“First there is the ‘Ka’, or ‘Double’, which, as Doctor Budge explains, may be defined as ‘an abstract individuality of personality’ which was imbued with all the characteristic attributes of the individual it represented, and possessed an absolutely independent existence.  It was free to move from place to place on earth at will; and it could enter into heaven and hold converse with the gods.  Then there was the ‘Ba’, or ‘soul’, which dwelt in the ‘Ka’, and had the power of becoming corporeal or incorporeal at will; ’it had both substance and form. . . .  It had power to leave the tomb. . . .  It could revisit the body in the tomb . . . and could reincarnate it and hold converse with it.’  Again there was the ‘Khu’, the ‘spiritual intelligence’, or spirit.  It took the form of ‘a shining, luminous, intangible shape of the body.’. . .  Then, again, there was the ‘Sekhem’, or ‘power’ of a man, his strength or vital force personified.  These were the ‘Khaibit’, or ‘shadow’, the ‘Ren’, or ‘name’, the ‘Khat’, or ‘physical body’, and ‘Ab’, the ‘heart’, in which life was seated, went to the full making up of a man.

“Thus you will see, that if this division of functions, spiritual and bodily, ethereal and corporeal, ideal and actual, be accepted as exact, there are all the possibilities and capabilities of corporeal transference, guided always by an unimprisonable will or intelligence.”  As he paused I murmured the lines from Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”: 

     “’The Magnus Zoroaster . . .  Met his own image walking in the
     garden.’”

Mr. Trelawny was not displeased.  “Quite so!” he said, in his quiet way.  “Shelley had a better conception of ancient beliefs than any of our poets.”  With a voice changed again he resumed his lecture, for so it was to some of us: 

“There is another belief of the ancient Egyptian which you must bear in mind; that regarding the ushaptiu figures of Osiris, which were placed with the dead to its work in the Under World.  The enlargement of this idea came to a belief that it was possible to transmit, by magical formulae, the soul and qualities of any living creature to a figure made in its image.  This would give a terrible extension of power to one who held the gift of magic.

“It is from a union of these various beliefs, and their natural corollaries, that I have come to the conclusion that Queen Tera expected to be able to effect her own resurrection, when, and where, and how, she would.  That she may have held before her a definite time for making her effort is not only possible but likely.  I shall not stop now to explain it, but shall enter upon the subject later on.  With a soul with the Gods, a spirit which could wander the earth at will, and a power of corporeal transference, or an astral body, there need be no bounds or limits to her ambition.  The belief is forced upon us that for these forty or fifty centuries she lay dormant in her tomb—­waiting.  Waiting with that ‘patience’ which could rule the Gods of the Under World, for that ‘love’ which could command those of the Upper World.  What she may have dreamt we know not; but her dream must have been broken when the Dutch explorer entered her sculptured cavern, and his follower violated the sacred privacy of her tomb by his rude outrage in the theft of her hand.