SCARABS.
His quondam signis, atque hæc exempla secuti,
Esse apibus partem divinæ mentis, et haustus
Ætherios dixere.—VIRGIL.
It would have been strange, indeed, if the Egyptians, who were so
sharp-sighted in detecting what, from their point of view, appeared to
be the fragments of Deity scattered among the lower animals—bird, beast,
fish, reptile, and insect—had failed to observe what we regard as the
instincts of the common Egyptian beetle.
Few people visit Egypt without bringing back an antique scarab or two.
They are to be found everywhere throughout the country; and yet it must
be nearly two thousand years since one of these antiques was carved, or
moulded. In what vast numbers, then, must they have been manufactured by
the old Egyptians. The scarab is also as common in their hieroglyphics as
it is in the rubbish-mounds of their old cities. These facts give us the
measure of the impression the habits of the insect made upon them.
It is one of the commonest out-o’-door insects in Egypt. At the season
for depositing its eggs it alights upon the bank of the river, where
the soil is still moist, about the consistency of tough dough, or clay
sufficiently trodden for brick-making. Upon this it lays its eggs,
arranging them closely together. It then forms the spot on which it has
laid them into a perfect sphere, by adding clay to the top of it, and
cutting away the earth around and beneath it. The sphere being thus
completed, it thrusts the extremities of its two inward curved hind legs
into the opposite sides of it, and by pushing backwards gives to it a
revolving motion; the inserted points of its hind legs forming the axis
on which it revolves. In this way it pushes and rolls it back to the edge
of the desert, often a long way off.
Who could be so dull as not to see in this sphere, full of the seeds of
life, a perfect symbol of this terrestrial globe, formed by creative
wisdom and energy, and everywhere fraught with the quickening germs of
endlessly manifold being? And so the beetle became the symbol of the
Creator.
But when the symbol of the Creator, with his burden, the symbol of the
life-containing globe, had arrived at the edge of the desert, it there
excavated a gallery a foot or two deep—a catacomb, a grave—into which
it descended. What divine forethought in thus foreseeing the effects
of the damp, and of the inundation! and these primæval observers had
not extinguished thought on these subjects by labelling such acts as
instincts, and then putting them away on a shelf of the mind. This work,
also, of the insect did not escape them. It had, as it seemed, buried
itself. It thus, at all events, sanctioned their mode of burial: though,
perhaps, it had previously taught them where, and how, to bury—in the
dry desert, in excavated galleries. It was in this way the young world
learnt. What they thought was what they had seen.
But there was another lesson, or rather series of lessons, which, through
its wondrous transformations, this beetle taught the old Egyptians. To
begin at the beginning: the first period of its existence it passed in
a drear subterranean abode, with feeble senses, narrowly circumscribed
powers, unloved and unloving, ungladdened by pleasant sights, only
terrified by the unintelligible voices that at times reached it from the
sun-lit world above; its best pleasure to eat dirt; its only employment
to grow into fitness for future changes.
Having dragged out the time apportioned to that first base condition,
it was translated into the second. Nature’s hand swathed it into a
chrysalis. Movement now ceased. Food could no longer be taken. The
avenues of the senses were closed. The functions of life were put in
abeyance. But life itself was not extinguished; it was only suspended
while new transformations were being effected to qualify the insect for
its perfected existence.
At last, when all was completed, from the swathed-up chrysalis burst
forth a marvellously furnished body. What had painfully crawled in the
earth, now spurned the earth, and flew to and fro, at its will, in the
air. It had passed into another and totally different stage of being;
and, too, into a new world where life was bright and free. And, besides,
it was now full of Divine sagacity, such as became its new life.
All this was nature’s triptych in illustration of the three stages of
man’s being. The earth-born, dirt-fed grub represented the first, the
earthly stage, during which man is the slave of toil and suffering, the
victim of grovelling cares, the sport of ever-recurring accidents—a
knot of troubles and incapacities, in which, however, are concealed the
precious germs of eventual glory and blessedness.
The chrysalis was an explanation, which he that ran might read, of the
conditions and purpose of the mummy period, that middle stage, without
cares, or wants, or enjoyments; the long undreaming sleep, during which
the incapacities of the first stage are transforming themselves into the
capacities and powers of the last. It was so with the chrysalis: and they
believed, and taught, that it would be so with the mummy, the first stage
of whose course was now closed; and for that reason it was that they
embalmed his body into a human chrysalis.
The winged insect bursting from the cerements of its suspended, into the
happy freedom of its new aërial life, was a type, addressed by nature
to the eye, and through the eye to the understanding, to prefigure the
soul of man, at last emancipated from all earthly and fleshly hindrances,
soaring to the empyrean regions of eternal day, for the full enjoyment of
its predestined glory, for which—all that had gone before having been the
long and troublous discipline—it is now completely equipped. In that last
transformation from the chrysalis to the winged insect was an assurance
in nature’s handwriting of the resurrection from the mummy condition, in
a higher form, and with enlarged endowments.
What volumes of profoundest doctrine, what revelations in this little
beetle! For thought was not yet ossified, as in after times, into those
rigid forms, with which neither history nor our own experience is
unfamiliar, and which oblige men to reject obstinately, and to denounce
loudly, everything that does not support the existing settled system; but
was still growing vigorously, and assimilating freely what it fed on: and
so the eye and heart were still open to the lessons of nature.
The reason, then, why in modern Egypt you give an Arab boy no more than
a piastre, or two, for an antique scarab, is that when men began to
observe and think, six thousand, perhaps twice six thousand years ago,
the Egyptian beetle taught the Egyptians much. Therein was the reason why
they loved to have the stones of their rings and seals cut into the form
of this beetle. For this reason it was that they used it for amulets:
there was much of the divinity in it. This was why it became a favourite
object for bearing an inscription that was to commemorate a royal hunt,
or a royal marriage. Probably a scarab, with an inscribed record of the
event, was sent to all who had been present on the occasion. There are
such now in our British Museum. It was for these reasons that the scarab
with expanded wings was laid on the mummy. And I can imagine their having
been used in many other ways, as New Year’s gifts, as wedding presents,
as mourning rings, such as were customary here a generation or two back;
as tickets of admission to festivals and funeral processions, and even
as tokens of membership in sacred guilds and other associations, each
bearing its appropriate inscription, containing, of course, the name of
some God; for that was a sanction that was sought for everything that was
done in Egypt.