337 
such as in the Vedas are repeatedly made to Indra * would 
have horrified them ; and though in the Assistances of Horus 
the deceased presents to the god Osiris beer, wine, and oil, 
which he has prepared for him, and entreats him to accept 
thereof, t still it is evident that these offerings were presented 
in a mystical sense, and were almost wholly deprived of any 
sensual or material tendency. 
28. There yet remains to be noticed a phase of the Myth of 
Ra upon which lately very much has been written, but about 
which still considerable uncertainty prevails, and of which the 
explanations offered are rather plausible conjectures than de- 
monstrated conclusions. This phase is that of sun and serpent 
worship, a theme which Dr. Phene has almost made his own.J 
It has been already shown that a very high place in the Ra 
Myth was assigned to the Urseus of Immortality and the great 
feminine serpent Mehen ; § and in almost every pictorial repre- 
sentation of the sun-god he is accompanied by one or other of 
these snakes, of which the Urseus was a most deadly species. 
Much confusion has arisen from the mention by careless 
theorists of the “ solar asps,” the asp being not a urseus, but 
a cerastes, or kind of viper. The truth is that the sun had no 
connection with the asp, but only with the basilisk, and that 
chiefly because the serpent was regarded as his feminine sacta, 
or counterpart. Antagonism between the sun and urseus there 
certainly was not, but antagonism between the sun and the 
serpent Apophis was a cardinal doctrine of the Solar and Horus 
and Osirian myths ; and in the end the Solar deity was ever 
victorious. It would be an important contribution towards a 
settlement of the various questions arising from the Serpent 
myths if some painstaking student would first determine what 
species of serpents were known to the Egyptians, or were re- 
presented on their monuments ; and, that being done, would 
go further and prove, theories and conjectures apart, in what 
relationship they stood to the great beneficent solar deity. It 
is by no means impossible that some of the Hellenic ideas of 
Helios worship were in the period of the Psammetichi 
transferred to the current Egyptian theology, and influenced 
* See R. Hunter’s History of India, p. 31. 
t See Naville, Le Discours d' Horus, in Zeitsckrift f. JEgypt, 1875. 
^ 1 / 1 • i it 1 * 9 9 * f I / . « c 
X See 
vol. viii 
Sun and Serpent Worship,” in Trans. Viet. Inst., 
Phene, 
§ See Mehen, in Pierret, Dictionnaire d’ Archiologie Egyptienne. 
