The notion of an external soul has now been traced in folk-tales
told by Aryan peoples from India to Ireland. We have still to show
that the same idea occurs commonly in the popular stories of peoples
who do not belong to the Aryan stock. In the ancient Egyptian tale
of "The Two Brothers," which was written down in the reign of
Rameses II., about 1300 B.C., we read how one of the brothers
enchanted his heart and placed it in the flower of an acacia tree,
and how, when the flower was cut at the instigation of his wife, he
immediately fell down dead, but revived when his brother found the
lost heart in the berry of the acacia and threw it into a cup of
fresh water.
In the story of Seyf el-Mulook in the _Arabian Nights_ the jinnee
tells the captive daughter of the King of India, "When I was born,
the astrologers declared that the destruction of my soul would be
effected by the hand of one of the sons of the human kings. I
therefore took my soul, and put it into the crop of a sparrow, and I
imprisoned the sparrow in a little box, and put this into another
small box, and this I put within seven other small boxes, and I put
these within seven chests, and the chests I put into a coffer of
marble within the verge of this circumambient ocean; for this part
is remote from the countries of mankind, and none of mankind can
gain access to it.
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