Development of the There is no Egyptian religion that covers the period from 7,000 to 9,000 or more years of the life of the Egyptian people. During most of this long period there was no one form of religion su preme or anything like to nearly supreme. The various beliefs were constantly changing, with the centuries. There was an ever-present tendency for certain more powerful gods to be come still more powerful and to take to them selves the powers and attributes of other less fortunate deities who had lost out in the race of time. Local gods became lost in the more powerful state deity, much as the local Hindu gods were incarnate in Vishnu, who was rep resented as having had many reincarnations, each of which probably represented one of these local deities. The Egyptians seem to have in corporated into the victorious god the Kas of all the local or other deities displaced by him. This accounts for the fact that Ra, for instance, was represented as having 14 Kas. Some of the divine kings of Egypt seem to have had as many Kas as the deities they represented on earth. Thus Rameses II is represented as possessing 30 Kas. The later Egyptian belief, which was the result of an evolution of 7,000 seems to have held that the Ka was a god-like principle, the of the divine dwelling in and saving the soul. Thus it ulti
mately came very close to the Jewish conception of the Holy Ghost. There seems to be plenty of evidence to demonstrate that Jewish and Egyptian doctrines concerning the soul acted and reacted upon one another from the first years of the contact of the two nations until the decline of Egypt. The mystical and imaginative Egyptian doctrine of the Ka and its interest in the affairs of the individual to gether with its relation to the Ba exercised a strong influence on early Christian religious thought and the development of the religious dogma of the soul. John's description of the Holy Ghost might have been the late Egyptian definition of the Ka as the indwelling divine principle whose presence saved the soul. This is essentially the doctrine of the logos in its highest development. Both the logos and the Ka came ultimately to signify a saving, divine principle. From this to the conception of the Ka immortal principle or soul was but a step, which had been already taken in Egypt before Christianity had put in its appearance. See