THE RIVER OF DEATH

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 29, 29 October 1928, Page 11

THE RIVER OF DEATH

ORIGIN OF THE TERM “GO WEST.”

The Fernley lecture, delivered by the Rev. Dr. Edward Sugden, master of Queen’s College, Melbourne University, this year at Liverpool, has been published in book form. His subject was “Israel’s Debt to Egypt,” and in the course of it, he presented an interesting speculation regarding the origin of the term “go west.” He said that all the burial places of the ancient Egyptians were on the western bank of the Nile, while the towns and villages inhabited by the living were on the east of the river. The corpse, after being mummified and kept for some time in its old home, was ferried over the Nile in a hearse-like barge and so conveyed to its final resting-place. From this the Greeks derived their myth of Charon, who ferried departed souls over the Styx into Hades, and from them the idea passed into Christian phraseology. And in the phrase which became so poignantly and pathetically familiar during the Great War—to “go west”— there still survived the thought that the departed spirit goes over the Nile to the land of the setting sun. “The Oxford Dictionary confesses ignorance as to the origin of the expression, the first example of which dated from 1919, though it was certainly used by our men before that,” said Dr. Sugden. “I have often wondered whether it may not have been first used by our boys in Egypt and have been started by one of them who knew something of the antiquities of that land of mystery.”