throwing in with it lotus-pod seed and honey, and grinding smooth, make a little cake; and at once you will see it approaching and eating, and when it eats, at once it dies. Taking it up, drop it into a glass vessel of the finest rose-oil, as much as

The beetle is killed to be preserved, and the killing is gentle and total: it eats the honeyed cake and simply dies, then goes straight into oil. The lōtomḗtra, the seed-pod of the lotus, is not a random bait — the lotus is the other great Egyptian solar plant, the flower that closes and sinks at dusk and rises and opens at dawn, from which, in one myth, the newborn sun-god is born. So the scarab of the sun is fed the seed of the sun-flower, and dies eating it. What the recipe is really staging is a death-and-preservation that mirrors the whole rite. The creature dies and is at once placed, incorrupt, into mýron — sweet oil, the stuff of unguents and of embalming — in a glass vessel, so its small preserved body can be seen. This is mummification in miniature: the sacred animal killed, anointed, sealed, kept from decay. The initiate who has just declared 'being born again, I pass away' now performs that same passage on a beetle with his own hands — death that does not end in rot but in a preserved, usable, deathless substance.