The miraculous birth of Bata in his third transformation
is, as we have noticed, closely paralleled by the
birth of Atys from the almond. The idea at the
root of this is that of self-creation or self-existence,
as in the usual Egyptian phrase, “bull of his
mother.”
The king flying up to heaven is a regular expression
for his death: “the hawk has soared,”
“the follower of the god has met his maker,”
so Sanehat describes it (see ist series, pp. 97, 98).
This hawk-form of the king may be connected with the
hawk bearing the double crown which is perched on
the top of the ka name of each king. That
hawk is not Horus, nor even the king deified as Horus,
because the emblem of life is given to it by other
gods (as by Set on a lintel of XVIIIth Dynasty from
Nubt), and therefore the hawk is the human king who
could perish, and not an immortal divinity. Further,
this hawk-king is always perched on the top of the
drawing of the doorway to the sepulchre which bears
the ka name of the king; and when we see the
drawings of the ba bird or soul flying down
the well to the sepulchre, it appears as if the hawk
were the royal ba bird (ordinary men having
a ba bird with a human head); and that the
well-known first title of each king represents the
royal soul or ba bird perched on the door of
the sepulchre, resting on his way to and from the
visit to the corpse below. The soul or ba
of the king at his death thus flew away as a hawk to
meet the sun.
The veil drawn over the fate of the inhuman princess
is well conceived. That she should die a sharp
death has been foretold; but how Bata should slay
the divine creation—his wife—his
mother—is a matter that the scribe reserves
in silence; we only read that “he judged with
her before him, and the great nobles agreed with him.”
That judgment is best left among the things unwritten,
The strange manner in which we can see incident after
incident in the latter part of the tale, each to refer
to some ceremony or belief, even imperfect as our
knowledge of such must be, and the evidence that the
whole being of Bata is a transference of the myth of
Atys, must lead us to look on this, the marvellous
portion, as woven out of a group of myths, ceremonies,
and beliefs which were joined and explained by the
formation of such a tale. How far it is due to
purely Egyptian ideas, indicated by the Apis bull
and the analogies in present African beliefs, and
how far it is Asiatic and belonging to Atys, it would
be premature to decide. But from the weird confusion
and mystery of these transformations, we turn back
with renewed pleasure to the simple and sweet picture
of peasant life, and the beauty of Bata, and we see
how true a poet the Egyptian was in feeling and in
expression.
SETNA AND THE MAGIC BOOK
