The gate of the year

Painting on wood showing Méresimen, priestess of the god Amun, in prayer before an offering table and facing Osiris and the four Sons of Horus. The latter are funerary deities, identified with the four Canopic jars, into which the viscera and organs extracted from the corpse during the mummification process were preserved. One of the four is shown in thoroughly anthropomorphic shape, while the other three have the heads of a baboon, of a falcon and of a jackal. The object is datable to the XXVth dynasty (715-656 B.C.) and is now in the Louvre Museum, Paris. The representation of the divinities in part-human and part-animal form is a peculiar tract of Egyptian religion since the most ancient times. The most visible manifestation of the deity was assumed to be in animal form, and that is why, in many cases, living animals were regarded as the abode of the god or goddess and were worshiped as such in the temples.

[Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meresimen_osiris_quatre_fils_four_sons_horus_Louvre_N4024.jpg]




Human-Animal Transformation

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Painting on wood showing Méresimen, priestess of the god Amun, in prayer before an offering table and facing Osiris and the four Sons of Horus. The latter are funerary deities, identified with the four Canopic jars, into which the viscera and organs extracted from the corpse during the mummification process were preserved. One of the four is shown in thoroughly anthropomorphic shape, while the other three have the heads of a baboon, of a falcon and of a jackal. The object is datable to the XXVth dynasty (715-656 B.C.) and is now in the Louvre Museum, Paris. The representation of the divinities in part-human and part-animal form is a peculiar tract of Egyptian religion since the most ancient times. The most visible manifestation of the deity was assumed to be in animal form, and that is why, in many cases, living animals were regarded as the abode of the god or goddess and were worshiped as such in the temples. [Image: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meresimen_osiris_quatre_fils_four_sons_horus_Louvre_N4024.jpg]