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Then, not from the garden but from very far away, came the stone gods of Egypt and Assyria bull-bodied, bird-winged, hawk-headed, cat-headed, all in stone, and all alive and alert; strange, grotesque figures from the towers of cathedrals figures of angels with folded wings, figures of beasts with wings wide spread; sphinxes; uncouth idols from Southern palm-fringed islands; and, last of all, the beautiful marble shapes of the gods and goddesses who had held their festival on the lake-island, and bidden Lord Yalding and the children to this meeting.
The date of it is in dispute, one authority assigning it to the Eighteenth Dynasty and another bringing it down as late as the seventh century B.C. Be that as it may, the art of casting hollow bronze figures is of high antiquity in Egypt. The figure represents a hawk-headed god, Horus, who once held up some object, probably a vase for libations.
Now, although Set in the form of a man had been slain, he reappeared in the form of a great hissing serpent, and took up his abode in a hole in the ground without being noticed by Horus. Rā, however, saw him, and gave orders that Horus, the son of Isis, in the form of a hawk-headed staff, should set himself at the mouth of the hole, so that the monster might never reappear among men.
And Horus, the son of Isis, in the form of a hawk-headed staff, took up his abode there with his mother Isis; in this manner did these things happen. Some texts seem to indicate that peals of thunder were caused by the fiend Set.
Possibly it may represent the receptacle in which the divine gifts are stored, and from which they can be taken by the genius at his discretion, to be bestowed upon the mortal under his care. Another good genius would seem to be represented by the hawk-headed figure, which is likewise found in attendance upon the monarch, attentively watching his proceedings.
RA: Hawk-headed, and crowned with the sun-disc, encircled by an asp. The divine disposer and organizer of the world; adored throughout Egypt. AMEN RA: Of human form, crowned with a flat-topped cap and two long, straight plumes; clothed in the schenti; his flesh sometimes painted blue. KHEM: Of human form, mummified; wears head-dress of Amen Ra; his right hand uplifted, holding a flail.
The figure with the stylized jackal head was Anubis, the god of death. The hawk-headed one must be Horus. The female figure would be Isis. The one with the solar disc over his head was probably Amon-Ré. The rest he couldn't identify at all. He wondered if one of them was Bubaste, the cat goddess. It would be appropriate.
His special function is that of overcoming evil; in the earliest days the conqueror of Set, later as the subduer of noxious animals, figured on a very popular amulet, and lastly, in Roman times, as a hawk-headed warrior on horseback slaying a dragon, thus passing into the type of St. George.
The philological analysis of the name of Gladstone is attempted, with very various results, by Roth, Kuhn, Schwartz, and other contemporary descendants of the old scholars. Roth finds in "Glad" the Scotch word "gled," a hawk or falcon. He then adduces the examples of the Hawk-Indra, from the Rig Veda, and of the Hawk-headed Osiris, both of them indubitably personifications of the sun.
It was probably the ritual counterpart of the mythical discovery of the body of Osiris enclosed in the erica-tree. In the hall of Osiris at Denderah the coffin containing the hawk-headed mummy of the god is clearly depicted as enclosed within a tree, apparently a conifer, the trunk and branches of which are seen above and below the coffin.
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