The Twenty-third Ceremony

In this ceremony the SEM priest offered the breast of some animal, and as he did so the Kher heb said:--

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"Unas, the Eye of Horus hath been presented unto thee so that it may embrace thee (or, be united unto thee)."

The breast naturally symbolized the act of embracing, which was in itself an important ceremony. When Horus embraced the deceased, the act of embracing him "smote Set," and when he had snatched his Eye out of the hand of the god of evil, "he gave to the deceased his heart, and the power which was therein." ¹

When, in the Tale of the Two Brothers, Anpu restored to Batau his heart, each embraced the other. ² Life

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was given to a statue by embracing it, and when a living person, priest, or relative embraced a mummy, his, or her, object was to reunite the bones, to knit together afresh the flesh, and to give order to the members of the body, which in primitive times had been dislocated, like the body of Osiris, and then put together, piece by piece, to form a complete whole. ¹ As to the breast itself, we may note in passing that in the Levitical law it was ordered that the breast of a ram should be waved for a wave offering before the Lord (Leviticus vii. 30).

Footnotes

83:1 See Teta, l. 173., and Moret's excellent remarks in Rituel, p. 88.

83:2 Papyrus D'Orbiney, pl. xiv., ll. 3, 4.

84:1 Moret, Rituel, p. 89.