Section 1. Osiris a Corn-god.
THE FOREGOING survey of the myth and ritual of Osiris may
suffice to prove that in one of his aspects the god was a
personification of the corn, which may be said to die and come to
life again every year. Through all the pomp and glamour with
which in later times the priests had invested his worship, the
conception of him as the corn-god comes clearly out in the
festival of his death and resurrection, which was celebrated in the
month of Khoiak and at a later period in the month of Athyr. That
festival appears to have been essentially a festival of sowing,
which properly fell at the time when the husbandman actually
committed the seed to the earth. On that occasion an effigy of the
corn-god, moulded of earth and corn, was buried with funeral
rites in the ground in order that, dying there, he might come to life
again with the new crops. The ceremony was, in fact, a charm to
ensure the growth of the corn by sympathetic magic, and we may
conjecture that as such it was practised in a simple form by every
Egyptian farmer on his fields long before it was adopted and
transfigured by the priests in the stately ritual of the temple. In the
modern, but doubtless ancient, Arab custom of burying "the Old
Man," namely, a sheaf of wheat, in the harvest-field and praying
that he may return from the dead, we see the germ out of which
the worship of the corn-god Osiris was probably developed. 1
The details of his myth fit in well with this interpretation of the
god. He was said to be the offspring of Sky and Earth. What more
appropriate parentage could be invented for the corn which
springs from the ground that has been fertilised by the water of
heaven? It is true that the land of Egypt owed its fertility directly to
the Nile and not to showers; but the inhabitants must have known
or guessed that the great river in its turn was fed by the rains
which fell in the far interior. Again, the legend that Osiris was the
first to teach men the use of corn would be most naturally told of
the corn-god himself. Further, the story that his mangled remains
were scattered up and down the land and buried in different
places may be a mythical way of expressing either the sowing or
the winnowing of the grain. The latter interpretation is supported by
the tale that Isis placed the severed limbs of Osiris on a
corn-sieve. Or more probably the legend may be a reminiscence
of a custom of slaying a human victim, perhaps a representative of
the corn-spirit, and distributing his flesh or scattering his ashes
over the fields to fertilise them. In modern Europe the figure of
Death is sometimes torn in pieces, and the fragments are then
buried in the ground to make the crops grow well, and in other
parts of the world human victims are treated in the same way. With
regard to the ancient Egyptians we have it on the authority of
Manetho that they used to burn red-haired men and scatter their
ashes with winnowing fans, and it is highly significant that this
barbarous sacrifice was offered by the kings at the grave of Osiris.
We may conjecture that the victims represented Osiris himself,
who was annually slain, dismembered, and buried in their persons
that he might quicken the seed in the earth. 2
Possibly in prehistoric times the kings themselves played the part
of the god and were slain and dismembered in that character. Set
as well as Osiris is said to have been torn in pieces after a reign
of eighteen days, which was commemorated by an annual festival
of the same length. According to one story Romulus, the first king
of Rome, was cut in pieces by the senators, who buried the
fragments of him in the ground; and the traditional day of his
death, the seventh of July, was celebrated with certain curious
rites, which were apparently connected with the artificial
fertilisation of the fig. Again, Greek legend told how Pentheus, king
of Thebes, and Lycurgus, king of the Thracian Edonians, opposed
the vine-god Dionysus, and how the impious monarchs were rent
in pieces, the one by the frenzied Bacchanals, the other by
horses. The Greek traditions may well be distorted reminiscences
of a custom of sacrificing human beings, and especially divine
kings, in the character of Dionysus, a god who resembled Osiris
in many points and was said like him to have been torn limb from
limb. We are told that in Chios men were rent in pieces as a
sacrifice to Dionysus; and since they died the same death as their
god, it is reasonable to suppose that they personated him. The
story that the Thracian Orpheus was similarly torn limb from limb
by the Bacchanals seems to indicate that he too perished in the
character of the god whose death he died. It is significant that the
Thracian Lycurgus, king of the Edonians, is said to have been put
to death in order that the ground, which had ceased to be fruitful,
might regain its fertility. 3
Further, we read of a Norwegian king, Halfdan the Black, whose
body was cut up and buried in different parts of his kingdom for
the sake of ensuring the fruitfulness of the earth. He is said to
have been drowned at the age of forty through the breaking of the
ice in spring. What followed his death is thus related by the old
Norse historian Snorri Sturluson: "He had been the most
prosperous (literally, blessed with abundance) of all kings. So
greatly did men value him that when the news came that he was
dead and his body removed to Hringariki and intended for burial
there, the chief men from Raumariki and Westfold and Heithmörk
came and all requested that they might take his body with them
and bury it in their various provinces; they thought that it would
bring abundance to those who obtained it. Eventually it was
settled that the body was distributed in four places. The head was
laid in a barrow at Steinn in Hringariki, and each party took away
their own share and buried it. All these barrows are called
Halfdan's barrows." It should be remembered that this Halfdan
belonged to the family of the Ynglings, who traced their descent
from Frey, the great Scandinavian god of fertility. 4
The natives of Kiwai, an island lying off the mouth of the Fly
River in British New Guinea, tell of a certain magician named
Segera, who had sago for his totem. When Segera was old and ill,
he told the people that he would soon die, but that, nevertheless,
he would cause their gardens to thrive. Accordingly, he instructed
them that when he was dead they should cut him up and place
pieces of his flesh in their gardens, but his head was to be buried
in his own garden. Of him it is said that he outlived the ordinary
age, and that no man knew his father, but that he made the sago
good and no one was hungry any more. Old men who were alive
some years ago affirmed that they had known Segera in their
youth, and the general opinion of the Kiwai people seems to be
that Segera died not more than two generations ago. 5
Taken all together, these legends point to a widespread practice
of dismembering the body of a king or magician and burying the
pieces in different parts of the country in order to ensure the
fertility of the ground and probably also the fecundity of man and
beast. 6
To return to the human victims whose ashes the Egyptians
scattered with winnowing-fans, the red hair of these unfortunates
was probably significant. For in Egypt the oxen which were
sacrificed had also to be red; a single black or white hair found on
the beast would have disqualified it for the sacrifice. If, as I
conjecture, these human sacrifices were intended to promote the
growth of the crops-and the winnowing of their ashes seems to
support this view-redhaired victims were perhaps selected as best
fitted to personate the spirit of the ruddy grain. For when a god is
represented by a living person, it is natural that the human
representative should be chosen on the ground of his supposed
resemblance to the divine original. Hence the ancient Mexicans,
conceiving the maize as a personal being who went through the
whole course of life between seed-time and harvest, sacrificed
new-born babes when the maize was sown, older children when
it had sprouted, and so on till it was fully ripe, when they
sacrificed old men. A name for Osiris was the "crop" or "harvest";
and the ancients sometimes explained him as a personification of
the corn. 7