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Updated: June 10, 2025
The ex-votos, or pictures and figures here described, are too familiar to the visitor of Catholic churches to need any explanation. Here Rodaja beheld that very chamber of the Virgin, wherein was delivered the most stupendous embassy ever heard or witnessed by all the heavens, all the angels, and all the archangels, or other inhabitants of the everlasting abodes.
In the city and at the fair, ex-votos of wax representing the male parts of generation, of various dimensions, sometimes even of the length of a palm, are publicly exposed for sale. There was also waxen vows that represent other parts of the body mixed with them, but of those there are few in comparison of the number of the Priapi."
Of more humble ex-votos, there is a queer collection in the shamusho or business building on the right of the haiden: a series of quaintly designed and quaintly coloured pictures, representing ships in great storms, being guided or aided to port by the power of Koto-shiro- nushi-no-Kami. These are gifts from ships.
These are evidently the ex-votos of the XVIIIth Dynasty fellahîn to the goddess Hathor in the rock-shrine above the court. When the shrine was full or the little ex-votos broken, the sacristans threw them over the wall into the court below, which thus became a kind of dust-heap. Over this heap the sand and débris gradually collected, and thus they were preserved.
A few tiny statuettes buried as amulets upon the bodies of mummies, a few domestic divinities buried in the ruins of private houses, a few ex-votos forgotten, perchance, in some dark corner of a fallen sanctuary, have escaped till the present day.
Fifteen times the cannon have awakened the numerous echoes of the cemetery, shaken the wreaths of jet and immortelles, the light ex-votos hanging at the corners of burial lots, and while a reddish cloud floats upward and revolves amid the odor of powder across the city of the dead, mingling gradually with the smoke from the factories of the plebeian quarter, the countless multitude also disperses, scattering through the sloping streets, the long stairways gleaming white among the verdure, with a confused murmur as of waves beating against the rocks.
"Those who go to inquire in dream of the goddess Isis," says Diodorus Siculus, "recover their health beyond expectation. Many have been healed of whom the physicians despaired." The temples were hung with ex-votos. At Lebedes, in Lydia, the sick went to pass the night in the temple of the Soteri, who appeared to them in dreams. It was the same in a temple in Sardinia.
They are chiefly the remains of the countless little vases of rough red pottery, which were dedicated here as ex-votos by the pious, between the XIXth and XXVIth Dynasties, to the memory of the ancient kings and of the great god Osiris, whose tomb, as we shall see, was supposed to have been situated here also.
James's face lit up, and he walked over the historic ground beside the lad, Aristodemo picking up for him fragments of terra-cotta from the furrows through which the plow had just passed, bits of the innumerable small figurines that used to crowd the temple walls as ex-votos, and are now mingled with the fragole in the rich alluvial earth.
Stone lamps, shaped like diminutive temples, illumined in the corners the grinning ex-votos which hung upon the walls, and the curious pictures with which they were accompanied. Grotesque bas-reliefs adorned the circuit of the edifice, where the slanting light was reflected from the white and polished pavement-stones."
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