Samizdat

“But in the present chapter we are not so much concerned with the ordinary as with the extraordinary uses to which a name might be put, and the above facts have only been mentioned to prove that a man’s name was regarded as an essential part of himself, and that the blotting out of the name of an individual was synonymous with his destruction.

Without a name no man could be identified in the judgment, and as a man only came into being upon this earth when his name had been pronounced, so the future life could only be attained after the gods of the world beyond the grave had become acquainted with it and had uttered it.

According to the story of the Creation which is related in the Papyrus of Nesi-Amsu, (see my paper in Archæologia, Vol. LII., London, 1891) before the world and all that therein is came into being, only the great god Neb-er-tcher existed, for even the gods were not born.

Now when the time had come for the god to create all things be says, “I brought (i.e., fashioned) my mouth, and I uttered my own name as a word of power, and thus I evolved myself under the evolutions of the god Khepera, and I developed myself out of the primeval matter which had evolved multitudes of evolutions from the beginning of time.

“Nothing existed on this earth [before me], I made all things. There was none other who worked with me at that time.”

Elsewhere, that is to say, in the other version of the story, the god Khepera says, “I developed myself from the primeval matter which I made, I developed myself out of the primeval matter. My name is ‘Osiris,’ the germ of primeval matter.”

Here, then, we have a proof that the Egyptians regarded the creation as the result of the utterance of the name of the god Neb-er-tcher or Khepera by himself.”

E.A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, London, 1901. P. 161.