This ending of the socially destructive practices of human and animal sacrifice, burial of precious goods and the replacement of them by sculptural stand-ins, probably came from necessity, yet it established the idea of sympathetic magic, that the image of something could function analogously to the thing itself.

The image was a tool, useful but dispensable, a kind of labour-saving device. The Egyptian dead, their bodies mummified to ensure their physical presence in the afterlife, had psychically to split themselves in order to deal with this fact - a premonition, perhaps, of the current notion of a non-pathological, schizophrenic psychology.