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