Samizdat

“IT has been said above that the name or the emblem or the picture of a god or demon could become an amulet with power to protect him that wore it, and that such power lasted as long as the substance of which it was made lasted, if the name, or emblem, or picture was not erased from it.

But the Egyptians went a step further than this, and they believed that it was possible to transmit to the figure of any man, or woman, or animal, or living creature, the soul of the being which it represented, and its qualities and attributes.

The statue of a god in a temple contained the spirit of the god which it represented, and from time immemorial the people of Egypt believed that every statue and every figure possessed an indwelling spirit.

When the Christianized Egyptians made their attacks on the “idols of the heathen” they proved that they possessed this belief, for they always endeavoured to throw down the statues of the gods of the Greeks and Romans, knowing that if they were once shattered the spirits which dwelt in them would have no place wherein to dwell, and would thereby be rendered homeless and powerless.

It will be remembered that it is stated in the Apocryphal Gospels that when the Virgin Mary and her Son arrived in Egypt there “was a movement and quaking throughout all the land, and all the idols fell down from their pedestals and were broken in pieces.”

Then all the priests and nobles went to a certain priest with whom “a devil used to speak from out of the idol,” and they asked him the meaning of these things; and when he had explained to them that the footstep of the son of the “secret and hidden god” had fallen upon the land of Egypt, they accepted his counsel and made a figure of this god.

The Egyptians acknowledged that the new god was greater than all their gods together, and they were quite prepared to set up a statue of him because they believed that in so doing they would compel at least a portion of the spirit of the “secret and hidden god” to come and dwell in it.

In the following pages we shall endeavour to describe the principal uses which the Egyptians made of the figures of gods, and men, and beasts, to which magical powers had been imparted by means of the performance of certain symbolic ceremonies and the recital of certain words of power; and how they could be employed to do both good and evil.”

E.A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, London, 1901. Pp. 65-7.