Until Swedenborg[160] arrived, and gave his disciples the precise measure and form of the life to come, no religion has ever taught an immortality as distinct in its outline and as solid in its substance as that of the Egyptians.  The Greek and Roman hereafter was shadowy and vague; that of Buddhism remote; and the Hebrew Beyond was wholly eclipsed and overborne by the sense of a Divine presence and power immanent in space and time.  To the Egyptian, this life was but the first step, and a very short one, of an immense career.  The sun (Ra) alternately setting and rising, was the perpetually present type of the progress of the soul, and the Sothiac period (symbolized by the Phoenix) of 1421 years from one heliacal rising of Sirius at the beginning of the fixed Egyptian year to the next, was also made to define the cycle of human transmigrations.  Two Sothiac periods correspond nearly to the three thousand years spoken of by Herodotus, during which the soul transmigrates through animal forms before returning to its human body.  Then, to use the Egyptian language, the soul arrived at the ship of the sun and was received by Ra into his solar splendor.  On some sarcophagi the soul is symbolized by a hawk with a human head, carrying in his claws two rings, which probably signify the two Sothiac cycles of its transmigrations.

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, says Mr. Birch,[161] is as old as the inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty, many of which contain extracts from the Ritual of the Dead.  One hundred and forty-six chapters of this Ritual have been translated by Mr. Birch from the text of the Turin papyrus, the most complete in Europe.  Chapters of it are found on mummy-cases, on the wraps of mummies, on the walls of tombs, and within the coffins on papyri.  This Ritual is all that remains of the Hermetic Books which constituted the library of the priesthood.  Two antagonist classes of deities appear in this liturgy as contending for the soul of the deceased,—­Osiris and his triad, Set and his devils.  The Sun-God, source of life, is also present.

An interesting chapter of the Ritual is the one hundred and twenty-fifth, called the Hall of the Two Truths.  It is the process of “separating a person from his sins,” not by confession and repentance, as is usual in other religions, but by denying them.  Forty-two deities are said to be present to feed on the blood of the wicked.  The soul addresses the Lords of Truth, and declares that it has not done evil privily, and proceeds to specifications.  He says:  “I have not afflicted any.  I have not told falsehoods.  I have not made the laboring man do more than his task.  I have not been idle.  I have not murdered.  I have not committed fraud.  I have not injured the images of the gods.  I have not taken scraps of the bandages of the dead.  I have not committed adultery.  I have not cheated by false weights.  I have not kept milk from sucklings.  I have not caught the sacred birds.”  Then, addressing each god