On the walls of his tomb were paintings, bright and wondrous, showing the gods of his people and the judging of the dead, Pharaoh himself standing before them to offer an account of his life and his reign. A strange god with a brawny body and a bird’s head weighed the heart of the king in a balance while the presiding god looked on, judging its merit. These gods, he said, are called Thoth and Osiris. The Egyptians have a multitude of gods, whom they call by Egyptian names, though of course all gods are the same, no matter what mortals may call them, certain names for the Egyptians and certain ones for the Babylonians and different ones for the people of the yellow lands: names are only names, but the gods are the same, be they Amon and Thoth or Zeus and Hermes, the patterns are the same everywhere: Osiris is a god who is slain and resurrected, and is that not true of Dionysus as well? Thoth is Hermes; Amon is not unlike far-seeing Zeus. And in the end all of them, Poseidon and Hermes and Dionysus and Ares and Athena, Horus and Osiris and Isis and Set, must be understood as mere aspects of the One God who rules the universe. I did not discuss these matters with Pharaoh, though later I would with his priests. What I did speak of with him was the art of music, and the methods by which his tomb had been carved into the rock, and when he showed me the colossal pyramidal mountains of stone that his distant ancestors had built as their own tombs at a time when such huge funerary monuments were in fashion, he explained to me the secret of how those tremendous blocks of granite had been trundled toward the site and lifted into position, telling me of the amazing levers and hoists and engines by which the job was done. But we did not ever discuss the nature of the gods.
I stayed in Egypt five years, or perhaps it was ten. The days went by quickly and under that implacable sun my sadness began gradually to melt. I showed them how to make lyres from a tortoise shell and a sounding-skin, and how to attach the strings and how to affix the decorative horns. Pharaoh complained that these lyres were not like my own, and I explained that a god had fashioned mine out of gold and it was the only one of its kind in the world. “Which god?” he demanded, and I hesitated a moment and said, “Thoth,” for he knew nothing of Hermes. Since Thoth is the weigher of the souls of the dead the king did not care to have me invoke him, so nothing more was said about the making of a second lyre the equal of my own. But I could tell that he was displeased.
I taught his courtiers how to play the lyres that I made and how to sing to them, and they sang well enough, in their way, though there was no magic in their singing. How could there have been? I am Orpheus, who was made by the gods to bring music to this world of ours, and they were only men and women of the court of Pharaoh, constrained by all the constraints that hold the court of Pharaoh in an iron grip. For they do everything at the court of Pharaoh as it was done a thousand years before, and three thousand, and ten thousand. Nothing must change, they think, or the skies will fall. So they sing the melodies of Orpheus but they sing them in their rigid Egyptian way, stiff and jangling where my melodies are sinuous and gentle, and so everything is quite different. But they were happy with what they achieved and music resounded day and night in the halls of the palace of Pharaoh.
They are an interesting people. They have poetry and literature and painting, and do it all quite well. They have a kind of writing, too, a funny picture-writing, using images of snakes and beetles and owls and whips to stand for sounds and ideas, very cumbersome. I have devised a better system for my own people. I offered it to Pharaoh, but he would not have it: the more fool he, but Egypt’s welfare is not my concern. Anyway, they are happy with the things they have, which will serve them for a very long time. But my kind of writing will outlast even theirs. A time will come when no one in the world will be able to read their writing, and it will be understood again only because men will find a text that has the same inscription in their writing and mine, which will still be capable of being read, so that they can compare and decipher the mysteries of those owl-pictures and beetle-pictures and summon sense and meaning from them again.
On the other hand, they have devoted many thousands of years to the study of the secrets of the soul, and have deep insight into such things. I learned all that I could of their magic. I learned of the Amulet of the Eye of Horus and the Amulet of the Two Fingers and the Amulet of the Collar of Gold. I learned of the Seven Cows and the Four Rudders, and of the Gift of Air and Water. I learned the names of the Seven Gates and the words of the Coming Forth by Day. And when the great priest of Pharaoh offered to initiate me into the most sacred mysteries of Egypt, I accepted gladly: I have never been too proud to learn when learning is offered me. (I am like far-questing Odysseus in this. Of all mortal mankind there has never been anyone I admired more than clever Odysseus. I had no love for him, because he allowed his men to sack my city of Ismarus when they passed the coast of Thrace at the beginning of their journey home from Troy, but it was impossible not to admire the workings of his mind, and we would become friends, after a sort, long afterward.)
The Mysteries of Egypt were worthy mysteries, though they were not sufficient to the task, since they did not deal fully, as our Mysteries do, with the problems of creation and existence and death, though they do touch on the great matter of rebirth. Still, for all their gaps, they are excellent mysteries, full of truth. These Egyptian Mysteries I will not sing to you, Musaeus, not here, at any rate, because they are Mysteries sacred to those people and may not be treated that way, but you know something of them already. You know that they deal primarily with the fate of the soul after death. You know that they teach us that when breath leaves us we go before the judges of Hades and are consigned to our next existence according to our deserts, punishment for the wicked, happiness for the good. And then we drink the waters of Lethe and forget who we have been and are made ready for our new lives, and enter again a mortal body and are born once more, and the circle is complete, though at last a time comes, when one has undergone the full initiation, that final release from the body is granted.
So it is, at least, among mortals. For us who are not entirely mortal it is different, a cycle of eternal return, a dying and a coming to life again, even as the cornfield and the grapevine spring to new green growth after the brown barren time of winter has passed. I often wonder what it is like to be truly mortal, to be ordinary, to be not in the least mythicaclass="underline" to live only a short while, sixty or seventy years, and then to die and be forgotten, even by one’s own sons, who are just like oneself and will quickly grow old and die in their turn. And when mortals return to life, as the Mysteries say they will, it is without memory of what they have been before, so that they must learn and do and suffer all over again. I have sired mortal children, Musaeus, many of them, your brothers and sisters, though you never knew them. Now and then I encounter them in the world, aging wrinkled people with thinning hair and sagging frames. Some of them are unable even to sing. It is all very strange.