Note 33 — Chapter V · Chinese Dragon Lore

In ancient Egypt the conflict between the Solar and Osirian cults was a conflict between the “cult of the east” and the “cult of the west”. Professor Breasted notes that although Osiris is “First of the Westerners” (the west being his quarter) “he goes to the east (after death) in the Pyramid texts (of the solar cult) and the pair, Isis and Nepthys (the goddess), carry the dead into the east”. The east was the place where the ascent to the sky was made. In Egyptian solar theology it combined with the south. The rivalry between the two cults is reflected in one particular Pyramid text in which “the dead is adjured to go to the west in preference to the east, in order to join the sun-god!” But to the solar cult the east was “the most sacred of all regions”. In the Pyramid texts it is found that “the old doctrine of the ‘west’ as the permanent realm of the dead, a doctrine which is later so prominent, has been quite submerged by the pre-eminence of the east”.33