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These rustic ceremonies he would continue to perform year
after year at the same season, while the solemn festivals of the
priests continued to shift, with the shifting calendar, from summer
through spring to winter, and so backward through autumn to summer.
The rites of the husbandman were stable because they rested on
direct observation of nature: the rites of the priest were unstable
because they were based on a false calculation. Yet many of the
priestly festivals may have been nothing but the old rural festivals
disguised in the course of ages by the pomp of sacerdotalism and
severed, by the error of the calendar, from their roots in the
natural cycle of the seasons.
These conjectures are confirmed by the little we know both of the
popular and of the official Egyptian religion. Thus we are told that
the Egyptians held a festival of Isis at the time when the Nile
began to rise. They believed that the goddess was then mourning for
the lost Osiris, and that the tears which dropped from her eyes
swelled the impetuous tide of the river.


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