centre of all Egyptian worship, and are perhaps the oldest original objects of reverence,” says Bunsen.  How can this be if they belong to a lower order of Deities, and what is the explanation of it?  There is another historical fact also to be explained.  Down to the time of Ramses, thirteen hundred years before Christ, Typhon, or Seth, the God of Destruction, was the chief of this third order, and the most venerated of all the gods.  After that time a revolution occurred in the worship, which overthrew Seth, and his name was chiselled out of the monuments, and the name of Amun inserted in its place.  This was the only change which occurred in the Egyptian religion, so far as we know, from its commencement until the time of the Caesars.[191] An explanation of both these facts may be given, founded on the supposed amalgamation in Egypt of two races with their religions.  Supposing that the gods of the higher orders represented the religious ideas of a Semitic or Aryan race entering Egypt from Asia, and that the Osiris group were the gods of the African nature-worship, which they found prevailing on their arrival, it is quite natural that the priests should in their classification place their own gods highest, while they should have allowed the external worship to go on as formerly, at least for a time.  But, after a time, as the tone of thought became more elevated, they may have succeeded in substituting for the God of Terror and Destruction a higher conception in the popular worship.

The myth of Isis and Osiris, preserved for us by Plutarch, gives the most light in relation to this order of deities.

Seb and Nutpe, or Nut, called by the Greeks Chronos and Rhea, were the parents of this group.  Seb is therefore Time, and Nut is Motion or perhaps Space.  The Sun pronounced a curse on them, namely, that she should not be delivered, on any day of the year.  This perhaps implies the difficulty of the thought of Creation.  But Hermes, or Wisdom, who loved Rhea, won, at dice, of the Moon, five days, the seventieth part of all her illuminations, which he added to the three hundred and sixty days, or twelve months.  Here we have a hint of a correction of the calendar, the necessity of which awakened a feeling of irregularity in the processes of nature, admitting thereby the notion of change and a new creation.  These five days were the birthdays of the gods.  On the first Osiris is born, and a voice was heard saying, “The Lord of all things is now born.”  On the second day, Arueris-Apollo, or the elder Horus; on the third, Typhon, who broke through a hole in his mother’s side; on the fourth, Isis; and on the fifth, Nepthys-Venus, or Victory.  Osiris and Arueris are children of the Sun, Isis of Hermes, Typhon and Nepthys of Saturn.