Chapter 40. The Nature of Osiris.
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
Section 2. Osiris a Tree-spirit.
BUT Osiris was more than a spirit of the corn; he was also a
tree-spirit, and this may perhaps have been his primitive
character, since the worship of trees is naturally older in the
history of religion than the worship of the cereals. The character of
Osiris as a tree-spirit was represented very graphically in a
ceremony described by Firmicus Maternus. A pine-tree having
been cut down, the centre was hollowed out, and with the wood
thus excavated an image of Osiris was made, which was then
buried like a corpse in the hollow of the tree. It is hard to imagine
how the conception of a tree as tenanted by a personal being
could be more plainly expressed. The image of Osiris thus made
was kept for a year and then burned, exactly as was done with
the image of Attis which was attached to the pine-tree. The
ceremony of cutting the tree, as described by Firmicus Maternus,
appears to be alluded to by Plutarch. It was probably the ritual
counterpart of the mythical discovery of the body of Osiris
enclosed in the erica-tree. In the hall of Osiris at Denderah the
coffin containing the hawk-headed mummy of the god is clearly
depicted as enclosed within a tree, apparently a conifer, the trunk
and branches of which are seen above and below the coffin. The
scene thus corresponds closely both to the myth and to the
ceremony described by Firmicus Maternus. 1
It accords with the character of Osiris as a tree-spirit that his
worshippers were forbidden to injure fruit-trees, and with his
character as a god of vegetation in general that they were not
allowed to stop up wells of water, which are so important for the
irrigation of hot southern lands. According to one legend, he
taught men to train the vine to poles, to prune its superfluous
foliage, and to extract the juice of the grape. In the papyrus of
Nebseni, written about 1550 B.C., Osiris is depicted sitting in a
shrine, from the roof of which hang clusters of grapes; and in the
papyrus of the royal scribe Nekht we see the god enthroned in
front of a pool, from the banks of which a luxuriant vine, with many
bunches of grapes, grows towards the green face of the seated
deity. The ivy was sacred to him, and was called his plant
because it is always green. 2
Section 3. Osiris a God of Fertility.
AS A GOD of vegetation Osiris was naturally conceived as a god
of creative energy in general, since men at a certain stage of
evolution fail to distinguish between the reproductive powers of
animals and of plants. Hence a striking feature in his worship was
the coarse but expressive symbolism by which this aspect of his
nature was presented to the eye not merely of the initiated but of
the multitude. At his festival women used to go about the villages
singing songs in his praise and carrying obscene images of him
which they set in motion by means of strings. The custom was
probably a charm to ensure the growth of the crops. A similar
image of him, decked with all the fruits of the earth, is said to have
stood in a temple before a figure of Isis, and in the chambers
dedicated to him at Philae the dead god is portrayed lying on his
bier in an attitude which indicates in the plainest way that even in
death his generative virtue was not extinct but only suspended,
ready to prove a source of life and fertility to the world when the
opportunity should offer. Hymns addressed to Osiris contain
allusions to this important side of his nature. In one of them it is
said that the world waxes green in triumph through him; and
another declares, "Thou art the father and mother of mankind, they
live on thy breath, they subsist on the flesh of thy body." We may
conjecture that in this paternal aspect he was supposed, like other
gods of fertility, to bless men and women with offspring, and that
the processions at his festival were intended to promote this object
as well as to quicken the seed in the ground. It would be to
misjudge ancient religion to denounce as lewd and profligate the
emblems and the ceremonies which the Egyptians employed for
the purpose of giving effect to this conception of the divine power.
The ends which they proposed to themselves in these rites were
natural and laudable; only the means they adopted to compass
them were mistaken. A similar fallacy induced the Greeks to adopt
a like symbolism in their Dionysiac festivals, and the superficial
but striking resemblance thus produced between the two religions
has perhaps more than anything else misled enquirers, both
ancient and modern, into identifying worships which, though
certainly akin in nature, are perfectly distinct and independent in
origin. 1
Section 4. Osiris a God of the Dead.
WE have seen that in one of his aspects Osiris was the ruler and
judge of the dead. To a people like the Egyptians, who not only
believed in a life beyond the grave but actually spent much of
their time, labour, and money in preparing for it, this office of the
god must have appeared hardly, if at all, less important than his
function of making the earth to bring forth its fruits in due season.
We may assume that in the faith of his worshippers the two
provinces of the god were intimately connected. In laying their
dead in the grave they committed them to his keeping who could
raise them from the dust to life eternal, even as he caused the
seed to spring from the ground. Of that faith the corn-stuffed
effigies of Osiris found in Egyptian tombs furnish an eloquent and
un-equivocal testimony. They were at once an emblem and an
instrument of resurrection. Thus from the sprouting of the grain the
ancient Egyptians drew an augury of human immortality. They are
not the only people who have built the same lofty hopes on the
same slender foundation. 1
A god who thus fed his people with his own broken body in this
life, and who held out to them a promise of a blissful eternity in a
better world hereafter, naturally reigned supreme in their
affections. We need not wonder, therefore, that in Egypt the
worship of the other gods was overshadowed by that of Osiris,
and that while they were revered each in his own district, he and
his divine partner Isis were adored in all. 2