamite, was the starry heaven of night upraised by Shu as he stood upon the mount of earth. This was the heaven in which the stars of our two bears revolved about the pole. The writer of the present work has seen in equatorial regions how the Southern Cross arises and the bears go down for those who are going south. The northern polestar dips and disappears, and with it sinks the primal paradise of mythology in general that was configurated in the stars about the pole. On coming north again, the old lost paradise arose once more as paradise regained. At a certain point, in regions of no latitude, the polestar rests for ever on the horizon in the north, or, as the Egyptians figured it, upon the mount of earth in Apta. The heaven of the ancient legends and of the equatorial astronomers was close to the earth, because the polestar rested on the summit of the mount like Anup on his mountain. Such traditions were deposited as the mythical mode of representing natural fact, however much the fact may be obscured. Now, the ordinary heaven of night and day could not supply the natural fact. Heaven is no farther off from earth than ever. Yet there is a starting point in the various mythologies that is equivalent to this beginning, at which time heaven rested on the earth, and was afterwards separated from it by the mythical uplifter of [p.262] the sky. The name of heaven denotes the up-heaven. Nut or Nu, the Egyptian name for heaven, has the meaning and the sign of uplifted. And there was but one starting point at which the heaven could be said to rest upon the earth. This was in the regions of no latitude, where the polestars were to be seen upon the two horizons. As the nomads travelled towards the north, this heaven of the pole, which touched the earth in Equatoria, naturally rose up from the mount, or, as mythically rendered, it was raised by Shu, who stood upon the steps of Am-Khemen to reach the height, and push the two apart with his huge staff that was the giant's figure of the north celestial pole. There were no solstices in Apta. Time, if any, was always equinoctial there. And on this equal measure of day and dark the first division of the circle, the sep or turn-round of the sphere, was founded. When Shu upraised the sky it was equally divided between Sut and Horus, the portion of each being half of the water, half of the mount, or half of the twenty-four hours. And this was the time made permanent in Amenta, where the later register for all such simple mysteries was kept. There are twelve hours light and twelve hours dark in this netherworld, the same as in the equatorial regions. It is the equinoctial time of Shu and Mati. The earth was not an upright pillar in Apta, with the starry sphere revolving round it on a horizontal plane. The risings and settings of the stars were vertical, and the two fixed centres of the poles were on the two horizons, or, in accordance with the Egyptian expression, on the northern and the southern sides of the mount of earth. The sky, as the celestial water, was also divided into two great lakes, one to the north and one to the south of the mount. These survive in the Ritual as the Lake of Kharu and the Lake of Ru to the south and the north of the Bakhu hill 'on which heaven resteth.'[41] The system of dividing the celestial water was apparently founded on the two great equatorial lakes at the head of the Nile, which were repeated in the two lakes of Amenta and in the other pictures of the double source of the great stream now figured in heaven at the head of the Milky Way as 'the stream without end.'

The Egyptians also preserved traditions of Ta-nuter, the holy land that was known by the name of Punt or Puanta. Maspero spells the name Puanit[42]. The present writer has rendered it Puanta. One meaning of anta, in Egyptian, is yellow or golden. Hence Puanta the golden. The name is applied in the Ritual[43] to the land of dawn, or anta, as the golden the land of gold. This was the mythical or divine Anta in Amenta where the tree of golden Hathor grew. In that case, Puanta or Punt is identical with the orient in the mythos. But the land of Puanta is also geographical, and there was an Egyptian tradition that this divine country could be reached by ascending the river Nile[44]. It was reported that in a remote region south you came to an unknown great water which bathed Puanta or the holy land, Ta-nuter. This, we suggest, was that nearest and largest of all the African lakes, now called the Victoria Nyanza, from which the river Nile debouches on its journey north. We gather from the inscriptions of Deir el-Bahari that the inhabitants of that Puanta for which the expedition of Queen Hatshepsu sailed were lake-dwellers. The houses, built on piles, were [p.263] reached by means of ladders, and pile-dwellings imply that the people of Puanta were dwellers on the lake. Further, it is recorded on the monuments that two naval expeditions were made by the Egyptians to the land of Puanta. The first occurred in the reign of Sankh-Ka­Ra, the last king of the eleventh dynasty, long before the expedition to Puanta was made in the time of Queen Hatshepsu (eighteenth dynasty). The leader of this earlier expedition was a nobleman named Hannu, who describes his passage inland through the desert and the cultivated land. On his return to Egypt from the gold land, he speaks of coming back from the land of Seba, and thus far identifies the one with the other. He says: 'When I returned from Seba, or Sebma, I had executed the king's command, for I brought him back all kinds of presents which I had met with in the ports of Puanta, and I came back by the road of Uak and of Hannu.'[45] In the story The Shipwrecked Sailor the speaker says of his voyage: 'I was going to the mines of Pharaoh, in a ship that was cubits long and 40 cubits wide, with 150 of the best sailors in Egypt.' He was shipwrecked on an island, which turned out to be in the land of Puanta. The serpent ruler of the island says to the sailor: 'I am prince of the land of Puanta.' It is not said that this was the land of the mines, but he was sailing to the mines when he reached the land of Puanta[46]. An inscription found in the tomb of Iua and Thua (of the eighteenth dynasty), which tomb was rich in gold, informs us that the gold had been brought from 'the lands of the south.' Also the Mazai tribes are known to have had relations with the people of Puanta. Puanta, as a geographical locality, is said to lie next to the spirit world, or the land of the shades, which is spoken of as being in the south, but as far away as sailors could go upstream; in fact, it was where the celestial waters came from heaven at the sources of the Nile. This surely means that Puanta, the gold land, was at the summit of this world, and therefore closest to the next, where there was nothing but the firmamental water between them and the islands of the blessed.

If Mashonaland should prove to be the gold land of Puantai this would be the geographical Puanta, not Arabia, from which the golden Hathor and the hawk of gold originally came. The symbolism of the ruined cities of Mashonaland, discovered by the explorer Bent, suffices at least to show that the Egyptians of a very remote age had worked the gold mines in that country[47]. Horus on his pedestal or papyrus is a figure not to be mistaken, whether the bird is a hawk or a vulture, for there was also a very ancient Horus of the vulture that was the bird of Neith. The hawk or vulture on the pedestal or papyrus (uat) was indefinitely older than the human type of Horus the child in Egypt. Horus as the hawk or vulture, standing on the column within the necklace zone or cestus, was the child of Hathor; and these two, Hathor and Horus, were the divine mother and child. The gold hawk of Horus is connected with the Egyptian mines, whilst precious metals and stones, especially the turquoise, were expressly sacred to the goddess Hathor. The Egyptian goddess Hathor, as a form of the Earth-mother, was the mistress of the mines, and of precious stones and metals, called mafkat. It was here she gave birth to the blue-eyed golden Horus as her child, her golden calf or hawk of gold. The [p.264] Egyptian labourers who worked the mines of the turquoise country in the Sinaitic peninsula were worshippers of this golden Hathor and the golden Horus. These two are the divinities most frequently invoked in the religious worship of the Egyptian officers and miners residing in the neighbourhood of the mafkat mines. Also the name for a mine in Egyptian is ba or ba-t, and baba, or babait, is a plural for mines, likewise for caverns, grottoes, and lairs underground. Moreover, this district of the Sinaitic mines was designated Baba or Babait by the Egyptian miners. And this name of Baba or Babait, with the plural terminal for the mines, would seem to have been preserved and repeated for the Zimbabwe mines in Rhodesia, the Egyptian word being left there by the Egyptian workers. Lastly, as Mafekh or Mafkhet is a title of Hathor, as mafekh is an Egyptian name for the turquoise, for copper and other treasures of the mines, as well as of Hathor, one wonders whether the name of Mafeking was not also derived from the Egyptian word mafekh. The earliest Ta-Neter or holy land of the Egyptians, then, was Puanta in the south, which was sacred on account of its being the primeval home. But in the mythos the place of coming forth had been given to the sun god in the east, and this became the holy land in the solar mythology which has been too hastily identified by certain Egyptologists with Arabia as the eastern land.

At present we are more concerned with the original race and its primitive achievement than with the return wave from Egypt in the later ages of the pharaohs. The oasis in Africa was a heaven on earth, a paradise in nature readymade in the vast expanse of papyrus reed. Egypt from the beginning was based on the oasis, Uat. We might trace a form of the heptanomis with which Egypt began in the seven oases: the great oasis of Abydos, called Uaht, the great Theban oasis, the oasis of The Natron Lakes, the oasis of El-Kargeh, the oasis of Sinai, the oasis of Dakhel, and the oasis of Bahnesa.

Maspero says the Great Oasis had been at first considered as a sort of mysterious paradise to which the dead went in their search of peace and happiness[48]. It was called Uit or Uat. As late as the Persian epoch the ancient tradition found its echo in the name of the 'Isles of the Blessed,'[49] which was given to the Great Oasis. 'So soon as the deceased was properly equipped with his amulets and formulas, he set forth to seek "the field of reeds."'[50] The 'field of reeds' was the field of Uat, the papyrus reed, which had been repeated in the heavens, from the Uat of Egypt the Uat of the oasis, the Uat of the reed land that was in the beginning. For those who lived on the papyrus shoots, when this was a primeval food, there was a world of plenty in the region of the lakes, which would be looked back to as a very paradise by those who wandered forth into the waterless deserts and suffered cruelly from thirst and hunger midst the arid wastes of burning sand. In seeking 'the field of reeds' the deceased was going back in spirit to Uthlanga, the cradle in the reeds, or to Karua, the land of the lakes; to Apta, the starting-point; to Puanta, the ever-golden; to Merta, the land of the two eyes, or some other form of the primitive paradise, where, as the Ritual has it, he would drink the waters of the [p.265] sacred river at the sources of the Nile. This was the land where food and water had been abundant enough to furnish a type of everlasting plenty for the land of promise in the astronomical mythology and the eschatology.

It is necessary to postulate a commencement in equatorial regions, in order that we may explain certain primeval representations in the land of Egypt. We see a deluge legend originating in the woman's failing to keep the secret of the water source, which was followed by an overwhelming, devastating flood. We see that a legend of the first man—he who brought death into the world by disobeying the law of taboo—is indigenous to the natives of Uganda. A primitive picture of 'the beginning' is also presented in an African story which was told to Stanley by a native of the Bashko on the Aruwimi River, and called 'The Creation of Man.' It is related that, 'In the old, old time all this land, and indeed the whole earth, was covered with sweet water. Then the water dried up or disappeared. No living thing was moving oil the earth, until one day a large toad squatted by one of the pools. How long it had lived or how it came into existence was not known, but it was suspected that the water must have brought it forth from some virtue of its own. On the whole earth there was but this one toad'—which in relation to water was the frog. Then follows the legend of 'creation.' The toad becomes the maker of the primal human pair which came into being in the shape of twins (like Sut and Horus, or the Zulu black and white twins in the bed of reeds), and these are said to be 'the first like our kind that ever trod the earth.'[51] The legend we judge to be an African original relating to the primordial water in which the earth was figured as a 'large toad,' or frog, at the time when no other living thing moved on the earth, and there was no human creature known. The frog floating on the water in the act of breathing out of it was an arresting object to primitive man, and this became a type of earth emerging from the water of space. The constellation of Piscis AustraIis was known to the Arab astronomers as the frog. Indeed, the two fish, the southern fish and the whale, were named by them as the two frogs[52]. But, whichever type was first, a monstrous frog or huge fish, a turtle or the water-cow, it was a figure of the earth amidst the firmamental water, in the lower part of which was the abyss. And here the primal pair are also born as twins, like Sut and Horus. In Egypt the north celestial pole was variously imaged as a mountain-summit, an island in the deep, a mound of earth, a papyrus plant or lotus in the waters of immensity, a tree, a stake, a pole, a pillar, a pyramid, and other types of the apex in heaven.

In Equatoria there was neither pole nor polestar fixed on high in the celestial north. On the other hand, there were two polestars visible upon the two horizons, north and south. These, according to the imagery, might be represented by two jackals, two lions, two giraffes, mountains—the mount and horizon being synonymous—two trees, two pillars of the firmament, or by the two eyes of two watchers. 'Heaven's-Eye Mountain' is a Chinese title for the Mount of the Pole[53]. This would [p.266] apply when only one polestar was visible. But in Equatoria there were two poles or mountains with the eyes of two non-setting stars upon the summits, the only two fixed stars in all the firmament. These we hold to be the 'pair of eyes' or merti that were also a pair of jackals in the Kamite astronomical mythology. But first of the two poles as pillars.

Josephus has preserved a tradition concerning two pillars that were erected in the land of Siriad. He tells us that the children of Seth (Egyptian, Set) were the inventors of astronomy, and in order that their inventions might not be lost, and acting 'upon Adams prediction that the world was to be destroyed at one time by the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and quantity of waters, they made two pillars, the one of brick, the other of stone; they inscribed their discoveries upon them both, that in case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the flood, the pillar of stone might remain and exhibit those discoveries to mankind, and also inform them that there was another pillar of brick erected by them. Now this remains in the Land of Siriad to this day.'[54] Plato likewise speaks of these two columns in the opening of Timaeus[55]. The place where the two pillars, or one of them, traditionally stood was in the land of Siriad. Where that is no mortal knows, but Sen in Egyptian is a name for the south. Sen is also the mount that is figured as the twofold rock which is equivalent to the pillars of the two horizons, south and north. Sen is also the name of the giraffe, a zootype of Sut, the overseer. Siriad, then, we take to be the land of the south where the pillar 'remains to this day.' According to John Greaves, the old Oxford astronomer, 'these pillars of Seth were in the very same place where Manetho placed. the pillars of Taht, called Seiread.'[56]

It is possible to identify the missing pillar of the two, the pillar of Sut in the south. There was a southern Annu and a northern Annu in Egypt, and possibly a relic of the two poles may be recognized in the two Annus, viz., Hermonthes, the Annu of the south, and Heliopolis, the Annu of the north. The original meaning of Annu appears to have been the place of the pillar, or stone, that marked the foundation which preceded the Å-sign of station or dwelling-place. There was an Egyptian tradition which connected Sut, the inventor of astronomy, with Annu, as the original founder of the pillar, which makes him the primary establisher of the pole. As an astronomical character Sut was earlier than Shu. The Arabs also have a tradition that one of the pyramids was the burial-place of Sut. The pillar of brick, being less permanent, went down as predicted in the deluge as a figure of the southern pole, whereas the pillar of stone remained for ever as an image of the north celestial pole, or of Annu, the site of the pillar, in the astronomical mythology. It is reported by Diodorus that Annu (Heliopolis in the solar mythos) was accounted by its inhabitants to be the oldest city in Egypt[57]. Which may have been mystically meant, as Annu was also a city or station of the pole, the most ancient foundation in the northern heaven, described in the eschatology as the place of a thousand fortresses provisioned for eternity.

The two pillars of Sut and Horus were primal as pillars of the two [p.267] poles thus figured in the equatorial regions as the two supports of heaven when it was first divided in two portions, south and north and the pillar or mount of the south was given to Sut, the pillar or mount of the north to Horus. The typical two pillars are identified with (and as) Sut and Horus in the Inscription of Shabaka[58] from Memphis, in which it is said, 'The two pillars of the gateway of the house of Ptah are Horus and Sut.' The present interpretation is that the typical two pillars or props originated as figures of the two poles, the single pillar being an ideograph of Sut, that these were established in the two domains of Sut and Horus to the south and north of the land in which the veriest dawn of astronomy first occurred, and that the types were preserved and re-erected in the earth of eternity as the two supports of the heaven suspended by Ptah for the manes in Amenta, even as the sky of earth had been uplifted and sustained by the two poles of the south and north in Equatoria. Sut and Horus, then, were the twin props of support twice over, once in Equatoria as the two poles, once in Amenta as the two tats of Ptah. Further, two brothers, Sut and Horus, as the founders of the two poles in building the heavens for the ancient mother, may explain the American story of the two brothers who planted each a cane in the house of their grandmother when they started on their perilous journey to the land of Kibalba. The old mother was to know how they fared by the flourishing or withering of the tree or cane, and whether they were alive or dead. Grimm traced the same legend in the story of the two gold children who wished to leave their home and go forth to see the world. At parting they say, 'We leave you the two golden lilies: from these you can see how we fare. If they are fresh we are well; if they fade we are ill; if they fall we are dead.'[59] Now the reason why this story is told in Central America, in India, and in Europe we hold to be because it was first told in Africa and rendered mythically in Egypt.

It appears quite possible that a form of the two typical pillars which were visible at the equator also survives in the two sacred poles of the Arunta natives in Central Australia. These people 'down under' have no northern pole or polestar of the north, but they carry two symbolic poles about with them, which they erect wherever they go as signs of locality or encampment, both of which are limited to the south and the north. One is called the nurtunja. This, so to say, is the north pole of the two, and is never met with in the south. The other, called a waninga, is always limited to the south. The nurtunja is typical of the northern and the waninga of the southern part of the Arunta tribe[60]. Each of these, like the Egyptian tat-pillar, is a sign of establishing or founding, as is shown from its use in the ceremony of young-man-making. In Greek myth the temple of heaven was raised on high by two brothers, who in one version are Trophonios and Agamedes, the builders of the temple of Apollo. The sinking of Trophonios into the cave also corresponds to the engulfing of Sut in his going down south with the disappearing pole.

One of the two legendary pillars of Seth disappeared, the other remained. And when the nomads of the equatorial regions had begun the movement northward on the way that led them down the [p.268] Nile, they would gradually lose sight of the southern polestar, and whatsoever else had been configurated with it in the nightly heaven would sink below the horizon south, like a subsidence of land in the celestial waters. Thus in astronomical mythology a fall from heaven, a sinking down in the waters called a deluge, and a lost primeval home were natural occurrences as certain stars or constellations disappeared from sight for those who travelled northward from the equatorial plain. And these celestial events would be told of as mundane in the later legends of the 'Fall' and 'Flood' and man's lost paradise of everlasting peace and plenty. It is enough, however, for the present purpose that a star or constellation first assigned to Sut sank down into the dark abysm south, and disappeared from the ken of the observers who were on their journey of three thousand miles down into the valley of the Nile. It is certain that Sut went down south to some sort of netherworld, and so became the power of darkness in Amenta, when our earth had been completely hollowed out by Ptah, and Amenta below became the south to the circumpolar paradise in the celestial north. The ancient Egyptians had no antipodes on the outside of the earth. Amenta in the netherworld was their antipodes. Their two poles were celestial and subterrestrial. The north pole was at the summit of the mount. The south pole was in the root-land of the earth below. The Ritual describes the ways of darkness in the entrance to the Tuat as the tunnels of Sut[61], which tends to show that a way to the netherworld was made by Sut when his star and standing-ground went under in the abyss of the beginning in the south, where the Egyptians localized the Tuat or entrance to the underworld, which was the place of egress for the life that came into the world by water from 'the recesses of the south.'

Without doubt the contention of Sut and Horus began with the conflict of darkness and light or drought and water when these were elemental powers, and the birthplace of the twin brothers, one black, one white, was in the bed of reeds. This phase was continued by the twins that likewise struggled for supremacy in the dark and light halves of the moon, which imaged the light eye of Horus and the dark eye of Sut. But the war extended to the whole of nature, that was divided in halves between the Sut and Horus twins, who were the firstborn of the ancient mother in two of her several characters. In Central Africa the year is divided into two seasons of rain and drought. These are equivalent to the two opposite domains of Horus and Sut as powers of good and evil. The winds of the north and south follow suit. The wind from the north in the rainy season is warm and wet and beneficent; on the other hand, the wind that comes up from the South Pole is witheringly dry, the wind therefore of Sut, the power inimical to man and animal in physical nature[62]. The desert drought, like darkness, was an element assigned to Sut. As this was the region of drought and sterility and typhonian sands, and Sut the tawny-complexioned was the force that dominated in the south under the same name, we may see how and where he first acquired his character in Egyptian mythology as representative of the arid desert opposed to water, fertility, and food. Thus Sut versus Horus imaged [p.269] the south versus north. Sut was deadly as the drought; Horus was 'right as rain.' This contention of the combatants and of the south versus the north was continued in the stellar mythos until their reconciliation was effected by some other god, such as Shu, Taht, or Seb. When Sut, or his star, went down from the horizon, mount or pole in the south, he gradually sank to the lowermost parts of the abyss which in the eschatology was called the secret earth of Amenta. Here his character as the opener of roads or ways in the astronomy was continued into the Egyptian eschatology by Ap-Uat or the jackal as the conductor of souls. He was the deity of the dark. In the oblong zodiac of Denderahi the two jackals of the south and north, continued in the solar mythos, are figured opposite to each other. These represent the two forms of Ap-Uat, the opener of ways, who was imaged as a jackal, the seer in the dark. One jackal was known as guide of the southern ways, the other as opener of the northern ways. No Egyptologist has gone further than to suggest that this north and south may have been in Amenta—as they also were. But no one has dared to dream of a beginning with the primitive paradise in Equatoria.

EGYPTIAN WISDOM

Deluded visionaries, lift your eyes,
Behold the truths from which your fables rise
These were realities of heavenly birth,
And ye pursue their shadows on the earth.

'The wisdom of the Egyptians,' said Augustine, 'what was it but astronomy?'[63] The answer is that it was not simply the science of astronomy in the modern sense, but astronomical mythology was the subject of subjects with the ancient 'mystery-teachers of the heavens,' as the Egyptian urshi or astronomers were self-designated. The most puerile report of all which has played false with us so long is the exoteric tradition in the Hebrew Pentateuch.

Professor Sayce has asserted that 'Babylonia was really the cradle of astronomical observation'[64]. To which one might reply with the wise Egyptian, 'Do you really know that, or is it that you only pretend to know?' The author of Researches into the Origin of the Constellations of the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Babylonians also claims a Euphratean origin for these, whilst admitting that 'Egypt was not indebted to any foreign region for her original scheme of constellations, which are entirely or almost entirely distinct,'[65]. But it is useless or puerile to discuss the genesis of astronomical mythology with the African originals omitted, and without allowing for the alterations that were made by Greeks and Euphrateans in the course of transmitting a celestial chart. To omit the Kamite 'wisdom' from the reckoning is to dispense with evolution and leave no ground for a beginning—no gauge of time nor data of development. Moreover, the primary question of the origins is not astronomical but mythological. The types of this sign-language had [p.270] been founded in totemism. These were first employed for distinguishing the human motherhoods and brotherhoods. They were reapplied to the elemental powers in mythology, and afterwards repeated in the constellation figures as a mode of record in the heavens which can still be read by aid of the Egyptian wisdom, but not by means of the Semitic legendary lore. The primitive constellations might be described as Egyptian ideographs configurated in groups of stars, with the view of determining time and season and of registering the prehistoric human past.

The principle of representation was similar to that of the modern teachers who draw their diagrams upon the blackboard. In like manner the mystery teachers of the heavens approximately shaped the constellation figures on the background of the dark, to be seen at night and to be expounded in the mysteries. For example, if they were desirous of memorizing some likeness of the old primeval home in Apta at the horn-point of the earth, this would naturally be done by repeating the especial imagery of the equatorial regions at the highest point of beginning in the northern heaven as seen in Egypt. Or, if they wished to show that the river of the inundation issued from an abyss of water in the remotest south, this could be accomplished by constellating the course of the stream in heaven on its long and winding way from the star Achernar to the star Rigel at the foot of Orion. Hence the water of the inundation was depicted in and as the river Eridanus. The contest between Horus the lord of light and the serpent of the dark was made uranographic in the 'Serpent-Holder.' The conflict between Horus who came by water and the dragon of drought was exhibited by the Apap-reptile being drowned in the inundation as the monster 'Hydra.' The scene configurated in the southern heaven where the conqueror Orion rose to bruise the serpent's head or crush the dragon under foot is also represented in the Ritual when Apap is once more put in bonds, cut up piecemeal, and submerged in the green lake of heaven[66]. Other imagery in the planisphere bears witness to the drowning of the dragon Apap in the waters of the inundation. The monster imaged in 'Hydra' is treated as carrion by the crow that is perched upon it, pecking at its dead body. Or, if we suppose the mystery teachers of the heavens wished to constellate a figure of the mount of earth amidst the waters of surrounding space, and that this was in the time of the most primitive mound-builders, when no conical pillar could as yet be carved in wood or stone, how would they figure the object-picture forth as a uranograph? The earth was thought of as a mount amid the firmamental water, and to image this they would naturally raise a mound of earth. At the same time the heap of earth had acquired a sacred character in relation to the dead, and had become a kind of altar mound piled up with offerings of food. And such a figure we find in Ara, the southern altar or the altar mound. The earliest altar raised had been the mound of earth, and this was used to typify the mount of earth. Aratus, speaking of 'the southern altar's sacred seat,' calls this constellation 'a mighty sign.'[67] Manilius says of the constellation, 'Ara mundi templum est'[68]. It is traditionally connected with the war of the earth-born giants or elemental powers which were succeeded by the glorious ones or khuti in the astral [p.271] mythos. The Mesopotamian mound-builders likewise show us that the most primitive type of foundation was the mound, that the earth-mound passed into the foundation of brickwork as the pillar, and the pillar culminated in the Ziggurat. So in Egypt the earth-mound led up to the pyramid with steps, that culminated in the altar-mound of stone. The Chinese still call the altar a mound. Because of its being a figure of the earth amidst the Nun, the altar-mound was raised immediately after the deluge in the Semitic mythos. In this way the teachers who first glorified the storied windows of the heavens, like some cathedral of immensity, with their pictures of the past, are demonstrably Egyptian, because the sign-language, the mythos, the legends, and the eschatology involved are wholly Egyptian, and entirely independent of all who came after them. The so-called 'wisdom of the ancients' was Egyptian when the elemental powers were represented first as characters in mythology. It was Egyptian when that primeval mythology was rendered astronomically. It is also Egyptian in the phase of eschatology. Speaking generally, and it would be difficult to speak too generally from the present standpoint, the Egyptian mythology is the source of the märchen, the legends, and the folklore of the world, whilst the eschatology is the fountainhead of all the religious mysteries that lie between the earliest totemic and the latest Osirian, that were ultimately continued in the religion of ancient Rome. The mysteries were a dramatic mode of communicating the secrets of primitive knowledge in sign-language when this had been extended to the astronomical mythology. Hence, we repeat, the Egyptian urshi or astronomers were known by the title of 'mystery teachers of the heavens,' because they explained the mysteries of primitive astronomy.

For one thing, a later theology has wrought havoc with the beginnings previously evolved and naturally rendered. And we have consequently been egregiously misled and systematically duped by the Semitic perversions of the ancient 'wisdom.' There was indeed 'a fall' from the foothold first attained by the Egyptians to the dismal swamp of the Assyrian and Hebrew legends. In Egyptian mythology compared with the Babylonian the same types that represent evil in the one had represented good in the other. The old Great Mother of evil, called the dragon-horse in the Assyrian version, was neither the source nor the product of evil in the original. The serpent-goddess Rannut, as renewer of the fruits of earth in the soil or on the tree, is not a representative of evil. We hold that moral evil in the mythical domain is an abortion of theology which was mainly Semitic in its birth. The Kamite beginning with the Great Mother and the elemental powers which are definite and identifiable enough in the Egyptian wisdom became confused and chimerical in Babylonian and Hebrew versions of the same sign-language; the dark of a benighted heaven followed day. Elemental evils were converted into moral evil. The types of good and ill were indiscriminately mixed, pre-eminently so in the reproduction of the old Great Mother as Tiamat. Originally she was a form of the Mother-earth, the womb of life, the suckler, the universal mother in an elemental phase. But the types of good and evil were confounded in the later rendering. The creation of evil as a [p.272] mis-creation of theology is plainly traceable in the Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Hebrew remains. The Great Mother, variously named Tiamat, Zikum. Nin-Ki-Gal, or Nana, was not originally evil. She represented source in perfect correspondence to Apt, Ta-Urt, or Rannut in the Egyptian representation of the Great Mother, who, howsoever hideous, was not bad or inimical to man; the 'mother and nurse of all,' the 'mother of gods and men,' who was the renewer and bringer forth of life in earth and water. Nor were the elemental offspring evil, although imaged in the shape of monsters or of zootypes. As Egyptian, the seven anunaki were spirits of earth, born of the Earth-mother in the earth, but they were not wicked spirits. The elements are not immoral. These are a primitive form of the seven great gods who sit on golden thrones in Hades as lords of life and masters of the underworld. Moreover, the seven Nunu or Anunas can be traced to their Egyptian origin.

In the Cuthean legend of creation we are told that the great gods created 'warriors with the body of a bird' and 'men with the faces of ravens.' 'Tiamat gave them suck.' 'Their progeny the mistress of the gods created.' 'In the midst of the (celestial) mountains they grew up and became heroes' and increased in number. 'Seven kings, brethren, appeared as begetters'—who are given names as signs of personality[69]. Now the seven children of the great Mother as Egyptian were produced as two plus five. The Sut and Horus twins were born warriors or fighters. They are portrayed as two birds, the black vulture or raven of Sut and the gold hawk of Horus. These, the first two children imaged as two birds, one of which is black, will or may account for the two bird races, one of which had the face of a raven and were a black race, or were the 'black-heads' in Akkad. The Sut and Horus twins were succeeded by five other powers, so that there were seven altogether, all brothers, all males or begetters—the seven which constituted a primary order of gods, as fellow-males who were the 'Nunu' of Egypt, which became the Anunas or primordial male deities of ancient Babylonia. But the seven nature powers evolved in the Egyptian mythos were the offspring of the great Earth-mother, not the progeny of Apap. They were native to the nether earth, but were not wicked spirits. They are spoken of in the Ritual[70] as 'those seven Uraeus-deities who are born in Amenta.' The serpent type is employed to denote the power, but it is the good serpent, the uraeus-serpent of life and of renewal, not the evil reptile Apap. These the Euphrateans changed into the seven evil spirits or devils of their theology. The spawn of Apap in Egypt are the sebau, which were numberless in physical phenomena and never were portrayed as seven in number. The Euphrateans turned the evil serpent Apap into Tiamat, the old Great Mother in the abyss of birth, where she has been supposed to have brought forth the seven powers of evil and to have been herself the old serpent with seven heads. In Egypt, happily, we get beyond the rootage of mythology in Babylonia and Akkad. The goddess Rannut was a form of the Earth-goddess as the serpent-mother. The serpent brood or dragon progeny of Rannut are mentioned in the, Ritual, where they have become a subject of ancient knowledge in the [p.273] mysteries[71]. Elsewhere they are called the seven divine uraei or serpents of life. There are no seven serpents of death, no seven evil serpents, in the Kamite representation. The seven uraei, though elemental, born of matter, and of the earth earthy, like their mother, are not evil powers; neither are they in the same category with the Sebau of Apap or the sami-fiends of Sut; whereas in the Euphratean version these have become seven wicked spirits as the evil brood of the Great Mother Tiamat. They are also portrayed as the seven heads or potencies of an infernal snake, which had been Egyptian, but without the seven heads, the types of good and evil being mixed up together as Euphratean. The Kamite elemental powers were just the powers of the elements represented by zootypes. They might be sometimes fearsome, but they were not baneful. The inimical forces of external nature, the evil spawn of drought, plagues, dearth, and darkness, called the sebau or the sami, had preceded these, whereas in Babylonia the two categories are confused and the seven have been reproduced as altogether evil. They are sevenfold in all things evil: seven evil demons, seven serpents of death, seven evil winds, seven wicked spirits; seven in the hollows of the earth, seven evil monsters in the watery abyss; seven evil incubi, seven plagues. But even these seven baleful and injurious spirits of Babylonia originated as powers of the elements, no matter where. Hence the first is a scorpion of rain (compare the curse of rain); the second is a monster with unbridled mouth (thunder); the third is the lightning-flash; the fourth is a serpent; the fifth is a raging dog; the sixth is a tempest; the seventh is the evil wind. Here the whole scheme of evil is meteorological, and is based upon bad northern weather[72]. The theological perversion and the degradation of the type are traceable in Babylonia. The seven serpent powers were originally the same. In Egypt they are the seven spirits of the earth. And of the seven in Babylonia it is said in the Magical Text from Eridu: 'those seven in the earth were born. Those seven in the earth grew up. Those seven from the earth have issued forth.'[73] Only in Babylonia the Great Mother as the crocodile type of water has been confounded with the Apap-reptile of evil, and made to spawn the evil powers in the darkness of later ignorance. We can watch the change in a Babylonian version of the mythos. The seven nature forces here originated as seven evil powers; they were 'rebellious spirits' and 'workers of calamity' that were 'born in the lower part of heaven,' or the firmamental deep.[74] They are called 'the forces of the deep,' for ever rising in rebellion. In short, they are one with the sebau of the Ritual, who were the progeny of Apap, which have been confounded with the 'seven' elemental spirits who were not originally evil. The beneficent great Mother-earth who had been imaged by the sloughing serpent as a type of renewal and rejuvenescence was transmogrified into the serpent of theology, the very devil in a female guise, the author of evil that was ultimately represented as a woman who became the mother of the human race, and who doomed her offspring to eternal torment ere she gave them birth in time. The Hebrews follow the [p.274] Babylonians in confusing the uraeus-serpent of life with the serpent of death. The primal curse was brought into the world by Apap the reptile of drought, dearth, and darkness, plague and disease, but the evil serpent began and ended in physical phenomena. Apap never was a spiritual type, and was never divinized, not even as a devil. The beneficent serpent Rannut represents the mother of life, the giver of food in fruits of the earth or the tree. She is portrayed as the mother both in the form of a serpent and also as the human mother. But good and evil have been badly mixed together in the Hebrew version of the Babylonian perversion of the Egyptian wisdom.

The way in which the Kamite mythos was converted into Semitic legendary lore and finally into biblical history is palpably apparent in the story of the fall. The woman offering fruit as temptress in the tree was previously represented in sign-language as the serpent which was the symbol of renewal in the tree, as is shown when the reptile offers the fruit to the man. Thence came the serpent-woman, who was a compound of the zootype and the anthrotype, and who was damned as Mother Eve, and deified as Rannut, the giver of the fruits of earth. Conclusive evidence of the way that changes were made in the appropriation of the prototypes and their re-adaptation to the change of fauna, and likewise of later theology, can be shown in relation to the primordial great mother who is Tiamat in Babylonia. One of her typical titles is the 'dragon-horse,' and as the Egyptians had no horse, it might be fancied at first sight that such a compound type as the dragon-horse, which also figures in Chinese mythology, was not Egyptian. The ancient Egyptians had no horse, and their dragon was a crocodile. The hippopotamus was their first water-horse as male—that is, the water-bull. As female it was the water-cow. Now, the old first genetrix Apt (Khept, or Ta-Urt), when represented as a compound figure is a hippopotamus, that is the water-horse, in front, and a crocodile, that is the dragon, behind. The dual type of Tiamat the dragon-horse is based on the crocodile and hippopotamus, which are to be seen combined in the twofold character of the great Mother Apt, and these two animals were unknown to the fauna of Akkad and Babylonia. Thus as Babylonian they are not derived directly from nature, but from the mythology and the zootypes that were already extant in Egypt as African.

Horus, as Sebek, was the great fish of the inundation, typical of food and water. This great fish is the crocodile, which was applied to Horus as a figure of force in his capacity of solar god, the crocodile in Egypt being a prototype of the mythical dragon—not the evil dragon, but the solar dragon, which was known in relation to Sebek and to Saturn as the dragon of life. In one of the Greco-Egyptian planispheres this dragon keeps its original form and remains a crocodile. It is portrayed as a constellation of enormous magnitude, and is truly the great fish of Horus-Sebek that was first of all a figure of the inundation constellated in the stellar mythosi and reapplied to the power that crossed the waters as the solar Horus of the double horizon[75]. The only form of evil to be found in the abyss was the dark and deadly power of drought, that, as feared, might drink or dry up all the water. This was figured as the Apap-reptile [p.275] or some other form of the monster Hydra, the prototypal serpent of the sea. The mother of life in the abyss was the giver of water as the wet nurse of the world, not the destroyer of the water.

In Babylonia the tree of life was changed into a tree of death. The serpent in the tree that offers fruit for food, as Rannut, the giver of food and representative of Mother-earth, was transformed into the evil serpent that 'brought death into the world and all our woe,' but which had originated as a beneficent figure in the Kamite representation of external nature. The transmogrifying of Tiamat, the mother of all and suckler of the seven elemental powers, into the dragon of evil might be followed on other lines of descent, as in the conflict of Bel-Merodach and the dragon[76]. In the Egyptian representation Apap the dragon of drought is drowned in the water by Horus of the inundation, whose weapon therefore is the water flood. Now in warring with Tiamat the deluge is the 'mighty weapon' wielded by Bel. 'Bel (launched) the deluge, his mighty weapon, against Tiamat, inundating her covering,'[77] or drowning the dragon of drought. Thus Tiamat is destroyed by Bel with the deluge, where Apap was drowned by Horus in the inundation. This again shows that the great Mother Tiamat, the suckler, as the giver of water, had been converted into the evil dragon of drought. The good crocodile has also been transmuted into the evil dragon and portrayed as falling down head foremost from the starry summit of heaven to be trodden under foot and crushed beneath the heel of Horus, who is Herakles in Greece, Krishna in India, Merodach in Assyria. It was the same with other fauna. The pregnant hippopotamus was changed for the always female bear or the pregnant woman. The two dogs have been substituted for the two jackals of the south and north, the first two openers of the roads in heaven. The eagle of Zeus takes the place of the hawk of Ra, and the raven, the black Neh of Sut; the legend follows, and the conflict between the eagle and the serpent is substituted for that of the warring hawk and serpent in the Egyptian mythos. The huge Apap-reptile of drought and darkness has been supplanted by the chimerical monster that is slain by Gilgamesh the solar god. And when the totemic matriarchate has been followed by the patriarchate, and the goddess of the 'living word' in heaven has been changed in the Euphratean system for the lord who is 'the voice of the firmament'; when the waterman has replaced the multi-mammalian wateress, the cow or sow of an earlier system of signs; when the heroes, or mighty ones, have been superseded by simple shepherds of the heavenly flocks—it becomes a question of very minor import who made the changes and forged the counterfeits, or whether the originals were deliberately disguised by the Akkadians or Babylonians, Phoenicians or Greeks.

In the course of the present inquiry we shall learn that the creation exoterically described in the Semitic legends of the beginning was not cosmogonical. Neither was it what one writer has called it, 'the cosmography of appearances.'[78] It was uranography, not cosmography, and uranography is sign-language constellated in the stars. That which has been called 'chaos' in the 'legends of creation' was a condition in which there was neither law nor order, time nor name, nor means [p.276] of representing natural phenomena. But it does not mean there were no natural phenomena because there had been no mode of expression. Things existed even when they had no name or record in the Babylonian mythology. It was never pretended in the Egyptian wisdom that there was any creation of the elements.

Ground to stand on, food to eat, water to drink, air to breathe, had always been, and were in no wise dependent upon any mode of representation; whereas the mythical representation did depend upon the elements or nature-forces being already extant to be named or to be constellated and become pictorial for the purpose of the mystery teachers. In no land or literature has the mythical mode of representation been perverted and reduced to drivelling foolishness more fatally than in some of the Hebrew legends, such as that of Jonah and the great fish, which is connected with the origin of the fish-man in mythology who was born of a fish mother whom we shall identify with the constellation of the southern fish, and Horus of the inundation. The most ancient type of the fish was female, as a representative of the great Mother-earth in the water. This as Egyptian was the crocodile. She was the suckler of crocodiles in the inundation. She was the bringer-forth as great fish or crocodile in the astronomical mythology. One of her children was the crocodile-headed Sebek, who made the passage of the Nun by night as sun god in the solar mythos. The fish-man was at first the crocodile of Egypt, next the crocodile-headed figure of Horus who is called 'the crocodile god in the form of a man.'[79] The deceased assumes this form to cross the waters in the netherworld, because it had been a figure of the solar god in the mythology. The conversion of the crocodile god in the Nun to the fish-man of Babylonia is thus made plausible. Jonah is a form of the fish-man in the biblical story (which is neither mythology nor eschatology), and therefore a figure of the solar god who made passage of the waters as Horus the crocodile or as Ea the fish-man Nineveh. As usual in later legend, the anthropomorphic rendering re-faces and thus defaces the type. It was the fish itself that the waters of the inundation. It was the typical fish that swam nocturnal waters, or the sun god represented by the mighty whereas, this being 'history,' Jonah is made mere man, and therein needed the great fish to carry him across the Nun or to land him Nineveh. Birth, or rebirth, from the great fish in the Lower Nun one of the oldest traditions of the race. It was represented in the mysteries and constellated in the heavens as a means of memorial. The great fish that landed Jonah on dry ground may still be seen as 'Ketos' with its enormous mouth wide open at the point of emanation from the Nun, just where the landing-place on earth is represented in the equatorial regions on the celestial chart.

Naturally there would be some changes in the constellations with the change of fauna as the primitive wisdom passed from land to land, but that is a different matter from working the oracle of celestial orrery on behalf of false and therefore all the more virulent theology. It can be demonstrated that the astronomical mythology of Egypt passed into Akkad and Babylonia, with the race of Cushite 'black-heads,' to become the wisdom of the 'Chaldees' and the Persian magi in after ages, including such primary types [p.277] the abyss of the beginning in the lower firmament, the Great Mother as a fish or dragon = crocodile in the abyss, and the fish-man born of the fish-mother from the abyss. According to the legend related by Berosus, a divine fish-man, Oannes, or Oan, who had his dwelling in the Persian Gulf or Erythrean Sea, came forth from thence to teach the Chaldeans all they ever knew, when, as it is said in the native tradition, the people wisely 'repeated his wisdom.'[80] In all probability the instructor as a fish-man in Babylonia was represented by Ea, whose consort was Davki or Davkina, the Earth-mother corresponding to the Egyptian Great Mother, one of whose names was Tef. 'Among the chief deities reverenced by the rulers of Telloh was one whose name is expressed by the ideographs of a "fish" and an "enclosure," which served in later days to denote the name of Nina or Nineveh.'[81] The same sign, i.e., of a fish, and enclosure in the Egyptian hieroglyphics, signifies an, to appeal, to show, to teach, as did the fish-man. An in Egyptian is a name of the teacher, the scribe, the priest. An was the fish in Egypt. An, with the fish for ideograph, is an ancient throne name that was found by Lepsius among the monumental titles on a tomb near the pyramids of Giza[82]. This an, to show, to reveal, An, the fish of the enclosure, An, the teacher, as the fish, is the likeliest original of the Oan or Oannes who issued from the waters to show the Babylonians how to live, as the mythos was reflected in the later legend. Horus-Sebek was the earliest fish-man known to mythology. He calls himself the fish in the form of a man. Yet he issued from the female fish as a fish, the crocodile as son from the crocodile as Apt the mother and not as a man ejected from the mouth of a fish, as the legend reads when ignorantly literalized. The fish-mother also survived in the divine lady Nina, who was represented by the ideograph of a fish enclosed in a basin of water[83], which has the same significance as the fish-mother in the lake at Ascalon.

But to reach a beginning the bottom must be plumbed in the abyss or nether parts of the firmamental Nun upon the outside of the mount by means of which the earth was imaged in the astronomical mythology. The abyss was known by various names in different versions of the mythos. It is the Phoenician baev or deep. It is the bau of the Hebrew Genesis. It is the bau or bahu as Egyptian. The word bahu is also a name for the god of the inundation called the power of the southern lakes. 'I am Bahu the Great' is said four times over (in the Magic Papyrus[84]) at the breaking forth of the water power from its southern source in the abyss of the dragon, the crocodile, or the Southern Fish[85]. The Egyptian also has an earlier form of the word bahu in 'bab,' for the well or whirlpool as a welling source of water. Another term for this outrance from the Nun is the tepht, which signifies the abyss, the source, the outlet. The Tiavat or Thavath of Berosus[86] is a form of the Great Mother as a type of the watery abyss which is the Egyptian tepht, the abyss, the source, the well, the hole from whence the water issues, the dwelling underground where the dragon-horse gave suck to her brood of monsters in the earth. Tepht or Tept is also an Egyptian name for the old first Great Mother as a [p.278] figure of source. This likewise had been applied to the place of emanation for the waters of the Nile which issued from the well of source, the bahu, tepht, or tuat. But the tepht of source, the lair of the dragon, the 'hole of the snake' had been the outrance of the Nile from the abyss before there was a goddess Thavath or Tiamat in Assyria. So was it with the bau, bahu, or bab. These names had been applied to the source of the inundation itself and localized in Egypt before they were repeated in the astronomical mythology to become a subject of Semitic legendary lore. The bau, the bahu, or bab is Egyptian. The tepht and tuat are likewise Egyptian; and these names had been (already) applied to the source of the inundation and to the facts of earth that formed the mould of the astronomical mythology.

In the later Semitic legend it was said the earth was founded on the flood, as if it were afloat upon the water of the abyss. But according to the primary expression the earth stood on its own bottom in the water, at the fixed centre, with the tree upon the summit as a figure of food and water in vegetation. The mythical abyss of the beginning was the welling-place of water underground where life was brought to birth by the Great Mother from the womb of the Abyss. In the Ritual this is described as the Tuat, a place of entrance to and egress from the lower earth of Amenta. It is a secret deep that nobody can fathom, which sends out light in the dark, and 'its offerings are eatable plants.'[87] It is the birthplace of water and vegetation, and therefore, more abstractly, of life. The bottomless pit is a figure that was derived from this unplumbed deep inside the earth itself. From this abyss the Mother-earth (as womb of life) had brought forth her elemental progeny as the perennial renewers of food to eat, water to drink, and air to breathe.

The Tuat in the recesses of the south is likewise identified in the hymns as the secret source of the river Nile, which is thus traced to the abyss. Such was the birthplace of the beginning, the birthplace of water in the beginning from which the papyrus plants arose as the primeval food, and as the fact is registered in the Ritual. In the Magic Papyrus the abyss is comprehensively spoken of as 'the water's well.'[88] It is the habitat of the dragon called 'the crocodile coming out of the abyss.' It is also the lair of the Apap-monster, of whom it is said by Shu, 'If he who is in the water opens his mouth, I will let the earth fall into the water's well,' being the 'south made north, or the earth turned upside down.'[89] Here the two dragons can be identified together as the crocodile-dragon of water and the Apap-dragon of drought, that were at war from the beginning as antagonists in the abyss. The strife in the abyss was between the crocodile of water and the fiery dragon of drought, the two dragons of good and evil, Sebek-Horus and the dragon or reptile of Apap. Both were born of the abyss; hence the scholia on chapter 17 of the Ritual add, 'The devourer comes from the lake of Puanta,' or the water of the abyss which the Egyptians traced to the 'recesses' in the south. The beginning in heaven, as on earth, was with water. Water was the first thing rendered uranographically, not created, in the southern hemisphere. This when 'gathered into one place' was localized as 'the water.' The [p.279] Egyptians had a huge southern constellation dedicated to Menat the wet-nurse, called 'the Stars of the Water.'[90] The 'Southern Fish' and 'Ketos' are both depicted in this water of the south or the abyss. Aratus, speaking of the stars in the neighbourhood of these great fishes or monsters of the deep, says 'they are all of them called "the water"'[91]. Earth, the Great Mother, was imaged as the breeder of life and the bringer forth from this abyssal water in the south. She was represented in two mythical characters. In one she is the mother who brought forth on dry ground, as the hippopotamus (or its equivalent type); in the other she was the mother of life in water who is figured as the Southern Fish low down in the deep of the southern heaven.

In mythology that which has been called 'creation' begins with duplicating by dividing: darkness was divided from light, dry land as breathing-place was divided from water; the north was divided from the south, and earth was divided from heaven, as in the Japanese creation. So the power of the two monsters (in the Book of Enoch) 'became separated on the same day, one being in the depths of the sea and one in the desert'[92]—that is, one in the water, as Leviathan (the crocodile or dragon), and one as the hippopotamus on dry ground. Enoch asks the angel to show him 'the power of those monsters and how they became separated on the same day of creation, one in the depths of the sea, above the springs of waters, and one in the dry desert.' It is said of the two monsters that they had been prepared by the people of God to become food. In this there is a broken ray of the refracted mythos. The two monsters had represented food and drink from the first, one as the mother of life in the earth, the other in the waters. These two monsters were prepared for food in the garden or enclosure of the beginning. The name of one is Behemoth, the name of the other Leviathan. Behemoth is the Egyptian Bek­hamut, the female hippopotamus, and Leviathan answers to the crocodile or dragon of the deep. The rabbis repeated a true tradition when they rendered the biblical 'Behemoth' not as a plural of majesty, but as a pair of beasts. They were a pair of beasts in the mythology of Egypt. The female Behemoth was the original Great Mother Kep, or Apt; the male was her son. The crocodile also, as zootype, was both male and female. For his purpose, however, Enoch makes Leviathan a male monster and Behemoth female. Of course the type is or may be differentiated by the sex. The two monsters in the Egyptian starry scheme are both female as two forms of the Great Mother, who was the hippopotamus in her forepart and the crocodile behind, or the crocodile in the south and the hippopotamus in the north. Thus the hippopotamus and crocodile which were natural in the Nile had become two huge, indefinite monsters of legendary lore in the Book of Enoch, and the two survived as the types of dry and wet, for land and water. The suggestion now to be made is that the two monsters of dry and wet, or earth and water, were constellated as the Southern Fish and Ketos, or the whale, but that the whale has been substituted for the hippopotamus by the Euphrateans or the Greeks.

The Southern Fish on the celestial globe is portrayed in the act of [p.280] emaning a stream of water from its mouth, whereas the monster Ketos is depicted as the breather out of the water, the two being representative of the earth as the mother of life in the water called the abyss. In the Sut and Horus mythos the first two children of the ancient mother represent the conditions of dry and wet. They were born twin because the conditions were co-extant in earth and water. In the course of time everything that was dry, desiccative, or of the desert was ascribed to Sut, whereas the products of water were assigned to Horus. Hence the two monsters were continued as types of the twins. The hippopotamus of earth as male was given to Sut. The crocodile of water was given to Horus, to typify the fish as food of the inundation.

The 'abyss of waters' is described by Berosus[93] as the habitat of most hideous beings, which had been produced by a 'twofold principle' that was as yet undiscreted into wet and dry. 'The person who was said to have presided over them was a female named Omoroca.'[94] Then came Belos 'and cut the woman asunder, and of one half formed the earth, and of the other half the heaven or firmament.'[95] This is a mode of discreting the twofold principle of the dry earth and the celestial water. The story told by Berosus is a later legendary form of the mythos. The duplication of the motherhood is the same, but with a change of type. The later woman has taken the place of the cow that was cut in two, divided, or made twain as the water-cow of earth and the milch-cow of heaven. Omoroca is the Great Mother who was one as the representative of earth, and was then divided to become the representative of earth and water. The formation of earth and heaven out of the halves is identical with separating earth and water and distinguishing wet from dry.

The 'creation' with which we are now concerned is uranographic as a mode of fashioning and giving names to the earliest constellation figures, those that were truly primitive. Thus in the beginning of the astronomical mythology there is a figure of uncreated ground that stands in space or amidst the firmamental water.

If we use the word 'creation,' which has been so ignorantly abused, the first creation figured in the astronomical mythology was the birth of water or, more abstractly, of life from the water, the source whence came the inundation with its blessings to the rainless land of Egypt. As Plutarch[96] reports, the Egyptians held that water was 'the beginning and origin of all things'—that was, as an element of life. Hence in the Osirian mysteries the throne of the Eternal rested on the element of water, and Horus the child-saviour, the Messu or Messiah, came by water in the power of the southern lakes. So in the building of the heavens the beginning was with water, or the firmament imaged in its aerial likeness. Thus it might be said the heaven was made from water, as it is said in the Babylonian legends of creation, the water based on being the abyss of source. According to the present reading of the data, water had been recognized as the first and most vital element of life. Hence the beginning of all recorded human thought with water. Water in Africa was life indeed, where drought was very death. Horus on his papyrus as lord of water was the lord of life. One Egyptian name for [p.281] heaven is kabhu, derived from water, or the inundation, as 'the cool,' and that which makes cool. Paradise was where water was plenteous. Hence water was divinized as heaven, and heaven is figured in the hieroglyphics as water suspended overhead, the firmament being held aloft on four sustaining props as water lifted up. There was no such crying want of water in Babylonia, no such devouring dragon of drought in Akkad, therefore no such raison d'étre for the origin from water as in Africa.

The birth of water from the abyss of earth is figured in the 'Southern Fish.' The star Fomalhaut at the mouth of the Fish denotes the point of emergence whence the stream is seen ascending from its source beneath the constellation of Aquarius. A soul of life from the element of water was manifested by the fish as Horus the crocodile, also by Horus cradled on the water-plant. Thus the water element was fundamental in the making of the heavens. This was as the firmamental water. Earth as the mother of life and giver of water was portrayed in the abyss as a great fish emaning water from its mouth, which represents the fact that the earth in the abyss had been already recognized as giver of life because it was the source of water, the primary wateress or the wet-nurse of mythology. She, the Great Mother, as we read the heavenly story-book, was next constellated in the Southern Fish as the producer of life and sustenance from water in the unfathomable abyss.

In various legends there is a beginning with a world all water. This is one with the Egyptian Nu or Nun. In the beginning was the Nun. Thus says the primordial word. Not in the beginning of the heavens and earth, but in the beginning of the uranographic representation or entification in the astronomical mythology. The Nun is a name in Egyptian for the firmament when imaged in the similitude of water, the world that was all water at the intellectual starting-point. There is a relic of the ancient wisdom on one of the Assyrian tablets, the gnosis of which we hold to be Egyptian, and that as such it can be unriddled and read. As it is said, 'the heaven was created from the waters.'[97] The earth was pre-existent. This is called the work of 'Ansar and Kisar,' who 'created the earth,' i.e., when 'creation' had been rendered cosmogonically. But 'the heaven was created from the waters'[98] which were firmamental and uranographic. The non-Semitic legend of Cutha describes the beginning with a condition of nonentity or pre-entity; there was nothing but an amorphous world of water. As it is said, 'the whole of the lands were sea'; 'the abyss had not been made' below, nor was there any seat of the gods above. There was no field of reeds; no tree of life had been planted in the midst of an enclosure. There flowed no stream from the abyss 'within the sea' of the celestial water[99]. This, when bottomed, means that configuration of the signs in the astronomical mythology had not as yet begun. But as space the firmamental water was extant, and dry earth itself had stood for ever in the midst thereof; earth and water were the uncreated substance which had no beginning, any more than they had in the Egyptian Nun. The monsters born of Tiamat had their home in the ground of earth. It was there she suckled [p.282] them. Earth as the natural fact preceded the abyss in the astronomy. As Professor Sayce observes, somewhat naively, 'There was already an earth by the side of the deep'[100]. No Earth was the ground to go upon in the deep, and this was the Mother-earth which brought forth in and from the deep that was depicted as the abyss, or as the Great Fish in 'the water' of the southern heaven. It was in the extreme south that the Babylonians also placed their entrance to the underworld or the abyss. That is where the Egyptians had already localized the outrance from this mysterious region whence the inundation came. Here was the 'Ununait' or place of springing up that was first applied to water in the pre-solar mythos, the water that was pictured in its rising from the fish's mouth.

The abyss or great deep of the beginning was represented in the mysteries as the Lake of the Great Fish. It was related by Ctesias of Knidos that the sacred lake was seen at Bambŷkê or Hierapolis[101]. It was also said that in this lake the life of Derketô, daughter of Aphrodite, was saved by the fish. And as the great fish of Kam was the crocodile, the likelihood is that the Lake Meoris, sacred to the crocodiles in Egypt, was also a form of the lake which represented the place of birth that was commemorated in the mysteries and told of in the legends as the abyss of the beginning, the birthplace or fontal source of water = life. A figure of the 'abyss' or 'deep' survives still in the 'basin.' Large ewers filled with water were used for purificatory rites in the Babylonian temples. These were called apsu, for 'deeps' or 'abysses.' Tanks were used by the Egyptians for their baptistries. The baptismal font still images the fount of source. As a mythical or celestial locality the Gulf of Eridu is a mundane form of the abyss that was in the beginning. This was the birthplace where the Earth-mother brought forth as a dragon or great fish, the mistress in the abode of the fish. Hence it was the place from whence not only the fish-man Oannes, but the seven fish-like men or annedoti, ascended before the time of the Assyrian deluge[102]. The source of water underground most naturally suggested the idea of a primordial deep, an unfathomable gulf, a bottomless pit. This was then applied to the point of beginning in the lower Nun or firmamental water where the abyss was figured in the uranographic representation.

If, as we suggest, the story of the heavens was written by the race here generalized as 'the Egyptians,' and if that race descended from the equatorial regions like the great river flowing from its source, it is to the southern hemisphere we must look for the imagery which first reflects the mythology. The southern constellations are comparatively few, but their character in relation to the Egyptian wisdom is unmistakable. Besides which, these uranographs of the beginning, or the first time, could not all have originated as Euphratean, because so many of the stars were too far south to be seen or constellated in Akkad or Babylonia.

The Southern Fish is figured as the bringer forth of water—that is, of life or of Horus the fish from the abyss. Ketos the monster represents the mother in another character. This, as we suggest, is the mother in the water emaning life upon dry land as did the water­cow. The head of the monster is half out of the deep, with jaws agape and gasping like a fish on dry ground, sufficient to show that [p.283] these are a fish-form of the dual motherhood that was imaged as a crocodile and water-cow, as two cows, as two women, or as the woman Omoroca, who was cut in halves by Belos. If the sphere is carefully examined it will be seen that a stream of water is gushing upwards from the fish's mouth and apparently ascending towards the figure of Aquarius on the ecliptic. Hitherto it has been assumed that water in heaven always ran downwards from the northern pole into the abyss of the south; that the water from the urn of Aquarius was being poured into the mouth of the Southern Fish, and the river Eridanus started from the star Rigel at the foot of Orion and came to an end at the star Achernar, its course being from north to south, or from right to left of the sphere. But this reckoning has now to be reversed.

On the celestial globe, then, the life of the world that was born of water and imaged as Ichthus the fish is represented still as issuing from the mouth of 'the Southern Fish.' The word that issued from the fish's mouth is mentioned by the writer of a hymn to Merodach, in which it is said, 'The holy writing of the mouth of the deep is thine.'[103] If this is rightly rendered, the word of Ichthus had then become the written word. Still, it issued from the mouth of the deep, which was that of the fish-mother, or the fish's mouth. Now, the mystical emblem known by name as the vesica piscis (¨) is still a form of the fish's mouth, or outrance into life. The present writer once thought the vesica was uterine. And it is such as a co-type, but not in its origin, because the child first born of it was not the human child! It is the emaning mouth of that fish which gave birth to water as the life of the world and to the saviour who came to Egypt by water as the fish of the inundation. In the language of obstetrics, the outrance of birth is called the os tincæ or tench's mouth. That is the mouth of the fish, not because the origin in this instance was uterine, but because the fish's mouth was first, and this has been continued as a symbol of the birthplace when that which as prehuman was reapplied to the human organ. In the course of