has his animal: Phtah incarnates himself in the beetle, Horus in the
hawk, Osiris in the bull. The two figures often unite in a man with
the head of an animal or an animal with the head of a man. Every god
may be figured in four forms: Horus, for example, as a man, a hawk, as
man with the head of a hawk, as a hawk with the head of a man.

=Sacred Animals.=--What did the Egyptians wish to designate by this
symbol? One hardly knows. They, themselves, came to regard as sacred
the animals which served to represent the gods to them: the bull, the
beetle, the ibis, the hawk, the cat, the crocodile. They cared for
them and protected them. A century before the Christian era a Roman
citizen killed a cat at Alexandria; the people rose in riot, seized
him, and, notwithstanding the entreaties of the king, murdered him,
although at the same time they had great fear of the Romans. There was
in each temple a sacred animal which was adored. The traveller Strabo
records a visit to a sacred crocodile of Thebes: "The beast," said he,
"lay on the edge of a pond, the priests drew near, two of them opened
his mouth, a third thrust in cakes, grilled fish, and a drink made
with meal."

=The Bull Apis.=--Of these animal gods the most venerated was the bull
Apis. It represented at once Osiris and Phtah and lived at Memphis in
a chapel served by the priests. After its death it became an Osiris
(Osar-hapi), it was embalmed, and its mummy deposited in a vault. The
sepulchres of the "Osar-hapi" constituted a gigantic monument, the
Serapeum, discovered in 1851 by Marietta.

=Cult of the Dead.=--The Egyptians adored also the spirits of the
dead. They seem to have believed at first that every man had a
"double" (Kâ), and that when the man was dead his double still