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Khem

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Khemah

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(or Horus-Khem, "The Bull of his Mother"), an ithyphallic deity of the ancient Egyptians, generally represented as standing upright, with his. right arm extended in the act of scattering seed, and having behind it the threshing instrument, which is usually called a flagellum. His left hand and arm are closely enveloped in a thick robe, which swathes him like a mummy. His phallus is erected; and his headdress consists of two upright plumes similar to those of the deity Amen-Ra; he wears a large and richly- ornamented collar round his neck. Mythologically, Khem represented the idea of divinity in its double character of father and son. As father he was called the husband of his mother, while as a son he was assimilated to the god Horus.

He properly symbolized generative power surviving death, indeed, but submitting to a state of rigidity and inertion over which he could not triumph, till his left arm was freed. In the one hundred and forty- sixth chapter of the Egyptian Ritual of the Dead, the deceased is said to exclaim, when his soul is reunited to his body, "that he has overcome his bandages, and that it is given him to extend his arm." Khem was also the symbolic deity of vegetable life, and it was probably in allusion to this theory that in a vignette to the Book of the Dead, the new birth of the deceased is represented by a tree growing out of his person while he lies upon a bier. The great festival of germination, in the Egyptian husbandry, was held in honor of the god Khem, and it is fully figured on the walls of the palace temple of Rameses III, at Medinet Habu. See Rawlinson, Hist. of Ancient Egypt, 1:331 sq.