Chapter 39. The Ritual of Osiris.
Section 1. The Popular Rites.
A USEFUL clue to the original nature of a god or goddess is often
furnished by the season at which his or her festival is celebrated.
Thus, if the festival falls at the new or the full moon, there is a
certain presumption that the deity thus honoured either is the moon
or at least has lunar affinities. If the festival is held at the winter or
summer solstice, we naturally surmise that the god is the sun, or at
all events that he stands in some close relation to that luminary.
Again, if the festival coincides with the time of sowing or harvest,
we are inclined to infer that the divinity is an embodiment of the
earth or of the corn. These presumptions or inferences, taken by
themselves, are by no means conclusive; but if they happen to be
confirmed by other indications, the evidence may be regarded as
fairly strong. 1
Unfortunately, in dealing with the Egyptian gods we are in a great
measure precluded from making use of this clue. The reason is not
that the dates of the festivals are always unknown, but that they
shifted from year to year, until after a long interval they had
revolved through the whole course of the seasons. This gradual
revolution of the festal Egyptian cycle resulted from the employment
of a calendar year which neither corresponded exactly to the solar
year nor was periodically corrected by intercalation. 2
If the Egyptian farmer of the olden time could get no help, except
at the rarest intervals, from the official or sacerdotal calendar, he
must have been compelled to observe for himself those natural
signals which marked the times for the various operations of
husbandry. In all ages of which we possess any records the
Egyptians have been an agricultural people, dependent for their
subsistence on the growth of the corn. The cereals which they
cultivated were wheat, barley, and apparently sorghum (Holcus
sorghum, Linnaeus), the doora of the modern fellaheen. Then as
now the whole country, with the exception of a fringe on the coast
of the Mediterranean, was almost rainless, and owed its immense
fertility entirely to the annual inundation of the Nile, which,
regulated by an elaborate system of dams and canals, was
distributed over the fields, renewing the soil year by year with a
fresh deposit of mud washed down from the great equatorial lakes
and the mountains of Abyssinia. Hence the rise of the river has
always been watched by the inhabitants with the utmost anxiety; for
if it either falls short of or exceeds a certain height, dearth and
famine are the inevitable consequences. The water begins to rise
early in June, but it is not until the latter half of July that it swells to
a mighty tide. By the end of September the inundation is at its
greatest height. The country is now submerged, and presents the
appearance of a sea of turbid water, from which the towns and
villages, built on higher ground, rise like islands. For about a month
the flood remains nearly stationary, then sinks more and more
rapidly, till by December or January the river has returned to its
ordinary bed. With the approach of summer the level of the water
continues to fall. In the early days of June the Nile is reduced to
half its ordinary breadth; and Egypt, scorched by the sun, blasted
by the wind that has blown from the Sahara for many days, seems
a mere continuation of the desert. The trees are choked with a thick
layer of grey dust. A few meagre patches of vegetables, watered
with difficulty, struggle painfully for existence in the immediate
neighbourhood of the villages. Some appearance of verdure lingers
beside the canals and in the hollows from which the moisture has
not wholly evaporated. The plain appears to pant in the pitiless
sunshine, bare, dusty, ash-coloured, cracked and seamed as far
as the eye can see with a network of fissures. From the middle of
April till the middle of June the land of Egypt is but half alive,
waiting for the new Nile. 3
For countless ages this cycle of natural events has determined
the annual labours of the Egyptian husbandman. The first work of
the agricultural year is the cutting of the dams which have hitherto
prevented the swollen river from flooding the canals and the fields.
This is done, and the pent-up waters released on their beneficent
mission, in the first half of August. In November, when the
inundation has subsided, wheat, barley, and sorghum are sown.
The time of harvest varies with the district, falling about a month
later in the north than in the south. In Upper or Southern Egypt
barley is reaped at the beginning of March, wheat at the beginning
of April, and sorghum about the end of that month. 4
It is natural to suppose that the various events of the agricultural
year were celebrated by the Egyptian farmer with some simple
religious rites designed to secure the blessing of the gods upon his
labours. These rustic ceremonies he would continue to perform
year after year at the same season, while the solemn festivals of
the priests continued to shift, with the shifting calendar, from
summer through spring to winter, and so backward through autumn
to summer. The rites of the husbandman were stable because they
rested on direct observation of nature: the rites of the priest were
unstable because they were based on a false calculation. Yet
many of the priestly festivals may have been nothing but the old
rural festivals disguised in the course of ages by the pomp of
sacerdotalism and severed, by the error of the calendar, from their
roots in the natural cycle of the seasons. 5
These conjectures are confirmed by the little we know both of the
popular and of the official Egyptian religion. Thus we are told that
the Egyptians held a festival of Isis at the time when the Nile began
to rise. They believed that the goddess was then mourning for the
lost Osiris, and that the tears which dropped from her eyes swelled
the impetuous tide of the river. Now if Osiris was in one of his
aspects a god of the corn, nothing could be more natural than that
he should be mourned at midsummer. For by that time the harvest
was past, the fields were bare, the river ran low, life seemed to be
suspended, the corn-god was dead. At such a moment people who
saw the handiwork of divine beings in all the operations of nature
might well trace the swelling of the sacred stream to the tears shed
by the goddess at the death of the beneficent corn-god her
husband. 6
And the sign of the rising waters on earth was accompanied by a
sign in heaven. For in the early days of Egyptian history, some
three or four thousand years before the beginning of our era, the
splendid star of Sirius, the brightest of all the fixed stars, appeared
at dawn in the east just before sunrise about the time of the summer
solstice, when the Nile begins to rise. The Egyptians called it
Sothis, and regarded it as the star of Isis, just as the Babylonians
deemed the planet Venus the star of Astarte. To both peoples
apparently the brilliant luminary in the morning sky seemed the
goddess of life and love come to mourn her departed lover or
spouse and to wake him from the dead. Hence the rising of Sirius
marked the beginning of the sacred Egyptian year, and was
regularly celebrated by a festival which did not shift with the
shifting official year. 7
The cutting of the dams and the admission of the water into the
canals and fields is a great event in the Egyptian year. At Cairo the
operation generally takes place between the sixth and the sixteenth
of August, and till lately was attended by ceremonies which
deserve to be noticed, because they were probably handed down
from antiquity. An ancient canal, known by the name of the Khalíj,
formerly passed through the native town of Cairo. Near its entrance
the canal was crossed by a dam of earth, very broad at the bottom
and diminishing in breadth upwards, which used to be constructed
before or soon after the Nile began to rise. In front of the dam, on
the side of the river, was reared a truncated cone of earth called
the 'arooseh or "bride," on the top of which a little maize or millet
was generally sown. This "bride" was commonly washed down by
the rising tide a week or a fortnight before the cutting of the dam.
Tradition runs that the old custom was to deck a young virgin in
gay apparel and throw her into the river as a sacrifice to obtain a
plentiful inundation. Whether that was so or not, the intention of the
practice appears to have been to marry the river, conceived as a
male power, to his bride the cornland, which was so soon to be
fertilised by his water. The ceremony was therefore a charm to
ensure the growth of the crops. In modern times money used to be
thrown into the canal on this occasion, and the populace dived into
the water after it. This practice also would seem to have been
ancient, for Seneca tells us that at a place called the Veins of the
Nile, not far from Philae, the priests used to cast money and
offerings of gold into the river at a festival which apparently took
place at the rising of the water. 8
The next great operation of the agricultural year in Egypt is the
sowing of the seed in November, when the water of the inundation
has retreated from the fields. With the Egyptians, as with many
peoples of antiquity, the committing of the seed to the earth
assumed the character of a solemn and mournful rite. On this
subject I will let Plutarch speak for himself. "What," he asks, "are
we to make of the gloomy, joyless, and mournful sacrifices, if it is
wrong either to omit the established rites or to confuse and disturb
our conceptions of the gods by absurd suspicions? For the Greeks
also perform many rites which resemble those of the Egyptians and
are observed about the same time. Thus at the festival of the
Thesmophoria in Athens women sit on the ground and fast. And the
Boeotians open the vaults of the Sorrowful One, naming that
festival sorrowful because Demeter is sorrowing for the descent of
the Maiden. The month is the month of sowing about the setting of
the Pleiades. The Egyptians call it Athyr, the Athenians
Pyanepsion, the Boeotians the month of Demeter... . For it was that
time of year when they saw some of the fruits vanishing and failing
from the trees, while they sowed others grudgingly and with
difficulty, scraping the earth with their hands and huddling it up
again, on the uncertain chance that what they deposited in the
ground would ever ripen and come to maturity. Thus they did in
many respects like those who bury and mourn their dead." 9
The Egyptian harvest, as we have seen, falls not in autumn but in
spring, in the months of March, April, and May. To the
husbandman the time of harvest, at least in a good year, must
necessarily be a season of joy: in bringing home his sheaves he is
requited for his long and anxious labours. Yet if the old Egyptian
farmer felt a secret joy at reaping and garnering the grain, it was
essential that he should conceal the natural emotion under an air of
profound dejection. For was he not severing the body of the
corn-god with his sickle and trampling it to pieces under the hoofs
of his cattle on the threshing-floor? Accordingly we are told that it
was an ancient custom of the Egyptian corn-reapers to beat their
breasts and lament over the first sheaf cut, while at the same time
they called upon Isis. The invocation seems to have taken the form
of a melancholy chant, to which the Greeks gave the name of
Maneros. Similar plaintive strains were chanted by corn-reapers in
Phoenicia and other parts of Western Asia. Probably all these
doleful ditties were lamentations for the corn-god killed by the
sickles of the reapers. In Egypt the slain deity was Osiris, and the
name Maneros, applied to the dirge, appears to be derived from
certain words meaning "Come to thy house," which often occur in
the lamentations for the dead god. 10
Ceremonies of the same sort have been observed by other
peoples, probably for the same purpose. Thus we are told that
among all vegetables corn, by which is apparently meant maize,
holds the first place in the household economy and the ceremonial
observance of the Cherokee Indians, who invoke it under the name
of "the Old Woman" in allusion to a myth that it sprang from the
blood of an old woman killed by her disobedient sons. After the last
working of the crop a priest and his assistant went into the field and
sang songs of invocation to the spirit of the corn. After that a loud
rustling would be heard, which was thought to be caused by the
Old Woman bringing the corn into the field. A clean trail was
always kept from the field to the house, "so that the corn might be
encouraged to stay at home and not go wandering elsewhere."
"Another curious ceremony, of which even the memory is now
almost forgotten, was enacted after the first working of the corn,
when the owner or priest stood in succession at each of the four
corners of the field and wept and wailed loudly. Even the priests
are now unable to give a reason for this performance, which may
have been a lament for the bloody death of Selu," the Old Woman
of the Corn. In these Cherokee practices the lamentations and the
invocations of the Old Woman of the Corn resemble the ancient
Egyptian customs of lamenting over the first corn cut and calling
upon Isis, herself probably in one of her aspects an Old Woman of
the Corn. Further, the Cherokee precaution of leaving a clear path
from the field to the house resembles the Egyptian invitation to
Osiris, "Come to thy house." So in the East Indies to this day
people observe elaborate ceremonies for the purpose of bringing
back the Soul of the Rice from the fields to the barn. The Nandi of
East Africa perform a ceremony in September when the eleusine
grain is ripening. Every woman who owns a plantation goes out
with her daughters into the cornfields and makes a bonfire of the
branches and leaves of certain trees. After that they pluck some of
the eleusine, and each of them puts one grain in her necklace,
chews another and rubs it on her forehead, throat, and breast. "No
joy is shown by the womenfolk on this occasion, and they
sorrowfully cut a basketful of the corn which they take home with
them and place in the loft to dry." 11
The conception of the corn-spirit as old and dead at harvest is
very clearly embodied in a custom observed by the Arabs of Moab.
When the harvesters have nearly finished their task and only a
small corner of the field remains to be reaped, the owner takes a
handful of wheat tied up in a sheaf. A hole is dug in the form of a
grave, and two stones are set upright, one at the head and the
other at the foot, just as in an ordinary burial. Then the sheaf of
wheat is laid at the bottom of the grave, and the sheikh pronounces
these words, 'The old man is dead." Earth is afterwards thrown in to
cover the sheaf, with a prayer, "May Allah bring us back the wheat
of the dead." 12
Section 2. The Official Rites.
SUCH, then, were the principal events of the farmer's calendar in
ancient Egypt, and such the simple religious rites by which he
celebrated them. But we have still to consider the Osirian festivals
of the official calendar, so far as these are described by Greek
writers or recorded on the monuments. In examining them it is
necessary to bear in mind that on account of the movable year of
the old Egyptian calendar the true or astronomical dates of the
official festivals must have varied from year to year, at least until
the adoption of the fixed Alexandrian year in 30 B.C. From that time
onward, apparently, the dates of the festivals were determined by
the new calendar, and so ceased to rotate throughout the length of
the solar year. At all events Plutarch, writing about the end of the
first century, implies that they were then fixed, not movable; for
though he does not mention the Alexandrian calendar, he clearly
dates the festivals by it. Moreover, the long festal calendar of Esne,
an important document of the Imperial age, is obviously based on
the fixed Alexandrian year; for it assigns the mark for New Year's
Day to the day which corresponds to the twenty-ninth of August,
which was the first day of the Alexandrian year, and its references
to the rising of the Nile, the position of the sun, and the operations
of agriculture are all in harmony with this supposition. Thus we may
take it as fairly certain that from 30 B.C. onwards the Egyptian
festivals were stationary in the solar year. 1
Herodotus tells us that the grave of Osiris was at Sais in Lower
Egypt, and that there was a lake there upon which the sufferings of
the god were displayed as a mystery by night. This commemoration
of the divine passion was held once a year: the people mourned
and beat their breasts at it to testify their sorrow for the death of the
god; and an image of a cow, made of gilt wood with a golden sun
between its horns, was carried out of the chamber in which it stood
the rest of the year. The cow no doubt represented Isis herself, for
cows were sacred to her, and she was regularly depicted with the
horns of a cow on her head, or even as a woman with the head of
a cow. It is probable that the carrying out of her cow-shaped image
symbolised the goddess searching for the dead body of Osiris; for
this was the native Egyptian interpretation of a similar ceremony
observed in Plutarch's time about the winter solstice, when the gilt
cow was carried seven times round the temple. A great feature of
the festival was the nocturnal illumination. People fastened rows of
oil-lamps to the outside of their houses, and the lamps burned all
night long. The custom was not confined to Sais, but was observed
throughout the whole of Egypt. 2
This universal illumination of the houses on one night of the year
suggests that the festival may have been a commemoration not
merely of the dead Osiris but of the dead in general, in other
words, that it may have been a night of All Souls. For it is a
widespread belief that the souls of the dead revisit their old homes
on one night of the year; and on that solemn occasion people
prepare for the reception of the ghosts by laying out food for them
to eat, and lighting lamps to guide them on their dark road from and
to the grave. Herodotus, who briefly describes the festival, omits to
mention its date, but we can determine it with some probability from
other sources. Thus Plutarch tells us that Osiris was murdered on
the seventeenth of the month Athyr, and that the Egyptians
accordingly observed mournful rites for four days from the
seventeenth of Athyr. Now in the Alexandrian calendar, which
Plutarch used, these four days corresponded to the thirteenth,
fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth of November, and this date
answers exactly to the other indications given by Plutarch, who
says that at the time of the festival the Nile was sinking, the north
winds dying away, the nights lengthening, and the leaves falling
from the trees. During these four days a gilt cow swathed in a black
pall was exhibited as an image of Isis. This, no doubt, was the
image mentioned by Herodotus in his account of the festival. On
the nineteenth day of the month the people went down to the sea,
the priests carrying a shrine which contained a golden casket. Into
this casket they poured fresh water, and thereupon the spectators
raised a shout that Osiris was found. After that they took some
vegetable mould, moistened it with water, mixed it with precious
spices and incense, and moulded the paste into a small
moon-shaped image, which was then robed and ornamented. Thus
it appears that the purpose of the ceremonies described by
Plutarch was to represent dramatically, first, the search for the dead
body of Osiris, and, second, its joyful discovery, followed by the
resurrection of the dead god who came to life again in the new
image of vegetable mould and spices. Lactantius tells us how on
these occasions the priests, with their shaven bodies, beat their
breasts and lamented, imitating the sorrowful search of Isis for her
lost son Osiris, and how afterwards their sorrow was turned to joy
when the jackal-headed god Anubis, or rather a mummer in his
stead, produced a small boy, the living representative of the god
who was lost and was found. Thus Lactantius regarded Osiris as
the son instead of the husband of Isis, and he makes no mention of
the image of vegetable mould. It is probable that the boy who
figured in the sacred drama played the part, not of Osiris, but of his
son Horus; but as the death and resurrection of the god were
celebrated in many cities of Egypt, it is also possible that in some
places the part of the god come to life was played by a living actor
instead of by an image. Another Christian writer describes how the
Egyptians, with shorn heads, annually lamented over a buried idol
of Osiris, smiting their breasts, slashing their shoulders, ripping
open their old wounds, until, after several days of mourning, they
professed to find the mangled remains of the god, at which they
rejoiced. However the details of the ceremony may have varied in
different places, the pretence of finding the god's body, and
probably of restoring it to life, was a great event in the festal year
of the Egyptians. The shouts of joy which greeted it are described
or alluded to by many ancient writers. 3
The funeral rites of Osiris, as they were observed at his great
festival in the sixteen provinces of Egypt, are described in a long
inscription of the Ptolemaic period, which is engraved on the walls
of the god's temple at Denderah, the Tentyra of the Greeks, a town
of Upper Egypt situated on the western bank of the Nile about forty
miles north of Thebes. Unfortunately, while the information thus
furnished is remarkably full and minute on many points, the
arrangement adopted in the inscription is so confused and the
expression often so obscure that a clear and consistent account of
the ceremonies as a whole can hardly be extracted from it.
Moreover, we learn from the document that the ceremonies varied
somewhat in the several cities, the ritual of Abydos, for example,
differing from that of Busiris. Without attempting to trace all the
particularities of local usage I shall briefly indicate what seem to
have been the leading features of the festival, so far as these can
be ascertained with tolerable certainty. 4
The rites lasted eighteen days, from the twelfth to the thirtieth of
the month Khoiak, and set forth the nature of Osiris in his triple
aspect as dead, dismembered, and finally reconstituted by the
union of his scattered limbs. In the first of these aspects he was
called Chent-Ament (Khenti-Amenti), in the second Osiris-Sep,
and in the third Sokari (Seker). Small images of the god were
moulded of sand or vegetable earth and corn, to which incense
was sometimes added; his face was painted yellow and his
cheek-bones green. These images were cast in a mould of pure
gold, which represented the god in the form of a mummy, with the
white crown of Egypt on his head. The festival opened on the
twelfth day of Khoiak with a ceremony of ploughing and sowing.
Two black cows were yoked to the plough, which was made of
tamarisk wood, while the share was of black copper. A boy
scattered the seed. One end of the field was sown with barley, the
other with spelt, and the middle with flax. During the operation the
chief celebrant recited the ritual chapter of "the sowing of the
fields." At Busiris on the twentieth of Khoiak sand and barley were
put in the god's "garden," which appears to have been a sort of
large flower-pot. This was done in the presence of the
cow-goddess Shenty, represented seemingly by the image of a
cow made of gilt sycamore wood with a headless human image in
its inside. "Then fresh inundation water was poured out of a golden
vase over both the goddess and the `garden,' and the barley was
allowed to grow as the emblem of the resurrection of the god after
his burial in the earth, `for the growth of the garden is the growth of
the divine substance.'" On the twenty-second of Khoiak, at the
eighth hour, the images of Osiris, attended by thirty-four images of
deities, performed a mysterious voyage in thirty-four tiny boats
made of papyrus, which were illuminated by three hundred and
sixty-five lights. On the twenty-fourth of Khoiak, after sunset, the
effigy of Osiris in a coffin of mulberry wood was laid in the grave,
and at the ninth hour of the night the effigy which had been made
and deposited the year before was removed and placed upon
boughs of sycamore. Lastly, on the thirtieth day of Khoiak they
repaired to the holy sepulchre, a subterranean chamber over which
appears to have grown a clump of Persea-trees. Entering the vault
by the western door, they laid the coffined effigy of the dead god
reverently on a bed of sand in the chamber. So they left him to his
rest, and departed from the sepulchre by the eastern door. Thus
ended the ceremonies in the month of Khoiak. 5
In the foregoing account of the festival, drawn from the great
inscription of Denderah, the burial of Osiris figures prominently,
while his resurrection is implied rather than expressed. This defect
of the document, however, is amply compensated by a remarkable
series of bas-reliefs which accompany and illustrate the inscription.
These exhibit in a series of scenes the dead god lying swathed as
a mummy on his bier, then gradually raising himself up higher and
higher, until at last he has entirely quitted the bier and is seen erect
between the guardian wings of the faithful Isis, who stands behind
him, while a male figure holds up before his eyes the crux ansata,
the Egyptian symbol of life. The resurrection of the god could
hardly be portrayed more graphically. Even more instructive,
however, is another representation of the same event in a chamber
dedicated to Osiris in the great temple of Isis at Philae. Here we
see the dead body of Osiris with stalks of corn springing from it,
while a priest waters the stalks from a pitcher which he holds in his
hand. The accompanying inscription sets forth that "this is the form
of him whom one may not name, Osiris of the mysteries, who
springs from the returning waters." Taken together, the picture and
the words seem to leave no doubt that Osiris was here conceived
and represented as a personification of the corn which springs from
the fields after they have been fertilised by the inundation. This,
according to the inscription, was the kernel of the mysteries, the
innermost secret revealed to the initiated. So in the rites of Demeter
at Eleusis a reaped ear of corn was exhibited to the worshippers as
the central mystery of their religion. We can now fully understand
why at the great festival of sowing in the month of Khoiak the
priests used to bury effigies of Osiris made of earth and corn. When
these effigies were taken up again at the end of a year or of a
shorter interval, the corn would be found to have sprouted from the
body of Osiris, and this sprouting of the grain would be hailed as
an omen, or rather as the cause, of the growth of the crops. The
corn-god produced the corn from himself: he gave his own body to
feed the people: he died that they might live. 6
And from the death and resurrection of their great god the
Egyptians drew not only their support and sustenance in this life,
but also their hope of a life eternal beyond the grave. This hope is
indicated in the clearest manner by the very remarkable effigies of
Osiris which have come to light in Egyptian cemeteries. Thus in the
Valley of the Kings at Thebes there was found the tomb of a royal
fan-bearer who lived about 1500 B.C. Among the rich contents of
the tomb there was a bier on which rested a mattress of reeds
covered with three layers of linen. On the upper side of the linen
was painted a life-size figure of Osiris; and the interior of the figure,
which was waterproof, contained a mixture of vegetable mould,
barley, and a sticky fluid. The barley had sprouted and sent out
shoots two or three inches long. Again, in the cemetery at
Cynopolis "were numerous burials of Osiris figures. These were
made of grain wrapped up in cloth and roughly shaped like an
Osiris, and placed inside a bricked-up recess at the side of the
tomb, sometimes in small pottery coffins, sometimes in wooden
coffins in the form of a hawkmummy, sometimes without any coffins
at all." These corn-stuffed figures were bandaged like mummies
with patches of gilding here and there, as if in imitation of the
golden mould in which the similar figures of Osiris were cast at the
festival of sowing. Again, effigies of Osiris, with faces of green wax
and their interior full of grain, were found buried near the necropolis
of Thebes. Finally, we are told by Professor Erman that between
the legs of mummies "there sometimes lies a figure of Osiris made of
slime; it is filled with grains of corn, the sprouting of which is
intended to signify the resurrection of the god." We cannot doubt
that, just as the burial of corn-stuffed images of Osiris in the earth
at the festival of sowing was designed to quicken the seed, so the
burial of similar images in the grave was meant to quicken the
dead, in other words, to ensure their spiritual immortality. 7
