and to remain embraced until the morning, when the god Shu separated them, and set the goddess of the sky upon his four pillars until the evening.  Nut was, naturally, regarded as the mother of the gods and of all things living, and she and her husband Seb were considered to be the givers of food, not only to the living but also to the dead.  Though different views were current in Egypt as to the exact location of the heaven of the beatified dead, yet all schools of thought in all periods assigned it to some region in the sky, and the abundant allusions in the texts to the heavenly bodies—­that is, the sun, moon, and stars—­which the deceased dwells with, prove that the final abode of the souls of the righteous was not upon earth.  The goddess Nut is sometimes represented as a female along whose body the sun travels, and sometimes as a cow; the tree sacred to her was the sycamore.

6.  Osiris was the son of Seb and Nut, the husband of Isis and the father of Horus.  The history of this god is given elsewhere in this book so fully that it is only necessary to refer briefly to him.  He was held to be a man although of divine origin; he lived and reigned as a king on this earth; he was treacherously murdered by his brother Set, and his body was cut up into fourteen pieces, which were scattered about Egypt; after his death, Isis, by the use of magical formulae supplied to her by Thoth, succeeded in raising him to life, and he begot a son called Horus; when Horus was grown up, he engaged in combat with Set, and overcame him, and thus “avenged his father”; by means of magical formulae, supplied to him by Thoth, Osiris reconstituted and revivified his body, and became the type of the resurrection and the symbol of immortality; he was also the hope, the judge, and the god of the dead, probably even in pre-dynastic times.  Osiris was in one aspect a solar deity, and originally he seems to have represented the sun after it had set; but he is also identified with the moon.  In the XVIIIth dynasty, however, he is already the equal of R[=a], and later the attributes of God and of all the “gods” were ascribed to him.

7.  Isis was the wife of Osiris and mother of Horus; as a nature goddess she had a place in the boat of the sun at the creation, when she probably typified the dawn.  By reason of her success in revivifying her husband’s body by means of the utterance of magical formulae, she is called the “lady of enchantments.”  Her wanderings in search of her husband’s body, and the sorrow which she endured in bringing forth and rearing her child in the papyrus swamps of the Delta, and the persecution which she suffered at the hands of her husband’s enemies, form the subject of many allusions in texts of all periods.  She has various aspects, but the one which appealed most to the imagination of the Egyptians, was that of “divine mother”; in this character thousands of statues represent her seated and suckling her child