ABSTRACT
T H E E X O D U S F R O M E G Y P T A N D T H E D E S E R T O F
A M E N T A
WHEN roughly classified, the myths and legends generally show two points of departure for the migrations of the human race, as these were rendered in the stellar and solar mythology. One is from the summit of the celestial mount, the other from the hollow under-world beneath the mount or inside the earth. The races that descended from, the mount were people of the pole whose starting-point in reckoning time was from one or other station of the pole-star, determinable by its type, whether as the tree, the rock, or other image of a first point of departure. Those who ascended from the netherworld were of the solar race who came into existence with the sun as it is represented in the legendary lore, that is, when the solar mythos was established. The tradition of the pole-star people found in various countries is that they were born when no sun or moon as yet had come into existence. That is, they were pre-solar and pre-lunar in their reckoning of time. These are they, as was said by the Egyptians, who issued from the eye of Sut, or Darkness, the earliest type of which we reckon to have been Polaris, whether as the polestar in the southern or the northern heaven. These were the Nahsi and the Blackheads of the dim beginnings in the stellar mythology. Following them, come the people born from the eye of Horus, which was a symbol of the moon. These were held to be the lunar race. Lastly came the children of the sun. Thus, the eye as symbol of a repeating period was stellar as the eye of Sut; it was lunar as the eye of Horus; it was solar as the eye of Ra. In the stellar mythos men descended from the summit of the mount, which was an image of the pole. And still in legendary lore they try to tell us from which of the seven stations they descended as a time-gauge in the prehistoric reckoning of their beginnings. But in the solar mythos they ascended from the under-world which had been hollowed out beneath the mount of earth for the passage of the sun. Thus there are two points of departure in the astronomical mythography, one from above and one from below. The oldest races that have kept the reckonings are descended from one or other of the seven stations in the mountain of the north, and in the later mythos men ascended from the earth below, or from below the earth ; the human ascent being figured in the upward pathway of the sun. These were the solar race
thee, and there arose the multitudes." These multitudes as stars had been the inhabitants in the deep region of the inferior sky. Ra having been " lifted u p " as god alone in this new heaven, of the astronomical mythos, the stars that were in the lower are to be assembled and grouped together in the upper heaven. This is followed by the stellar exodus from " lower Egypt and the desert of Amenta " under the leadership of Shu-Anhur, the uplifter of the sky together with its inhabitants, the stars, called the children of Nut, or heaven. It is said by Ra " my own son Shu, take with thee my daughter Nut, and be the guardian of the multitudes which live in the nocturnal sky," or the sky in the lower Egypt of Amenta ; " put them on thy head and be their fosterer," or sustainer. (PL B, line 42.) Then, as said in the hymn to the god Shu, " Uplifted is the sky which he maintains with his two arms " as " king of Upper and Lower E g y p t " in his new character of Shu-si-Ra, who, in the solar mythos, had become the son of Ra. In the Ritual, ch. n o , heaven is described as the mansion of Shu, " the mansion of his stars," which was nightly renewed as "the beautiful creation which he raiseth up."
