Oh, what a number of powers were there that inflicted punishment upon me!  And it came to pass that when I had been cast into the outer darkness, I saw a great ditch which was more than two hundred cubits deep, and it was filled with reptiles; each reptile had seven heads, and the body of each was like unto that of a scorpion.  In this place also lived the Great Worm, the mere sight of which terrified him that looked thereat.  In his mouth he had teeth like unto iron stakes, and one took me and threw me to this Worm which never ceased to eat; then immediately all the [other] beasts gathered together near him, and when he had filled his mouth [with my flesh], all the beasts who were round about me filled theirs.”  In answer to the question of the holy man as to whether he had enjoyed any rest or period without suffering, the mummy replied:  “Yea, O my father, pity is shown unto those who are in torment every Saturday and every Sunday.  As soon as Sunday is over we are cast into the torments which we deserve, so that we may forget the years which we have passed in the world; and as soon as we have forgotten the grief of this torment we are cast into another which is still more grievous.”

Now, it is easy to see from the above description of the torments which the wicked were supposed to suffer, that the writer had in his mind some of the pictures with which we are now familiar, thanks to the excavation of tombs which has gone on in Egypt during the last few years; and it is also easy to see that he, in common with many other Coptic writers, misunderstood the purport of them.  The outer darkness, i.e., the blackest place of all in the underworld, the river of fire, the pits of fire, the snake and the scorpion, and such like things, all have their counterparts, or rather originals, in the scenes which accompany the texts which describe the passage of the sun through the underworld during the hours of the night.  Having once misunderstood the general meaning of such scenes, it was easy to convert the foes of R[=a], the Sun-god, into the souls of the damned, and to look upon the burning up of such foes—­who were after all only certain powers of nature personified—­as the well-merited punishment of those who had done evil upon the earth.  How far the Copts reproduced unconsciously the views which had been held by their ancestors for thousands of years cannot be said, but even after much allowance has been made for this possibility, there remains still to be explained a large number of beliefs and views which seem to have been the peculiar product of the Egyptian Christian imagination.