| Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). The Golden
Bough. 1922. |
XXXVIII. The Myth of Osiris |
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| IN ANCIENT EGYPT the god whose death and resurrection were
annually celebrated with alternate sorrow and joy was Osiris, the
most popular of all Egyptian deities; and there are good grounds for
classing him in one of his aspects with Adonis and Attis as a
personification of the great yearly vicissitudes of nature,
especially of the corn. But the immense vogue which he enjoyed for
many ages induced his devoted worshippers to heap upon him the
attributes and powers of many other gods; so that it is not always
easy to strip him, so to say, of his borrowed plumes and to restore
them to their proper owners. |
1 |
| The story of Osiris is told in a connected form only
by Plutarch, whose narrative has been confirmed and to some extent
amplified in modern times by the evidence of the monuments. |
2 |
| Osiris was the offspring of an intrigue between the
earth-god Seb (Keb or Geb, as the name is sometimes transliterated)
and the sky-goddess Nut. The Greeks identified his parents with
their own deities Cronus and Rhea. When the sun-god Ra perceived
that his wife Nut had been unfaithful to him, he declared with a
curse that she should be delivered of the child in no month and no
year. But the goddess had another lover, the god Thoth or Hermes, as
the Greeks called him, and he playing at draughts with the moon won
from her a seventy-second part of every day, and having compounded
five whole days out of these parts he added them to the Egyptian
year of three hundred and sixty days. This
was the mythical origin of the five supplementary days which the
Egyptians annually inserted at the end of every year in order to
establish a harmony between lunar and solar time. On these five
days, regarded as outside the year of twelve months, the curse of
the sun-god did not rest, and accordingly Osiris was born on the
first of them. At his nativity a voice rang out proclaiming that the
Lord of All had come into the world. Some say that a certain Pamyles
heard a voice from the temple at Thebes bidding him announce with a
shout that a great king, the beneficent Osiris, was born. But Osiris
was not the only child of his mother. On the second of the
supplementary days she gave birth to the elder Horus, on the third
to the god Set, whom the Greeks called Typhon, on the fourth to the
goddess Isis, and on the fifth to the goddess Nephthys. Afterwards
Set married his sister Nephthys, and Osiris married his sister
Isis. |
3 |
| Reigning as a king on earth, Osiris reclaimed the
Egyptians from savagery, gave them laws, and taught them to worship
the gods. Before his time the Egyptians had been cannibals. But
Isis, the sister and wife of Osiris, discovered wheat and barley
growing wild, and Osiris introduced the cultivation of these grains
amongst his people, who forthwith abandoned cannibalism and took
kindly to a corn diet. Moreover, Osiris is said to have been the
first to gather fruit from trees, to train the vine to poles, and to
tread the grapes. Eager to communicate these beneficent discoveries
to all mankind, he committed the whole government of Egypt to his
wife Isis, and travelled over the world, diffusing the blessings of
civilisation and agriculture wherever he went. In countries where a
harsh climate or niggardly soil forbade the cultivation of the vine,
he taught the inhabitants to console themselves for the want of wine
by brewing beer from barley. Loaded with the wealth that had been
showered upon him by grateful nations, he returned to Egypt, and on
account of the benefits he had conferred on mankind he was
unanimously hailed and worshipped as a deity. But his brother Set
(whom the Greeks called Typhon) with seventy-two others plotted
against him. Having taken the measure of his good brother’s body by
stealth, the bad brother Typhon fashioned and highly decorated a
coffer of the same size, and once when they were all drinking and
making merry he brought in the coffer and jestingly promised to give
it to the one whom it should fit exactly. Well, they all tried one
after the other, but it fitted none of them. Last of all Osiris
stepped into it and lay down. On that the conspirators ran and
slammed the lid down on him, nailed it fast, soldered it with molten
lead, and flung the coffer into the Nile. This happened on the
seventeenth day of the month Athyr, when the sun is in the sign of
the Scorpion, and in the eight-and-twentieth year of the reign or
the life of Osiris. When Isis heard of it she sheared off a lock of
her hair, put on a mourning attire, and wandered disconsolately up
and down, seeking the body. |
4 |
| By the advice of the god of wisdom she took refuge
in the papyrus swamps of the Delta. Seven
scorpions accompanied her in her flight. One evening when she was
weary she came to the house of a woman, who, alarmed at the sight of
the scorpions, shut the door in her face. Then one of the scorpions
crept under the door and stung the child of the woman that he died.
But when Isis heard the mother’s lamentation, her heart was touched,
and she laid her hands on the child and uttered her powerful spells;
so the poison was driven out of the child and he lived. Afterwards
Isis herself gave birth to a son in the swamps. She had conceived
him while she fluttered in the form of a hawk over the corpse of her
dead husband. The infant was the younger Horus, who in his youth
bore the name of Harpocrates, that is, the child Horus. Him Buto,
the goddess of the north, hid from the wrath of his wicked uncle
Set. Yet she could not guard him from all mishap; for one day when
Isis came to her little son’s hiding-place she found him stretched
lifeless and rigid on the ground: a scorpion had stung him. Then
Isis prayed to the sun-god Ra for help. The god hearkened to her and
staid his bark in the sky, and sent down Thoth to teach her the
spell by which she might restore her son to life. She uttered the
words of power, and straightway the poison flowed from the body of
Horus, air passed into him, and he lived. Then Thoth ascended up
into the sky and took his place once more in the bark of the sun,
and the bright pomp passed onward jubilant. |
5 |
| Meantime the coffer containing the body of Osiris
had floated down the river and away out to sea, till at last it
drifted ashore at Byblus, on the coast of Syria. Here a fine
erica-tree shot up suddenly and enclosed the chest in its
trunk. The king of the country, admiring the growth of the tree, had
it cut down and made into a pillar of his house; but he did not know
that the coffer with the dead Osiris was in it. Word of this came to
Isis and she journeyed to Byblus, and sat down by the well, in
humble guise, her face wet with tears. To none would she speak till
the king’s handmaidens came, and them she greeted kindly, and
braided their hair, and breathed on them from her own divine body a
wondrous perfume. But when the queen beheld the braids of her
handmaidens’ hair and smelt the sweet smell that emanated from them,
she sent for the stranger woman and took her into her house and made
her the nurse of her child. But Isis gave the babe her finger
instead of her breast to suck, and at night she began to burn all
that was mortal of him away, while she herself in the likeness of a
swallow fluttered round the pillar that contained her dead brother,
twittering mournfully. But the queen spied what she was doing and
shrieked out when she saw her child in flames, and thereby she
hindered him from becoming immortal. Then the goddess revealed
herself and begged for the pillar of the roof, and they gave it her,
and she cut the coffer out of it, and fell upon it and embraced it
and lamented so loud that the younger of the king’s children died of
fright on the spot. But the trunk of the tree she wrapped in fine
linen, and poured ointment on it, and gave it to the king and queen,
and the wood stands in a temple of Isis and is worshipped by the people of Byblus to this
day. And Isis put the coffer in a boat and took the eldest of the
king’s children with her and sailed away. As soon as they were
alone, she opened the chest, and laying her face on the face of her
brother she kissed him and wept. But the child came behind her
softly and saw what she was about, and she turned and looked at him
in anger, and the child could not bear her look and died; but some
say that it was not so, but that he fell into the sea and was
drowned. It is he whom the Egyptians sing of at their banquets under
the name of Maneros. |
6 |
| But Isis put the coffer by and went to see her son
Horus at the city of Buto, and Typhon found the coffer as he was
hunting a boar one night by the light of a full moon. And he knew
the body, and rent it into fourteen pieces, and scattered them
abroad. But Isis sailed up and down the marshes in a shallop made of
papyrus, looking for the pieces; and that is why when people sail in
shallops made of papyrus, the crocodiles do not hurt them, for they
fear or respect the goddess. And that is the reason, too, why there
are many graves of Osiris in Egypt, for she buried each limb as she
found it. But others will have it that she buried an image of him in
every city, pretending it was his body, in order that Osiris might
be worshipped in many places, and that if Typhon searched for the
real grave he might not be able to find it. However, the genital
member of Osiris had been eaten by the fishes, so Isis made an image
of it instead, and the image is used by the Egyptians at their
festivals to this day. “Isis,” writes the historian Diodorus
Siculus, “recovered all the parts of the body except the genitals;
and because she wished that her husband’s grave should be unknown
and honoured by all who dwell in the land of Egypt, she resorted to
the following device. She moulded human images out of wax and
spices, corresponding to the stature of Osiris, round each one of
the parts of his body. Then she called in the priests according to
their families and took an oath of them all that they would reveal
to no man the trust she was about to repose in them. So to each of
them privately she said that to them alone she entrusted the burial
of the body, and reminding them of the benefits they had received
she exhorted them to bury the body in their own land and to honour
Osiris as a god. She also besought them to dedicate one of the
animals of their country, whichever they chose, and to honour it in
life as they had formerly honoured Osiris, and when it died to grant
it obsequies like his. And because she would encourage the priests
in their own interest to bestow the aforesaid honours, she gave them
a third part of the land to be used by them in the service and
worship of the gods. Accordingly it is said that the priests,
mindful of the benefits of Osiris, desirous of gratifying the queen,
and moved by the prospect of gain, carried out all the injunctions
of Isis. Wherefore to this day each of the priests imagines that
Osiris is buried in his country, and they honour the beasts that
were consecrated in the beginning, and when the animals die the
priests renew at their burial the mourning for Osiris. But the
sacred bulls, the one called Apis and the other Mnevis, were dedicated to Osiris, and it
was ordained that they should be worshipped as gods in common by all
the Egyptians, since these animals above all others had helped the
discoverers of corn in sowing the seed and procuring the universal
benefits of agriculture.” |
7 |
| Such is the myth or legend of Osiris, as told by
Greek writers and eked out by more or less fragmentary notices or
allusions in native Egyptian literature. A long inscription in the
temple at Denderah has preserved a list of the god’s graves, and
other texts mention the parts of his body which were treasured as
holy relics in each of the sanctuaries. Thus his heart was at
Athribis, his backbone at Busiris, his neck at Letopolis, and his
head at Memphis. As often happens in such cases, some of his divine
limbs were miraculously multiplied. His head, for example, was at
Abydos as well as at Memphis, and his legs, which were remarkably
numerous, would have sufficed for several ordinary mortals. In this
respect, however, Osiris was nothing to St. Denys, of whom no less
than seven heads, all equally genuine, are extant. |
8 |
| According to native Egyptian accounts, which
supplement that of Plutarch, when Isis had found the corpse of her
husband Osiris, she and her sister Nephthys sat down beside it and
uttered a lament which in after ages became the type of all Egyptian
lamentations for the dead. “Come to thy house,” they wailed. “Come
to thy house. O god On! come to thy house, thou who hast no foes. O
fair youth, come to thy house, that thou mayest see me. I am thy
sister, whom thou lovest; thou shalt not part from me. O fair boy,
come to thy house… . I see thee not, yet doth my heart yearn after
thee and mine eyes desire thee. Come to her who loves thee, who
loves thee, Unnefer, thou blessed one! Come to thy sister, come to
thy wife, to thy wife, thou whose heart stands still. Come to thy
housewife. I am thy sister by the same mother, thou shalt not be far
from me. Gods and men have turned their faces towards thee and weep
for thee together… . I call after thee and weep, so that my cry is
heard to heaven, but thou hearest not my voice; yet am I thy sister,
whom thou didst love on earth; thou didst love none but me, my
brother! my brother!” This lament for the fair youth cut off in his
prime reminds us of the laments for Adonis. The title of Unnefer or
“the Good Being” bestowed on him marks the beneficence which
tradition universally ascribed to Osiris; it was at once his
commonest title and one of his names as king. |
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| The lamentations of the two sad sisters were not in
vain. In pity for her sorrow the sun-god Ra sent down from heaven
the jackal-headed god Anubis, who, with the aid of Isis and
Nephthys, of Thoth and Horus, pieced together the broken body of the
murdered god, swathed it in linen bandages, and observed all the
other rites which the Egyptians were wont to perform over the bodies
of the departed. Then Isis fanned the cold clay with her wings:
Osiris revived, and thenceforth reigned as king over the dead in the
other world. There he bore the titles of Lord of the Underworld,
Lord of Eternity, Ruler of the Dead. There,
too, in the great Hall of the Two Truths, assisted by forty-two
assessors, one from each of the principal districts of Egypt, he
presided as judge at the trial of the souls of the departed, who
made their solemn confession before him, and, their heart having
been weighed in the balance of justice, received the reward of
virtue in a life eternal or the appropriate punishment of their
sins. |
10 |
| In the resurrection of Osiris the Egyptians saw the
pledge of a life everlasting for themselves beyond the grave. They
believed that every man would live eternally in the other world if
only his surviving friends did for his body what the gods had done
for the body of Osiris. Hence the ceremonies observed by the
Egyptians over the human dead were an exact copy of those which
Anubis, Horus, and the rest had performed over the dead god. “At
every burial there was enacted a representation of the divine
mystery which had been performed of old over Osiris, when his son,
his sisters, his friends were gathered round his mangled remains and
succeeded by their spells and manipulations in converting his broken
body into the first mummy, which they afterwards reanimated and
furnished with the means of entering on a new individual life beyond
the grave. The mummy of the deceased was Osiris; the professional
female mourners were his two sisters Isis and Nephthys; Anubis,
Horus, all the gods of the Osirian legend gathered about the
corpse.” In this way every dead Egyptian was identified with Osiris
and bore his name. From the Middle Kingdom onwards it was the
regular practice to address the deceased as “Osiris So-and-So,” as
if he were the god himself, and to add the standing epithet “true of
speech,” because true speech was characteristic of Osiris. The
thousands of inscribed and pictured tombs that have been opened in
the valley of the Nile prove that the mystery of the resurrection
was performed for the benefit of every dead Egyptian; as Osiris died
and rose again from the dead, so all men hoped to arise like him
from death to life eternal. |
11 |
| Thus according to what seems to have been the
general native tradition Osiris was a good and beloved king of
Egypt, who suffered a violent death but rose from the dead and was
henceforth worshipped as a deity. In harmony with this tradition he
was regularly represented by sculptors and painters in human and
regal form as a dead king, swathed in the wrappings of a mummy, but
wearing on his head a kingly crown and grasping in one of his hands,
which were left free from the bandages, a kingly sceptre. Two cities
above all others were associated with his myth or memory. One of
them was Busiris in Lower Egypt, which claimed to possess his
backbone; the other was Abydos in Upper Egypt, which gloried in the
possession of his head. Encircled by the nimbus of the dead yet
living god, Abydos, originally an obscure place, became from the end
of the Old Kingdom the holiest spot in Egypt; his tomb there would
seem to have been to the Egyptians what the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre at Jerusalem is to Christians. It was the wish of every
pious man that his dead body should rest in hallowed earth near the
grave of the glorified Osiris. Few indeed
were rich enough to enjoy this inestimable privilege; for, apart
from the cost of a tomb in the sacred city, the mere transport of
mummies from great distances was both difficult and expensive. Yet
so eager were many to absorb in death the blessed influence which
radiated from the holy sepulchre that they caused their surviving
friends to convey their mortal remains to Abydos, there to tarry for
a short time, and then to be brought back by river and interred in
the tombs which had been made ready for them in their native land.
Others had cenotaphs built or memorial tablets erected for
themselves near the tomb of their dead and risen Lord, that they
might share with him the bliss of a joyful resurrection. |
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