A Greek statue was therefore chosen as the idol, and it was proclaimed as the anthropomorphic equivalent of a much revered and highly popular Egyptian beast-divinity, the dead Apis, assimilated to Osiris.
Afterwards Osiris returned from the shades, and (in the form of a wolf) urged his son Horus to revenge him on Typhon.
All shrines of Osiris were called P-usiri, but the principal city of the name was in the centre of the Delta, capital of the 9th (Busirite) nome of Lower Egypt; another one near Memphis (now Abusir) may have helped the formation of the legend in that quarter.
As soon as Osiris tried, Typhon had the box nailed up, and threw it into the Tanaite branch of the Nile.
At first the luxury of mummification was reserved for the king, who was identified with Osiris and was buried with an abundance of ritual and magic words.
At the back were large chambers connected with the Osiris worship (Caulfield, Temple of the Kings); and probably from these led out the great Hypogeum for the celebration of the Osiris mysteries, built by Mineptah (Murray, Osireion).
Busiris is here probably an earlier and less accurate Graecism than Osiris for the name of the Egyptian god Usiri, like Bubastis, Buto, for the goddesses Ubasti and Uto.
But a number of non-Christian religions feature a deity dying and returning, notably Mithrism and the pantheism of ancient Egypt (Osiris).
But it was a sign of the times when Serapis and Isis, Osiris and Anubis began to take place among the popular deities in the old Greek lands.
But Osiris was a dead god who ruled the underworld.
But the appendage of the official was shorter than that of the king, and the gods had a distinctive shape for themselves; if it appears upon the dead it is because they in their death had become identified with the god Osiris (Erman, 59, 225 sq.).
Excavation has brought to light figurines of the Egyptian Osiris, Isis, Ptah, Anubis and especially Bes.
For the story of Isis and Osiris we have indeed the late treatise ascribed to Plutarch, and a few fragments of other myths may be culled from earlier native sources.
Forty-two was the number of divine assessors at the judgment of the dead before Osiris, and was the standard number of the nomes or counties in Egypt.
Frazer, The Golden Bough (London, 1900), and Adonis, Attis, Osiris (London, 1906); Georges Lafay, Culte des divinites d'Alexandrie (Paris, 1884); Dollinger, Sectengeschichte des Mittelalters (Munich, 1890); Fr.
He had a beautiful carved chest made which exactly fitted Osiris, and at an entertainment offered to give it to any one who could lie down in it.
He mangled the body of Osiris (as so many gods of all races were mangled), and tossed the fragments about.
Here the god Osiris is on the left with the stela owner, the dead person shown on the right worshipping him.
Herodotus constantly alludes to the most famous Egyptian myth,that of Osiris, and he recognizes the analogies between the Osirian myth and mysteries and those of Dionysus.
His fusion with Horus and Etom has already been noted; further we find an Ammon-Re, a Sobk-Re, a Khnum-Re; and Month, Onouris, Show and Osiris are all described as possessing the attributes of the sun.
His graves are shown in many places, like those of Osiris, which, says Plutarch, abounded in Egypt.
I used tripwire for several years, and since have used Samhain and Osiris.
In a shrine sits Osiris, the ruler and judge of the dead, accompanied by forty-two assessors; and before him stands the balance on which the heart of the deceased man is to be weighed against Truth; Thoth stands behind and registers the result.
In Egypt and in Greece the introduction of wine was ascribed to gods; in Greece to Dionysus; in Egypt to Osiris.
In Egypt, Harpa-khruti, Horus the child, was one of the forms of Horus, the sun-god, the child of Osiris.
In Egyptian mythology, Seth causes the death of his brother Osiris, the first king of Egypt.
In later times the moral ct of his tale was doubtless the main cause of its continued alarity; Osiris was named Onnophris, the good Being excellence, and Seth was contrasted with him as the author the root of all evil.
In the Pyramid texts Thoth is already closely associated with the Osiris myth, having aided the god by his science and knowledge of magic, and demonstrated the justice of his claims in the contest with Set.
In the scene of the weighing of the soul before Osiris, dating from the New-kingdom onwards, Anubis attends to the balance while Thoth registers the result.
In those days Anubis was considered to be son of Osiris by Nephthys; earlier perhaps he was son of Re, the sun-god.
Isis was identified with Demeter by Herodotus, and described as the goddess who was held to be the greatest by the Egyptians; he states that she and Osiris, unlike other deities, were worshipped throughout the land.
Isis was perhaps the 1 goddess of Buto, a town not far distant from Busiris; geographical proximity would suffice to explain her conon with Osiris in the tale.
It has been finely incised into the bandages of Osiris.
It is apparently through the funeral that Osiris so early took a firm hold on the imagination of people; for at a very ancient date he was identified with y dead king, and it needed but a slight extension of this idea iakehim into a king of the dead.
It is assumed above that the name Serapis (so written in later Greek and in Latin, in earlier Greek Sarapis) is derived from the Egyptian Userhapi - as it were Osiris-Apis - the name of the bull Apis, dead and, like all the blessed dead, assimilated to Osiris,.
It is not so much as king of the dead that Osiris here appears, but every deceased Egyptian was regarded as himself an Osiris, as having undergone all the indignities inificted upon the god, but finally triumphant over the powers of death and evil impersonated by Seth.
It was a veritable drama that was here enacted, and recalled in its incidents the story of Osiris, the divine proto type of all successive generations of the Egyptian dead.
It was related how Seth had brought an accusation against Osiris in the great judgment hail of Heliopolis, and how the latter, helped by the skilful speaker Thoth, had emerged from the ordeal acquitted and triumphant.
Khnum is said to have reconstructed the limbs of the dismembered Osiris.
Later generations reconciled these radictions by assuming the existence of two Horuses, one, brother of Osiris, Seth and Isis, being named Haroeris, i.e.
Later she commonly wore the horns of a cow, and the cow was sacred to her; it is doubtful, however, whether she had any animal representation in early times, nor had she possession of any considerable locality until a late period, when Philae, Behbet and other large temples were dedicated to her worship. Yet she was of great importance in mythology, religion and magic, appearing constantly in the very ancient Pyramid texts as the devoted sister-wife of Osiris and mother of Horus.
Later, as the god of ploughing, he is confounded with Osiris, and on a vase-painting at St Petersburg he is represented leaving Egypt in his dragon-drawn chariot on his journey round the world.
Less widespread was the cult of the Mnevis, also consecrated to Osiris.
Like Aphrodite and Adonis in Syria, Baal and Astarte at Sidon, and Isis and Osiris in Egypt, the Great Mother and Attis formed a duality which symbolized the relations between Mother Earth and her fruitage.
Mineptah (Merenptah) added a great Hypogeum of Osiris to the temple of Seti.
Much Egyptian magic turns on the healing or protection of Horus by Isis, and it is chiefly from magical texts that the myth of Isis and Osiris as given by Plutarch can be illustrated.
Neith, the goddess of Sais, was identified with Athena, and Osiris was worshipped there in a great festival.
Of Osiris we can only state that he was originally local god of Busiris, whatever further characteristics he iitively possessed being quite obscure.
On the other hand, Osiris with Isis and Horus was everywhere honoured and popular, and while the artificer Ptah, the god of the great native capital of Egypt, made no appeal to the imagination, the Apis bull, an incarnation of Ptah, threw Ptah himself altogether into the shade in the popular estimation.
On the roof of the temple, reached by two staircases, are a pavilion and several chambers dedicated to the worship of Osiris.
One incident of the tale of Osiris acquired a deep ethical meaning in connection with the dead.
Only the king or Osiris, the king of the dead could carry this scepter.
Or we may take the opposite view, and regard the story of Osiris and his war with Seth (who shut him up in a box and mutilated him) as a dualistic myth, originally on the level of the battle betweenaGaunab andTsui-Goab, or between Tagar and Suqe.
Osiris and Isis are closely connected with Syria and the Lebanon in legend; the Ded or sacred pillar of Osiris is doubtless really a representation of a great cedar with its horizontally outspreading branches; 8 another of the sacred Egyptian trees is obviously a cypress; corn and wine are traditionally associated with Osiris, and it is probable that corn and wine were first domesticated in Syria, and came thence with the gods Osiris and Re (the sun god of Heliopolis) into the Delta.
Osiris introduced civilization into Egypt, and then wandered over the world, making men acquainted with agriculture and the arts, as Pund-jel in his humbler way did in Australia.
Osiris is usually shown as a crowned king, holding a crook and a flail.
Osiris, Horus, Typhon (Seth), Isis and Nephthys were the children of Seb (whom the Greeks identified with Cronus); the myths of their birth were peculiarly savage and obscene.
Osiris, like Orpheus, is torn in pieces, and his head floats down every year from Egypt to Byblus; the body of Attis, the Phrygian counterpart of Adonis, like that of Orpheus, does not suffer decay.
Plutarch remarked the fact that the Greek myths of Cronus, of Dionysus, of Apollo and the Python, and of Demeter, " all the things that are shrouded in mystic ceremonies and are presented in rites," " do not fall short in absurdity of the legends about Osiris and Typhon."
Plutarch, drawing partly on Theopompus, speaks of his religion in his Isis and Osiris (cc. 46-47).
Ptah was early assimilated to the sepulchral gods Sokaris and Osiris.
Reinach, Cultes, mythes et religions (2 vols., Paris, 1905-6); Frazer, Adonis, Attis and Osiris (1906); Ed.
She sided with Isis and aided her to bring Osiris back to life.
So in the famous scene of the weighing of the soul, which first appears pictorially under the New Empire, she introduces the deceased before the forty-two assessors of the heavenly judge, Osiris, and presides over the scale in which his actions and life are weighed.
So too in Abydos, his later home, Osiris was identified with Khante-Amentiu (Khentamenti, Khentamenthes), the chief of those who are in the West, a name that was given to a vaguely-conceived but widely-venerated divinity ruler of the dead.
Sometimes, as in the case of the feast of Osiris in Abydos, a veritable drama would be enacted, in which the whole history of the god, his sufferings and final triumph were represented in mimic form.
Still the Egyptians themselves seem to have been somewhat at a loss to account for the great veneration that they paid to Osiris.
The Aegyptus sive de providentia is an allegory in which the good Osiris and the evil Typhon, who represent Aurelian and the Goth Gainas (ministers under Arcadius), strive for mastery; and the question of the divine permission of evil is handled.
The baser Greek myths of the wanderings, amours and adventures of the gods, myths ignored by Homer, are parallel to the adventures of the Alcheringa people, and the fable of the mutilation of Osiris and the search for the lost organ by Isis, actually occurs among the Alcheringa tales of Messrs Spencer and Gillen.
The combination of Osiris and the Apis bull which was found in the dead Apis was thus a most politic choice in naming the new divinity, whose figure represented a god of the underworld wearing an emblem of fruitfulness.
The earthly Jesus is congruent to Horus; Jesus the Christ corresponds to Osiris, the resurrected god.
The Egyptian name was A bdu, " the hill of the symbol or reliquary," in which the sacred head of Osiris was preserved.
The gods had their ha and bai, and the forms attributed to the latter are surprising; thus we read that the soul of the sky Nun is Re, that of Osiris the Goat of Mendes, the souls of Sobk are crocodiles, and those of all the gods are makes; similarly the soul of Ptah was thought to dwell in the Apis bull, so that each successive Apis was during its lifetime the reincarnation of the god.
The Isiac mysteries were a representation of the chief events in the myth of Isis and Osiris - the murder of Osiris, the lamentations of Isis and her wanderings, followed by the triumph of Horus over Seth and the resurrection of the slain god - accompanied by music and an exposition of the inner meaning of the spectacle.
The more ancient account survived, however, he myth that Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis and Nephthys (a less who plays but a minor part in the Osiris cycle) were all Iren of the earth-god Keb and the sky-goddess Nut, born on five consecutive days added on at the end of the year (the flied epagomenal days).
The name Busiris in this legend may have been caught up merely at random by the early Greeks, or they may have vaguely connected their legend with the Egyptian myth of the slaying of Osiris (as king of Egypt) by his mighty brother Seth, who was in certain aspects a patron of foreigners.
The Osiris cycle of legends seems to belong to these people.
The relationships had now to be readjusted, the most popular view recognized Horus as the son and iger of Osiris.
The story is in many respects similar to that of Osiris.
They again gave birth to Keb and Nut, from whom ieir turn sprang Osiris and Seth, Isis and Nephthys.
They comprise fragments of the native historian Manetho, the descriptions of Egypt in Herodotus and Diodorus, the geographical accounts of Strabo and Ptolemy, the treatise of Plutarch on Isis and Osiris and other monographs or scattered notices of less importance.
This nether his -ld was known as the Duat (Dat, Ti), and through it passed in t sun on his journey during the hours of night; here too, as nim sy thought, dwelt the dead and their king Osiris.
Various esoterical explanations were given of the myth, and the name not found as a king was recognized as that of the tomb of Osiris.
We thus find Osiris very near the beginning of what is known about Egyptian religion.
Wherever Isis found a portion of Osiris she buried it; hence Egypt was as rich in graves of Osiris as Namaqualand in graves of Heitsi Eibib.
With her sister Nephthys, Isis is frequently represented as watching the body of Osiris or mourning his death.
With this may be compared the festivals of Adonis and Osiris and the myth of Persephone.