Coffin Texts

Coffin Texts — Breasted 1912 selected English quotations and context — sourcepage 300

278 RELIGION AND THOUGHT IN ANCIENT EGYPT which, of course, involved belief in a transformation, the Coffin Texts also enable the deceased to "become the blazing Eye of Horus." 1 By the aid of another chapter he can accomplish the "transformation into an ekhet-bird"2 or "into the servant at the table of Hathor." 3 It is difficult to gain any coherent conception of the hereafter which the men of this age thus hoped to attain. There are the composite Solar-Osirian pictures which we have already found in the Pyramid Texts, and in which the priests to whom we owe these Coffin Text compila tions allow their fancy to roam at will. The deceased citizen, now sharing the destiny of Osiris and called such by Horus, hears himself receiving words of homage and promises of felicity addressed to him by his divine son: "I come, I am Horus who opens thy mouth, together with Ptah who glorifies thee, together with Thoth who gives to thee thy heart (understanding); . . . that thou mayest remember what thou hadst forgotten. I cause that thou eat bread at the desire of thy body. I cause that thou remember what thou hast forgotten. I cause that thou eat bread . . . more than thou didst on earth. I give to thee thy two feet that thou mayest make the going and coming of thy two soles (or sandals). I cause that thou shouldst carry out commissions with the south wind and shouldst run with the north wind. ... I cause that thou shouldst ferry over ^Peterui1 and ferry over the lake of thy wandering and the sea of (thy) sandal as thou didst on earth. Thou rulest the streams and the Phoenix. . . . Thou leviest on the royal domains. Thou repulsest the violent who comes in the night, the 1 LACAU, LXXX, Rec. 31, 166. 2 LACAU, XXX, Rec. 30, 71. 8 LACAU, XXXI, Rec. 30, 72 f.