ment in countless sun myths,[49] namely, the inversion of the idea of the composition of the child in the mother's womb.[50] In fact, the mother Isis collects the pieces of the body with the help of the jackal-headed Anubis. (She finds the corpse with the help of dogs.) Here the nocturnal devourers of bodies, the dogs and jackals, become the assistants of the composition, of the reproduction.[51] The Egyptian vulture owes its symbolic meaning as mother to this necrophagic habit. In Persian antiquity the corpses were thrown out for the dogs to devour, just as to-day in the Indian funeral pyres the removal of the carcasses is left to the vultures. Persia was familiar with the custom of leading a dog to the bed of one dying, whereupon the latter had to present the dog with a morsel.[52] The custom, on its surface, evidently signifies that the morsel is to belong to the dog, so that he will spare the body of the dead, precisely as Cerberus was soothed by the honey-cakes which Hercules gave to him in the journey to hell. But when we bear in mind the jackal-headed Anubis who rendered his good services in the gathering together of the dismembered Osiris, and the mother significance of the vulture, then the question arises whether something deeper was not meant by this ceremony. Creuzer has also concerned himself with this idea, and has come to the conclusion that the astral form of the dog ceremony, that is, the appearance of Sirius, the dog star, at the period of the sun's highest position, is related to this in that the introduction of the dog has a compensatory significance, death being thereby made, re-
