by giving her a cow’s head in place of her own.  Horus then renewed the war with his uncle, and finally slew him with a long spear, which he drove into his head.”  The gods and goddesses of the Osirid legend, Seb, Nut or Netpe, Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, Set, and Horus or Harmachis, were those which most drew towards them the thoughts of the Egyptians, the greater number being favourite objects of worship, while Set was held in general detestation.

It was a peculiar feature of the Egyptian religion, that it contained distinctively evil and malignant gods.  Set was not, originally, such a deity; but he became such in course of time, and was to the later Egyptians the very principle of evil—­Evil personified.  Another evil deity was Taour or Taourt, who is represented as a hippopotamus standing on its hind-legs, with the skin and tail of a crocodile dependent down its back, and a knife or a pair of shears in one hand.  Bes seems also to have been a divinity of the same class.  He was represented as a hideous dwarf, with large outstanding ears, bald, or with a plume of feathers on his head, and with a lion-skin down his back, often carrying in his two hands two knives.  Even more terrible than Bes was Apep, the great serpent, with its huge and many folds, who helped Set against Osiris, and was the adversary and accuser of souls.  Savak, a god with the head of a crocodile, seems also to have belonged to the class of malignant beings, though he was a favourite deity with some of the Ramesside kings, and a special object of worship in the Fayoum.

[Illustrations:  FIGURES OF TAOURT.]

The complex polytheism of the monuments and the literature was not, however, the practical religion of many Egyptians.  Local cults held possession of most of the nomes, and the ordinary Egyptian, instead of dissipating his religious affections by distributing them among the thousand divinities of the Pantheon, concentrated them on those of his nome.  If he was a Memphite, he worshipped Phthah Sekhet, and Tum; if a Theban, Ammon-Ra, Maut, Khons, and Neith; if a Heliopolite, Tum, Nebhebt and Horus; if a Elephantinite, Kneph, Sati, Anuka, and Hak; and so on.  The Egyptian Pantheon was a gradual accretion, the result of amalgamating the various local cults; but these continued predominant in their several localities; and practically the only deities that obtained anything like a general recognition were Osiris, Isis, Horus, and the Nile-god, Hapi.

[Illustration:  FIGURE OF BES.]

Besides the common popular religion, the belief of the masses, there was another which prevailed among the priests and among the educated.  The primary doctrine of this esoteric religion was the real essential unity of the Divine Nature.  The sacred texts, known only to the priests and to the initiated, taught that there was a single Being, “the sole producer of all things both in heaven and earth, himself not produced of any,” “the only true living