The great secret Author:Maurice Maeterlinck Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III EGYPT WE have already considered, in speaking of Nu, Tum, and Phtah, the idea which the Egyptians formed of the First Cause, and of the creatio... more »n, or rather, the emanation or manifestation, of the universe. This idea— as we know it, at least, from the translation, probably incomplete, of the hieroglyphs,— though less striking in form, less profound and less metaphysical, is analogous to that of the "Vedas" and reveals a common source. Immediately following the riddle of the First Cause they, too, inevitably encountered the insoluble problem of the origin of evil, and although they did not venture to probe into it very deeply, they achieved a solution of it which, though paler and more evasive, is at bottom almost similar to that of the Hindus. In the cult of Osiris spirit and matter are known as Light and Darkness, and Set, the antagonist of Ra, the sun-god, in the myths of Ra, Osiris, and Horus, is not a god of evil," says Le Page Renouf, "but represents a physical reality, a constant law of nature." 1 He is a god as 1 Op. clt.; p. 115. real as his adversaries and his cult is as ancient as theirs. Like them he has his priests, and is the offspring of the same unknown Cause. So little can he be divided from the Power opposed to him that on certain monuments the heads of Horus and Set grow upon the same body, making but one god. After the same confessions of ignorance, here, as in India, the myth of incarnation proceeds to define and control an ethic which, emerging from the unknowable, could not take shape and could not be known except in and by man. Osiris, Horus, and Thoth or Hermes, who five times put on human form—or so the occultists tell us—are but the more memorable incarnations of the god who dwells in each of us. From these incarnations arises...« less