Note 475 — Chapter IX · PROBLEMS OF THE ARABIAN CULTURE (C) PYTHAGORAS, MOHAMMED, CROMWELL

Was it that highly civilized Crete, the outpost of Egyptian modes of thought, afforded a pattern (see p. 87)? But, after all, the numerous local and tribal gods of the primitive Thinite time (before 3000), which represented the numina of particular beast-genera, were essentially different in meaning. The more powerful the Egyptian deity of this preliminary period is, the more particular individual spirits (ka) and individual souls (bai) he possesses, and these hide and lurk in the various animals—Bastet in the cat, Sechmet in the lion, Hathor in the cow, Mut in the vulture (hence the human-formed ka that figures behind the beast-head in the figures of the gods)—making of this earliest world-picture a very abortion of monstrous fear, filling it with powers which rage against man even after his death and which only the greatest sacrifices avail to placate. The union of the North and the South lands was represented by the common veneration of the Horus-falcon, whose first ka resided in the Pharaoh of the time. Cf. Eduard Meyer, Gesch. d. Alt., I, §§ 182, et seq. [See also Moret and Davy: Des clans aux empires and Moret: Le Nil et la civilisation égyptienne (available in English translations).—Tr.]