The plover was the bird usually chosen to represent the Ba, but at times the place of the plover is taken by the hawk, the symbol of Horus and the solar gods. That the soul should have been likened to a bird is natural, and we meet with the same or similar symbolism among other peoples. Like the bird, it flew between earth and heaven, untrammelled by the body to which it had once been joined. From time to time it visited its mummy; at other times it dwelt with the gods above. Now and again, so the inscriptions tell us, it alighted on the boughs of the garden it had made for itself in life, cooling itself under the sycamores and eating their fruits. For the Ba was no more immaterial than the Ka; it, too, needed meat and drink for its sustenance, and looked to its relatives and descendants to furnish them.
But, as Professor Maspero(31) has pointed out, there was a very real and fundamental difference between the idea of the Ka or double, and that of the Ba or soul. The Ka was originally nourished on the actual offerings that were placed in the tomb of the dead man; it passed into it through the false door and consumed the food that it found there. But the soul had ascended to the gods in heaven; it lived in the light of day, not in the darkness of the tomb; and it is doubtful if it was ever supposed to return there. To the gods accordingly was committed the care of the Ba, and of seeing that it was properly provided for. By the power of prayer and magical incantation, the various articles of food, or, more strictly speaking, their doubles, were identified with the gods, and communicated by the gods to the soul. Long before the days when the Pyramid texts had been compiled, this theory of the nourishment of the soul was applied also to the nourishment of the Ka, and the older belief in the material eating and drinking of the Ka had passed away. All that remained of it was the habitual offering of the food to the dead, a custom which still lingers among the fellahin of Egypt, both Moslem and Copt.
Besides the double and the two souls, there was yet another immortal element in the human frame. This was the heart, the seat both of the feelings and of the mind. But it was not the material heart, but its immaterial double, which passed after death into the other world. The material heart was carefully removed from the mummy, and with the rest of the intestines was usually cast into the Nile. Porphyry(32) tells us that in his time, when the bodies of the wealthier classes were embalmed, the Egyptians "take out the stomach and put it into a coffer, and, holding the coffer to the sun, protest, one of the embalmers making a speech on behalf of the dead. This speech, which Euphantos translated from his native language, is as follows: 'O Lord the Sun, and all ye gods who give life to man, receive me and make me a companion of the eternal gods. For the gods, whom my parents made known to me, as long as I have lived in this world I have continued to reverence, and those who gave birth to my body I have ever honoured. And as for other men, I have neither slain any, nor defrauded any of anything entrusted to me, nor committed any other wicked act; but if by chance I have committed any sin in my life, by either eating or drinking what was forbidden, not of myself did I sin, but owing to these members,'--at the same time showing the coffer in which the stomach was. And having said this, he throws it into the river, and embalms the rest of the body as being pure. Thus they thought that they needed to excuse themselves to God for what they had eaten and drunken, and therefore so reproach the stomach."(33)