contracted. These last however, if their children's children happened to be prosperous, were released from the impediments of their creditors, and at length received the ceremony of a magnificent burial. It was, indeed, most solemnly established in Egypt that parents and ancestors should have a more marked token of respect paid them by their family, after they had been transferred to their everlasting habitations. Hence originated the custom of depositing the bodies of their deceased parents as pledges for the payment of borrowed money; those who failed to redeem those pledges being subject to the heaviest disgrace, and deprived of burial after their own death." The grief and shame felt by the family, when the rites of burial had been refused, were excessive. They not only considered the mortification consequent upon so public an exposure, and the triumph given to their enemies; but the awful sentence foretold the misery which had befallen the soul of the deceased in a future state. They beheld him excluded from those mansions of the blessed, to which it was the primary object of every one to be admitted; to be admitted; his memory was stained in this world with indelible disgrace; and a belief in transmigration suggested to them the possibility of his soul being condemned to inhabit the body of some unclean animal. It is true that the duration of this punishment was limited according to the extent of the crimes Diodor. loc. cit. Herodot. ii. 136. Vide suprà, Vol. II. p. 51. Lucian says a brother or father." Essay on Grief. 66 of which the accused had been guilty; and when the devotion of friends, aided by liberal donations in the service of religion, and the influential prayers of the priests, had sufficiently softened the otherwise inexorable nature of the Gods, the period of this state of purgatory was doubtless shortened; and Diodorus shows that grandchildren, who had the means and inclination, might avail themselves of the same method of satisfying their creditors and the Gods. But still the fear of that cruel degradation, however short the period, was not without a salutary effect. Those, too, who had led a notoriously wicked life, could not expect any dispensation, since the credit of the priesthood, even if they were corrupt enough to court the wealthy, would have suffered when the case was flagrant; and in justice to them we may believe that, until society had undergone those changes, to which all nations are subject at their fall, the Egyptian priests were actuated by really virtuous feelings, both in their conduct and the object they had in view. The disgrace of being condemned at this public ordeal was in itself a strong inducement to every one to abstain from crime: not only was there the fear of leaving a bad name, but the dread of exposure; and we cannot refuse to second the praises of Diodorus in favour of the authors of so wise an institution. The form of the ritual read by the priest in pronouncing the acquittal of the dead is preserved in the tombs, usually at the entrance passage; in which the deceased is made to enumerate all the sins forbidden by the Egyptian law, and to assert his innocence of each. They are supposed by Champollion to amount to forty-two, being equal in number to the assessors who were destined to examine the deceased at his final judgment *, specting the peculiar crime which it was his province to punish. I have stated that every large city, as Thebes, Memphis, and other places, had its lake, at which the same ceremonies were practised; and it is probable, from what Diodorus says of the "lake of the nome," that the capital of each province had one in its immediate vicinity, to which the funeral procession of all who died within the jurisdiction of the nomarch was obliged to repair. Even when the priests granted a dispensation for the removal of a body to another town, as was sometimes done in favour of those who desired to be buried at Abydust and other places, the previous ceremony of passing through this ordeal was doubtless required at the lake of their own province. Those persons who, from their extreme poverty, had no place prepared for receiving their body when denied the privilege of passing the sacred lake, appear to have been interred on the shores they were forbidden to leave; and I have found the bones of many buried near the site of the lake of Thebes, which appeared to be of bodies imperfectly preserved, as of persons who could not afford + Suprà, p. 420. Vide Vol. I. (2d Series) p. 346. * Suprà, p. 76. * the more expensive processes of embalming. This cannot fail to recall the "centum errant annos, volitantque hæc litora circum" of Virgil†; and though the souls he mentions were condemned to hover a hundred years about the Stygian shores in consequence of their bodies having remained unburied ‡, the resemblance is sufficiently striking: as are the many tales related by the Greeks respecting the "Stygian marsh," and the various places or personages of their Hades, to those connected with the funeral rites of the Egyptians. Of their introduction into Greece Diodorus gives the following account§:- "Orpheus is shown to have introduced from Egypt the greatest part of his mystical ceremonies, the orgies that celebrate the wanderings of Ceres, and the whole fable of the shades below. The rites of Osiris and Bacchus are the same; those of Isis and Ceres exactly resemble each other, except in name: and the punishments of the wicked in Hades, the Elysian fields of the pious, and all the common imaginary fictions, were copied from the ceremonies of the Egyptian funerals. Hermes, the conductor of souls, according to the ancient institutions of Egypt, * Vide my Plan of Thebes, the S. W. corner of the lake. + Virgil, Æn. vi. 330. For which reason the soul of Patroclus, appearing to Achilles in a dream, prays him to bury his body as quickly as possible:Θαπτε με όττι τάχιστα, πύλας αΐδιο περήσω. Τηλε με είργουσι ψυχαι, είδωλα καμόντων, Ουδε με πως μισγεσθαι υπερ ποταμοιο εωσιν. (Ιl. xxiii. 71.) Conf. Hor. Car. lib. i. od. 23.; and Virg. Æn. vi. 526., “hi quos vehit unda, sepulti." was to convey the body of Apis to an appointed place, where it was received by a man wearing the mask of Cerberus; and this being communicated by Orpheus to the Greeks, gave rise to the idea adopted by Homer in his poetry: "Cyllenius now to Pluto's dreary reign "And again, "And now they reached the earth's remotest ends, The empty forms of men inhabit there,— "To the river he gives the name of Ocean, because, as they say, the Egyptians call the Nile Oceanus in their language; the gates of the Sun are derived from Heliopolis; and the meadow and the fabled dwelling of the dead are taken from the place about the lake called Acherusia, near Memphis, which is surrounded by beautiful meadows and marshes, abounding with lotus and flowering rushes. The reason of the dead being thought to inhabit those places, is that the greater part and the most considerable of the Egyptian catacombs are there, and the bodies are ferried over the river and Acherusian lake, previous to being deposited in * Homer, Odyss. Q. 1. et seq. |