38 
production of the Egyptian priests, is filled with the spirit of 
the Horus myth throughout. In the chapter of the Metamor- 
phosis,* Osiris is addressed thus : — 
“ Thy son Horus is crowned on thy throne ; 
All life is through him ; 
He has made millions ; 
He has formed the gods ” ; 
and proving the peculiarly intimate nature of the union sub- 
sisting between Horus and the, souls of the deceased, it is 
said : — 
“ Horus lie is my brother, 
Horus he is my cousin, 
Horus has come to me out of my father, 
He has proceeded from the brains of his head, 
He has made the gods, 
He has made millions with his eye. 
The Only One, its Lord, 
The universal Lord.” 
The allusion to the eye of Horus is in reference to a peculiar 
myth in which that deity, as the sun, was supposed to create 
all good things by merely looking them into existence ;t 
Horus himself, as we shall hereafter sec, being created bv the 
actual speech of his father Osiris; and hence he was termed 
the speech, or literally the “ word” of God.J 
It was as Horus 11a that the benevolent deity was most 
commonly represented, in the form of a royal figure with the head 
of a sparrow-hawk — the bird which in Egypt flew nearest 
to the sun — and wearing the solar disk upon his head. In 
his hands were usually the emblems of authority and life and 
power, the nas sceptre and the crux ansata. As Horus Ha the 
god was almost invariably figured on the upper part of the 
Egyptian mummy-cases, and on the amulets laid upon the head 
of the deceased ; and in this character the Hawk among birds, 
and the Basilisk or Uraeus among reptiles, were his emblems, 
or, as we should better call them, his totems. The Egyptian 
kings, who by a magnificently conceived political fiction were 
themselves incarnations of the Deity, generally assumed also 
the name and offices of Horus the Sun in one of their two car- 
touches, which was called the Horus title, and which was, in 
fact, their proper name. This cartouche was always preceded 
by the hieroglyphics signifying Son of the Sun,§ and the 
custom of assuming the double name dated from the close of 
* Chapter lxxviii. f Dr. Bircli. 
§ “ Ze-En ” or “ Mes-liar 
*h 
4 * 
I bit!. 
