TRANSFORMATION 171 



announces that the king has brought forth a lion. 

 He presents the cub to the people and proceeds to 

 feed it with milk. For some days the people remain 

 until the cub has gained strength and begins to eat 

 meat. All the interest and anxiety now centre in the 

 cub ; the corpse receives an ordinary burial and is 

 forgotten ; the king lives in. the cub. When the cub 

 grows up it is released and allowed to wander in the 

 forest with the other lions. It is thus by no means 

 fully tame ; still it is less fierce than the ordinary wild 

 lions, and it is accustomed to seek its food in a certain 

 place from the hands of the priests." In a similar way 

 the corpse of a queen gives birth to a leopard in 

 another belt of the same forest, and those of dead 

 princes and princesses to snakes. 1 Whether these 

 proceedings can be properly described as transmigration 

 c f the souls of the deceased seems more than doubt- 

 ful. In any case the animal is a new manifestation of 

 the departed. 



As the tale of The Two Brothers has prepared us to 

 believe, the Egyptians held that the dead " were 

 able," in Dr. Budge's words, " at will to assume the 

 form of any animal or bird or plant or living thing 

 which they pleased ; and one of the greatest delights 

 to which a man looked forward was the possession of 

 that power." 2 The Book of the Dead provides the 

 deceased with a number of formulae necessary to en- 

 able him to effect such transformation, or even to 

 assume any form he chose. The belief seems, in 

 fact, universal in Africa. The Masai, a Hamitic 

 people with Bantu admixture, do not as a rule bury 



1 Rev. J. Roscoe,/. A. L xxxvii. 



2 Budge, Egyptian Magic, 230. 



