Egyptian religious poetry

44 EGYPTIAN RELIGIOUS POETRY

onward, ceremonies for the purpose of transferring the Spirit from one body to another can also be found, and still exist among some primitive tribes. In every instance the killing of the divine King when he was past his prime was an essential part of the rite, for the fear of famine was ever present and no risk could be allowed of the failure of the creative power. The Spirit of fertility, driven out of its human body by the drastic means of the death of that body, had then to be housed again in a youthful body, where it could remain till that body grew old in its turn and a new home had again to be found for the indwelling Spirit of God.

As customs always become modified in course of time, this custom gradually changed, and a substitute for the King was allowed to die in his stead.1_ The substitute was for a given period the King himself, wielding the royal power and wearing the royal insignia ; but at the end of that time—often only a week—he suffered the death that his royal master should have suffered. By his death the earth was rendered fertile again and the King received a new lease of life and could reign for another period of years. The ceremonial birth and the baptism do not seem to have been performed for the substitute, and the calculation for the length of life was unnecessary ; but it is an open question whether there was a ceremony of naming, for it is clear that the substitute was sacrificed as the King and in the King’s name. The sacrificed King becomes, in the end, the god Osiris.

In the form in which it has come down to us, the Osirian belief bristles with inconsistencies. Even as early as the Pyramid

1 For the killing of the divine King, see Frazer, The Dying God and The Scapegoat; Wainwright, The Sky Religion in Egypt. The Swedish record shows that one of the Kings of Sweden lived to the age of ninety by having sacrificed a substitute at the times when he himself should have died.