stage of Naturalism.  In Egypt Osiris, for instance, was the moon, which came as a beautiful child each month and was devoured as the wasting “old moon” by the demon Set; he was the young god who was slain in his prime each year; he was at once the father, husband, and son of Isis; he was the Patriarch who reigned over men and became the Judge of the Dead; he was the earth spirit, he was the bisexual Nile spirit, he was the spring sun; he was the Apis bull of Memphis, and the ram of Mendes; he was the reigning Pharaoh.  In his fusion with Ra, who was threefold—­Khepera, Ra, and Tum—­he died each day as an old man; he appeared in heaven at night as the constellation Orion, which was his ghost, or was, perhaps, rather the Sumerian Zi, the spiritual essence of life.  Osiris, who resembled Tammuz, a god of many forms also, was addressed as follows in one of the Isis chants: 

    There proceedeth from thee the strong Orion in heaven at evening,
        at the resting of every day! 
    Lo it is I (Isis), at the approach of the Sothis (Sirius) period,
        who doth watch for him (the child Osiris),
    Nor will I leave off watching for him; for that which proceedeth
        from thee (the living Osiris) is revered. 
    An emanation from thee causeth life to gods and men, reptiles and
        animals, and they live by means thereof. 
    Come thou to us from thy chamber, in the day when thy soul
        begetteth emanations,—­
    The day when offerings upon offerings are made to thy spirit,
        which causeth the gods and men likewise to live.[309]

This extract emphasizes how unsafe it is to confine certain deities within narrow limits by terming them simply “solar gods”, “lunar gods”, “astral gods”, or “earth gods”.  One deity may have been simultaneously a sun god and moon god, an air god and an earth god, one who was dead and also alive, unborn and also old.  The priests of Babylonia and Egypt were less accustomed to concrete and logical definitions than their critics and expositors of the twentieth century.  Simple explanations of ancient beliefs are often by reason of their very simplicity highly improbable.  Recognition must ever be given to the puzzling complexity of religious thought in Babylonia and Egypt, and to the possibility that even to the priests the doctrines of a particular cult, which embraced the accumulated ideas of centuries, were invariably confusing and vague, and full of inconsistencies; they were mystical in the sense that the understanding could not grasp them although it permitted their acceptance.  A god, for instance, might be addressed at once in the singular and plural, perhaps because he had developed from an animistic group of spirits, or, perhaps, for reasons we cannot discover.  This is shown clearly by the following pregnant extract from a Babylonian tablet:  “Powerful, O Sevenfold, one are ye”.  Mr. L.W.  King, the translator, comments upon it as follows:  “There is no doubt that the name was applied to a group of gods who were so closely connected that, though addressed in the plural, they could in the same sentence be regarded as forming a single personality".[310]