336 
This generation of insects and plants from the exudations of 
the sun-god Ra is also a peculiar feature in Egyptian mythology, 
and somewhat reminds one of the sacred lake which Vishnu 
filled with the sweat of his body after playing with the Holy 
discus,* and which was afterwards filled with the beautiful 
lotus, sacred alike in the mythologies of India and Egypt, and 
thus forming another of the many points of contact between the 
religions of the two ancient nations. 
27. These texts, then, are the basis of all the facts upon 
which the Ra, or solar myth of Egypt, rests, and upon which 
must be founded all the comparisons which would analogize 
that religious dogma with the Agni-worship of the Aryans, the 
fire-worship of the Parsees, the Surya adoration of the Brah- 
mins, and the Helios cultus of the early Greeks.f The myth 
of Ra, as it existed in Egypt, was evidently an adoration of the 
sun alone ; and it did not partake of that elemental form of 
worship which reaches its climax in the Rig Veda. The 
Gandharvas, or horses of the sun the Maruts, or storm-clouds ; 
the demon of the eclipse ; the connection of the sun and the 
sacred intoxicant soma ; § the wheel of fire, still honoured in 
rustic France, || — are all foreign to the Egyptian sun-worship, 
which, if it originally proceeded from India, then certainly 
divested itself of all its naturalistic tendencies before it reached 
the valley of the Nile. There was to the Egyptian mind some- 
thing repugnant in the familiarity with which the adjacent 
nations regarded their deities, with their almost affectionate 
companionship, and nearly irreverent invitations to the gods to 
share their pleasures and partake of their festivities. Addresses 
nous to Northern Egypt, is now wholly extinct in Egypt proper, either 
Upper or Lower, and is only found in the lakes of equatorial Africa, 
Huleh in Palestine, and a lake in Sicily, where it was probably introduced 
by some of the Phenico-Egyptian colonists, 
i * The Chakra of the Buddhists also. 
t This cultus is especially well treated in Cox’s Mythology of the 
Aryan Nations, vol. ii. 
+ See Kelly, Curiosities of Indo-European Tradition and Folk 
Lore, pp. 35-6. 
i § The Haoma of the Zendavesta, formed of the juice of either the 
Asclepias acida or the Sarcostemma viminale. See Dr. Muir’s Contri- 
butions to a Knowledge of the Vedic Theogony and Mythology, in Journal 
E. A. S., 2nd series, vol. i. p. 136. 
|| Kelly, Curiosities, pp. 54, 64. 
