The Golden Bough
A Study in Magic and Religion
By
James George Frazer, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D.
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Liverpool
Vol. VI. of XII.
Part IV: Adonis Attis Osiris.
Vol. 2 of 2.
New York and London
MacMillan and Co.
1911
CONTENTS
Chapter I. The Myth Of Osiris.
Chapter II. The Official Egyptian Calendar.
Chapter III. The Calendar of the Egyptian Farmer.
§ 1. The Rise and Fall of the Nile.
§ 2. Rites of Irrigation.
§ 3. Rites of Sowing.
§ 4. Rites of Harvest.
Chapter IV. The Official Festivals of Osiris.
§ 1. The Festival at Sais.
§ 2. Feasts of All Souls.
§ 3. The Festival in the Month of Athyr.
§ 4. The Festival in the Month of Khoiak.
§ 5. The Resurrection of Osiris.
§ 6. Readjustment of Egyptian Festivals.
Chapter V. The Nature of Osiris.
§ 1. Osiris a Corn-God.
§ 2. Osiris a Tree-Spirit.
§ 3. Osiris a God of Fertility.
§ 4. Osiris a God of the Dead.
Chapter VI. Isis.
Chapter VII. Osiris and the Sun.
Chapter VIII. Osiris and the Moon.
Chapter IX. The Doctrine of Lunar Sympathy.
Chapter X. The King As Osiris.
Chapter XI. The Origin of Osiris.
Chapter XII. Mother-Kin And Mother Goddesses.
§ 1. Dying Gods and Mourning Goddesses.
§ 2. Influence of Mother-Kin on Religion.
§ 3. Mother-Kin and Mother Goddesses in the Ancient East.
Notes.
I. Moloch The King.
II. The Widowed Flamen.
§ 1. The Pollution of Death.
§ 2. The Marriage of the Roman Gods.
§ 3. Children of Living Parents in Ritual.
III. A Charm To Protect a Town.
IV. Some Customs Of The Pelew Islanders.
§ 1. Priests dressed as Women.
§ 2. Prostitution of Unmarried Girls.
§ 3. Custom of slaying Chiefs.
Index.
Footnotes
[Cover Art]
[Transcriber’s Note: The above cover image was produced by the submitter
at Distributed Proofreaders, and is being placed into the public domain.]
CHAPTER I. THE MYTH OF OSIRIS.
(M1) In ancient Egypt the god whose death and resurrection were annually
celebrated with alternate sorrow and joy was Osiris, the most popular of
all Egyptian deities; and there are good grounds for classing him in one
of his aspects with Adonis and Attis as a personification of the great
yearly vicissitudes of nature, especially of the corn. But the immense
vogue which he enjoyed for many ages induced his devoted worshippers to
heap upon him the attributes and powers of many other gods; so that it is
not always easy to strip him, so to say, of his borrowed plumes and to
restore them to their proper owners. In the following pages I do not
pretend to enumerate and analyse all the alien elements which thus
gathered round the popular deity. All that I shall attempt to do is to
peel off these accretions and to exhibit the god, as far as possible, in
his primitive simplicity. The discoveries of recent years in Egypt enable
us to do so with more confidence now than when I first addressed myself to
the problem many years ago.
(M2) The story of Osiris is told in a connected form only by Plutarch,
whose narrative has been confirmed and to some extent amplified in modern
times by the evidence of the monuments.(1) Of the monuments which
illustrate the myth or legend of Osiris the oldest are a long series of
hymns, prayers, incantations, and liturgies, which have been found
engraved in hieroglyphics on the walls, passages, and galleries of five
pyramids at Sakkara. From the place where they were discovered these
ancient religious records are known as the Pyramid Texts. They date from
the fifth and sixth dynasties, and the period of time during which they
were carved on the pyramids is believed to have been roughly a hundred and
fifty years from about the year 2625 B.C. onward. But from their contents
it appears that many of these documents were drawn up much earlier; for in
some of them there are references to works which have perished, and in
others there are political allusions which seem to show that the passages
containing them must have been composed at a time when the Northern and
Southern Kingdoms were still independent and hostile states and had not
yet coalesced into a single realm under the sway of one powerful monarch.
As the union of the kingdoms appears to have taken place about three
thousand four hundred years before our era, the whole period covered by
the composition of the Pyramid Texts probably did not fall short of a
thousand years. Thus the documents form the oldest body of religious
literature surviving to us from the ancient world, and occupy a place in
the history of Egyptian language and civilization like that which the
Vedic hymns and incantations occupy in the history of Aryan speech and
culture.(2)
(M3) The special purpose for which these texts were engraved on the
pyramids was to ensure the eternal life and felicity of the dead kings who
slept beneath these colossal monuments. Hence the dominant note that
sounds through them all is an insistent, a passionate protest against the
reality of death: indeed the word death never occurs in the Pyramid Texts
except to be scornfully denied or to be applied to an enemy. Again and
again the indomitable assurance is repeated that the dead man did not die
but lives. “King Teti has not died the death, he has become a glorious one
in the horizon.” “Ho! King Unis! Thou didst not depart dead, thou didst
depart living.” “Thou hast departed that thou mightest live, thou hast not
departed that thou mightest die.” “Thou diest not.” “This King Pepi dies
not.” “Have ye said that he would die? He dies not; this King Pepi lives
for ever.” “Live! Thou shalt not die.” “Thou livest, thou livest, raise
thee up.” “Thou diest not, stand up, raise thee up.” “O lofty one among
the Imperishable Stars, thou perishest not eternally.”(3) Thus for
Egyptian kings death was swallowed up in victory; and through their tears
Egyptian mourners might ask, like Christian mourners thousands of years
afterwards, “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?”
(M4) Now it is significant that in these ancient documents, though the
myth or legend of Osiris is not set forth at length, it is often alluded
to as if it were a matter of common knowledge. Hence we may legitimately
infer the great antiquity of the Osirian tradition in Egypt. Indeed so
numerous are the allusions to it in the Pyramid Texts that by their help
we could reconstruct the story in its main outlines even without the
narrative of Plutarch.(4) Thus the discovery of these texts has confirmed
our belief in the accuracy and fidelity of the Greek writer, and we may
accept his account with confidence even when it records incidents or
details which have not yet been verified by a comparison with original
Egyptian sources. The tragic tale runs thus:
(M5) Osiris was the offspring of an intrigue between the earth-god Seb
(Keb or Geb, as the name is sometimes transliterated) and the sky-goddess
Nut. The Greeks identified his parents with their own deities Cronus and
Rhea. When the sun-god Ra perceived that his wife Nut had been unfaithful
to him, he declared with a curse that she should be delivered of the child
in no month and no year. But the goddess had another lover, the god Thoth
or Hermes, as the Greeks called him, and he playing at draughts with the
moon won from her a seventy-second part(5) of every day, and having
compounded five whole days out of these parts he added them to the
Egyptian year of three hundred and sixty days. This was the mythical
origin of the five supplementary days which the Egyptians annually
inserted at the end of every year in order to establish a harmony between
lunar and solar time.(6) On these five days, regarded as outside the year
of twelve months, the curse of the sun-god did not rest, and accordingly
Osiris was born on the first of them. At his nativity a voice rang out
proclaiming that the Lord of All had come into the world. Some say that a
certain Pamyles heard a voice from the temple at Thebes bidding him
announce with a shout that a great king, the beneficent Osiris, was born.
But Osiris was not the only child of his mother. On the second of the
supplementary days she gave birth to the elder Horus, on the third to the
god Set, whom the Greeks called Typhon, on the fourth to the goddess Isis,
and on the fifth to the goddess Nephthys.(7) Afterwards Set married his
sister Nephthys, and Osiris married his sister Isis.
(M6) Reigning as a king on earth, Osiris reclaimed the Egyptians from
savagery, gave them laws, and taught them to worship the gods. Before his
time the Egyptians had been cannibals. But Isis, the sister and wife of
Osiris, discovered wheat and barley growing wild, and Osiris introduced
the cultivation of these grains amongst his people, who forthwith
abandoned cannibalism and took kindly to a corn diet. Moreover, Osiris is
said to have been the first to gather fruit from trees, to train the vine
to poles, and to tread the grapes. Eager to communicate these beneficent
discoveries to all mankind, he committed the whole government of Egypt to
his wife Isis, and travelled over the world, diffusing the blessings of
civilization and agriculture wherever he went. In countries where a harsh
climate or niggardly soil forbade the cultivation of the vine, he taught
the inhabitants to console themselves for the want of wine by brewing beer
from barley. Loaded with the wealth that had been showered upon him by
grateful nations, he returned to Egypt, and on account of the benefits he
had conferred on mankind he was unanimously hailed and worshipped as a
deity.(8) But his brother Set (whom the Greeks called Typhon) with
seventy-two others plotted against him. Having taken the measure of his
good brother’s body by stealth, the bad brother Typhon fashioned and
highly decorated a coffer of the same size, and once when they were all
drinking and making merry he brought in the coffer and jestingly promised
to give it to the one whom it should fit exactly. Well, they all tried one
after the other, but it fitted none of them. Last of all Osiris stepped
into it and lay down. On that the conspirators ran and slammed the lid
down on him, nailed it fast, soldered it with molten lead, and flung the
coffer into the Nile. This happened on the seventeenth day of the month
Athyr, when the sun is in the sign of the Scorpion, and in the
eight-and-twentieth year of the reign or the life of Osiris. When Isis
heard of it she sheared off a lock of her hair, put on mourning attire,
and wandered disconsolately up and down, seeking the body.(9)
(M7) By the advice of the god of wisdom she took refuge in the papyrus
swamps of the Delta. Seven scorpions accompanied her in her flight. One
evening when she was weary she came to the house of a woman, who, alarmed
at the sight of the scorpions, shut the door in her face. Then one of the
scorpions crept under the door and stung the child of the woman that he
died. But when Isis heard the mother’s lamentation, her heart was touched,
and she laid her hands on the child and uttered her powerful spells; so
the poison was driven out of the child and he lived. Afterwards Isis
herself gave birth to a son in the swamps. She had conceived him while she
fluttered in the form of a hawk over the corpse of her dead husband. The
infant was the younger Horus, who in his youth bore the name of
Harpocrates, that is, the child Horus. Him Buto, the goddess of the north,
hid from the wrath of his wicked uncle Set. Yet she could not guard him
from all mishap; for one day when Isis came to her little son’s
hiding-place she found him stretched lifeless and rigid on the ground: a
scorpion had stung him. Then Isis prayed to the sun-god Ra for help. The
god hearkened to her and staid his bark in the sky, and sent down Thoth to
teach her the spell by which she might restore her son to life. She
uttered the words of power, and straightway the poison flowed from the
body of Horus, air passed into him, and he lived. Then Thoth ascended up
into the sky and took his place once more in the bark of the sun, and the
bright pomp passed onward jubilant.(10)
(M8) Meantime the coffer containing the body of Osiris had floated down
the river and away out to sea, till at last it drifted ashore at Byblus,
on the coast of Syria. Here a fine _erica_-tree shot up suddenly and
enclosed the chest in its trunk. The king of the country, admiring the
growth of the tree, had it cut down and made into a pillar of his house;
but he did not know that the coffer with the dead Osiris was in it. Word
of this came to Isis and she journeyed to Byblus, and sat down by the
well, in humble guise, her face wet with tears. To none would she speak
till the king’s handmaidens came, and them she greeted kindly, and braided
their hair, and breathed on them from her own divine body a wondrous
perfume. But when the queen beheld the braids of her handmaidens’ hair and
smelt the sweet smell that emanated from them, she sent for the stranger
woman and took her into her house and made her the nurse of her child. But
Isis gave the babe her finger instead of her breast to suck, and at night
she began to burn all that was mortal of him away, while she herself in
the likeness of a swallow fluttered round the pillar that contained her
dead brother, twittering mournfully. But the queen spied what she was
doing and shrieked out when she saw her child in flames, and thereby she
hindered him from becoming immortal. Then the goddess revealed herself and
begged for the pillar of the roof, and they gave it her, and she cut the
coffer out of it, and fell upon it and embraced it and lamented so loud
that the younger of the king’s children died of fright on the spot. But
the trunk of the tree she wrapped in fine linen, and poured ointment on
it, and gave it to the king and queen, and the wood stands in a temple of
Isis and is worshipped by the people of Byblus to this day. And Isis put
the coffer in a boat and took the eldest of the king’s children with her
and sailed away. As soon as they were alone, she opened the chest, and
laying her face on the face of her brother she kissed him and wept. But
the child came behind her softly and saw what she was about, and she
turned and looked at him in anger, and the child could not bear her look
and died; but some say that it was not so, but that he fell into the sea
and was drowned. It is he whom the Egyptians sing of at their banquets
under the name of Maneros. But Isis put the coffer by and went to see her
son Horus at the city of Buto, and Typhon found the coffer as he was
hunting a boar one night by the light of a full moon.(11) And he knew the
body, and rent it into fourteen pieces, and scattered them abroad. But
Isis sailed up and down the marshes in a shallop made of papyrus, looking
for the pieces; and that is why when people sail in shallops made of
papyrus, the crocodiles do not hurt them, for they fear or respect the
goddess. And that is the reason, too, why there are many graves of Osiris
in Egypt, for she buried each limb as she found it. But others will have
it that she buried an image of him in every city, pretending it was his
body, in order that Osiris might be worshipped in many places, and that if
Typhon searched for the real grave he might not be able to find it.(12)
However, the genital member of Osiris had been eaten by the fishes, so
Isis made an image of it instead, and the image is used by the Egyptians
at their festivals to this day.(13) “Isis,” writes the historian Diodorus
Siculus, “recovered all the parts of the body except the genitals; and
because she wished that her husband’s grave should be unknown and honoured
by all who dwell in the land of Egypt, she resorted to the following
device. She moulded human images out of wax and spices, corresponding to
the stature of Osiris, round each one of the parts of his body. Then she
called in the priests according to their families and took an oath of them
all that they would reveal to no man the trust she was about to repose in
them. So to each of them privately she said that to them alone she
entrusted the burial of the body, and reminding them of the benefits they
had received she exhorted them to bury the body in their own land and to
honour Osiris as a god. She also besought them to dedicate one of the
animals of their country, whichever they chose, and to honour it in life
as they had formerly honoured Osiris, and when it died to grant it
obsequies like his. And because she would encourage the priests in their
own interest to bestow the aforesaid honours, she gave them a third part
of the land to be used by them in the service and worship of the gods.
Accordingly it is said that the priests, mindful of the benefits of
Osiris, desirous of gratifying the queen, and moved by the prospect of
gain, carried out all the injunctions of Isis. Wherefore to this day each
of the priests imagines that Osiris is buried in his country, and they
honour the beasts that were consecrated in the beginning, and when the
animals die the priests renew at their burial the mourning for Osiris. But
the sacred bulls, the one called Apis and the other Mnevis, were dedicated
to Osiris, and it was ordained that they should be worshipped as gods in
common by all the Egyptians; since these animals above all others had
helped the discoverers of corn in sowing the seed and procuring the
universal benefits of agriculture.”(14)
(M9) Such is the myth or legend of Osiris, as told by Greek writers and
eked out by more or less fragmentary notices or allusions in native
Egyptian literature. A long inscription in the temple at Denderah has
preserved a list of the god’s graves, and other texts mention the parts of
his body which were treasured as holy relics in each of the sanctuaries.
Thus his heart was at Athribis, his backbone at Busiris, his neck at
Letopolis, and his head at Memphis. As often happens in such cases, some
of his divine limbs were miraculously multiplied. His head, for example,
was at Abydos as well as at Memphis, and his legs, which were remarkably
numerous, would have sufficed for several ordinary mortals.(15) In this
respect, however, Osiris was nothing to St. Denys, of whom no less than
seven heads, all equally genuine, are extant.(16)
(M10) According to native Egyptian accounts, which supplement that of
Plutarch, when Isis had found the corpse of her husband Osiris, she and
her sister Nephthys sat down beside it and uttered a lament which in after
ages became the type of all Egyptian lamentations for the dead. “Come to
thy house,” they wailed, “Come to thy house. O god On! come to thy house,
thou who hast no foes. O fair youth, come to thy house, that thou mayest
see me. I am thy sister, whom thou lovest; thou shalt not part from me. O
fair boy, come to thy house.... I see thee not, yet doth my heart yearn
after thee and mine eyes desire thee. Come to her who loves thee, who
loves thee, Unnefer, thou blessed one! Come to thy sister, come to thy
wife, to thy wife, thou whose heart stands still. Come to thy housewife. I
am thy sister by the same mother, thou shalt not be far from me. Gods and
men have turned their faces towards thee and weep for thee together.... I
call after thee and weep, so that my cry is heard to heaven, but thou
hearest not my voice; yet am I thy sister, whom thou didst love on earth;
thou didst love none but me, my brother! my brother!”(17) This lament for
the fair youth cut off in his prime reminds us of the laments for Adonis.
The title of Unnefer or “the Good Being” bestowed on him marks the
beneficence which tradition universally ascribed to Osiris; it was at once
his commonest title and one of his names as king.(18)
(M11) The lamentations of the two sad sisters were not in vain. In pity
for her sorrow the sun-god Ra sent down from heaven the jackal-headed god
Anubis, who, with the aid of Isis and Nephthys, of Thoth and Horus, pieced
together the broken body of the murdered god, swathed it in linen
bandages, and observed all the other rites which the Egyptians were wont
to perform over the bodies of the departed. Then Isis fanned the cold clay
with her wings: Osiris revived, and thenceforth reigned as king over the
dead in the other world.(19) There he bore the titles of Lord of the
Underworld, Lord of Eternity, Ruler of the Dead.(20) There, too, in the
great Hall of the Two Truths, assisted by forty-two assessors, one from
each of the principal districts of Egypt, he presided as judge at the
trial of the souls of the departed, who made their solemn confession
before him, and, their heart having been weighed in the balance of
justice, received the reward of virtue in a life eternal or the
appropriate punishment of their sins.(21) The confession or rather
profession which the _Book of the Dead_ puts in the mouth of the deceased
at the judgment-bar of Osiris(22) sets the morality of the ancient
Egyptians in a very favourable light. In rendering an account of his life
the deceased solemnly protested that he had not oppressed his fellow-men,
that he had made none to weep, that he had done no murder, neither
committed fornication nor borne false witness, that he had not falsified
the balance, that he had not taken the milk from the mouths of babes, that
he had given bread to the hungry and water to the thirsty, and had clothed
the naked. In harmony with these professions are the epitaphs on Egyptian
graves, which reveal, if not the moral practice, at least the moral ideals
of those who slept beneath them. Thus, for example, a man says in his
epitaph: “I gave bread to the hungry and clothes to the naked, and ferried
across in my own boat him who could not pass the water. I was a father to
the orphan, a husband to the widow, a shelter from the wind to them that
were cold. I am one that spake good and told good. I earned my substance
in righteousness.”(23) Those who had done thus in their mortal life and
had been acquitted at the Great Assize, were believed to dwell thenceforth
at ease in a land where the corn grew higher than on earth, where harvests
never failed, where trees were always green, and wives for ever young and
fair.(24)
(M12) We are not clearly informed as to the fate which the Egyptians
supposed to befall the wicked after death. In the scenes which represent
the Last Judgment there is seen crouching beside the scales, in which the
heart of the dead is being weighed, a monstrous animal known as the “Eater
of the Dead.” It has the head of a crocodile, the trunk of a lion, and the
hinder parts of a hippopotamus. Some think that the souls of those whose
hearts had been weighed in the balance and found wanting were delivered
over to this grim monster to be devoured; but this view appears to be
conjectural. “Generally the animal seems to have been placed there simply
as guardian of the entrance to the Fields of the Blessed, but sometimes it
is likened to Set. Elsewhere it is said that the judges of the dead slay
the wicked and drink their blood. In brief, here also we have conflicting
statements, and can only gather that there seems to have been no general
agreement among the dwellers in the Valley of the Nile as to the ultimate
lot of the wicked.”(25)
(M13) In the resurrection of Osiris the Egyptians saw the pledge of a life
everlasting for themselves beyond the grave. They believed that every man
would live eternally in the other world if only his surviving friends did
for his body what the gods had done for the body of Osiris. Hence the
ceremonies observed by the Egyptians over the human dead were an exact
copy of those which Anubis, Horus, and the rest had performed over the
dead god. “At every burial there was enacted a representation of the
divine mystery which had been performed of old over Osiris, when his son,
his sisters, his friends were gathered round his mangled remains and
succeeded by their spells and manipulations in converting his broken body
into the first mummy, which they afterwards reanimated and furnished with
the means of entering on a new individual life beyond the grave. The mummy
of the deceased was Osiris; the professional female mourners were his two
sisters Isis and Nephthys; Anubis, Horus, all the gods of the Osirian
legend gathered about the corpse.” In this solemn drama of death and
resurrection the principal part was played by the celebrant, who
represented Horus the son of the dead and resuscitated Osiris.(26) He
formally opened the eyes and mouth of the dead man by rubbing or
pretending to rub them four times with the bleeding heart and thigh of a
sacrificed bull; after which a pretence was made of actually opening the
mouth of the mummy or of the statue with certain instruments specially
reserved for the purpose. Geese and gazelles were also sacrificed by being
decapitated; they were supposed to represent the enemies of Osiris, who
after the murder of the divine man had sought to evade the righteous
punishment of their crime but had been detected and beheaded.(27)
(M14) Thus every dead Egyptian was identified with Osiris and bore his
name. From the Middle Kingdom onwards it was the regular practice to
address the deceased as “Osiris So-and-So,” as if he were the god himself,
and to add the standing epithet “true of speech,” because true speech was
characteristic of Osiris.(28) The thousands of inscribed and pictured
tombs that have been opened in the valley of the Nile prove that the
mystery of the resurrection was performed for the benefit of every dead
Egyptian;(29) as Osiris died and rose again from the dead, so all men
hoped to arise like him from death to life eternal. In an Egyptian text it
is said of the departed that “as surely as Osiris lives, so shall he live
also; as surely as Osiris did not die, so shall he not die; as surely as
Osiris is not annihilated, so shall he too not be annihilated.” The dead
man, conceived to be lying, like Osiris, with mangled body, was comforted
by being told that the heavenly goddess Nut, the mother of Osiris, was
coming to gather up his poor scattered limbs and mould them with her own
hands into a form immortal and divine. “She gives thee thy head, she
brings thee thy bones, she sets thy limbs together and puts thy heart in
thy body.” Thus the resurrection of the dead was conceived, like that of
Osiris, not merely as spiritual but also as bodily. “They possess their
heart, they possess their senses, they possess their mouth, they possess
their feet, they possess their arms, they possess all their limbs.”(30)
(M15) If we may trust Egyptian legend, the trials and contests of the
royal house did not cease with the restoration of Osiris to life and his
elevation to the rank of presiding deity in the world of the dead. When
Horus the younger, the son of Osiris and Isis, was grown to man’s estate,
the ghost of his royal and murdered father appeared to him and urged him,
like another Hamlet, to avenge the foul unnatural murder upon his wicked
uncle. Thus encouraged, the youth attacked the miscreant. The combat was
terrific and lasted many days. Horus lost an eye in the conflict and Set
suffered a still more serious mutilation. At last Thoth parted the
combatants and healed their wounds; the eye of Horus he restored by
spitting on it. According to one account the great battle was fought on
the twenty-sixth day of the month of Thoth. Foiled in open war, the artful
uncle now took the law of his virtuous nephew. He brought a suit of
bastardy against Horus, hoping thus to rob him of his inheritance and to
get possession of it himself; nay, not content with having murdered his
good brother, the unnatural Set carried his rancour even beyond the grave
by accusing the dead Osiris of certain high crimes and misdemeanours. The
case was tried before the supreme court of the gods in the great hall at
Heliopolis. Thoth, the god of wisdom, pleaded the cause of Osiris, and the
august judges decided that “the word of Osiris was true.” Moreover, they
pronounced Horus to be the true-begotten son of his father. So that prince
assumed the crown and mounted the throne of the lamented Osiris. However,
according to another and perhaps later version of the story, the victory
of Horus over his uncle was by no means so decisive, and their struggles
ended in a compromise, by which Horus reigned over the Delta, while Set
became king of the upper valley of the Nile from near Memphis to the first
cataract. Be that as it may, with the accession of Horus began for the
Egyptians the modern period of the world, for on his throne all the kings
of Egypt sat as his successors.(31)
(M16) These legends of a contest for the throne of Egypt may perhaps
contain a reminiscence of real dynastical struggles which attended an
attempt to change the right of succession from the female to the male
line. For under a rule of female kinship the heir to the throne is either
the late king’s brother, or the son of the late king’s sister, while under
a rule of male kinship the heir to the throne is the late king’s son. In
the legend of Osiris the rival heirs are Set and Horus, Set being the late
king’s brother, and Horus the late king’s son; though Horus indeed united
both claims to the crown, being the son of the king’s sister as well as of
the king. A similar attempt to shift the line of succession seems to have
given rise to similar contests at Rome.(32)
(M17) Thus according to what seems to have been the general native
tradition Osiris was a good and beloved king of Egypt, who suffered a
violent death but rose from the dead and was henceforth worshipped as a
deity. In harmony with this tradition he was regularly represented by
sculptors and painters in human and regal form as a dead king, swathed in
the wrappings of a mummy, but wearing on his head a kingly crown and
grasping in one of his hands, which were left free from the bandages, a
kingly sceptre.(33) Two cities above all others were associated with his
myth or memory. One of them was Busiris in Lower Egypt, which claimed to
possess his backbone; the other was Abydos in Upper Egypt, which gloried
in the possession of his head.(34) Encircled by the nimbus of the dead yet
living god, Abydos, originally an obscure place, became from the end of
the Old Kingdom the holiest spot in Egypt; his tomb there would seem to
have been to the Egyptians what the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at
Jerusalem is to Christians. It was the wish of every pious man that his
dead body should rest in hallowed earth near the grave of the glorified
Osiris. Few indeed were rich enough to enjoy this inestimable privilege;
for, apart from the cost of a tomb in the sacred city, the mere transport
of mummies from great distances was both difficult and expensive. Yet so
eager were many to absorb in death the blessed influence which radiated
from the holy sepulchre that they caused their surviving friends to convey
their mortal remains to Abydos, there to tarry for a short time, and then
to be brought back by river and interred in the tombs which had been made
ready for them in their native land. Others had cenotaphs built or
memorial tablets erected for themselves near the tomb of their dead and
risen Lord, that they might share with him the bliss of a joyful
resurrection.(35)
(M18) Hence from the earliest ages of Egyptian history Abydos would seem
to have been a city of the dead rather than of the living; certainly there
is no evidence that the place was ever of any political importance.(36) No
less than nine of the most ancient kings of Egypt known to us were buried
here, for their tombs have been discovered and explored within recent
years.(37) The royal necropolis lies on the edge of the desert about a
mile and a half from the temple of Osiris.(38) Of the graves the oldest is
that of King Khent, the second or third king of the first dynasty. His
reign, which fell somewhere between three thousand four hundred and three
thousand two hundred years before our era, seems to have marked an epoch
in the history of Egypt, for under him the costume, the figure drawing,
and the hieroglyphics all assumed the character which they thenceforth
preserved to the very end of Egyptian nationality.(39) Later ages
identified him with Osiris in a more intimate sense than that in which the
divine title was lavished on every dead king and indeed on every dead man;
for his tomb was actually converted into the tomb of Osiris and as such
received in great profusion the offerings of the faithful. Somewhere
between the twenty-second and the twenty-sixth dynasty a massive bier of
grey granite was placed in the sepulchral chamber. On it, cut in high
relief, reposes a shrouded figure of the dead Osiris. He lies at full
length, with bare and upturned face. On his head is the White Crown of
Upper Egypt; in his hands, which issue from the shroud, he holds the
characteristic emblems of the god, the sceptre and the scourge. At the
four corners of the bier are perched four hawks, representing the four
children of Horus, each with their father’s banner, keeping watch over the
dead god, as they kept watch over the four quarters of the world. A fifth
hawk seems to have been perched on the middle of the body of Osiris, but
it had been broken off before the tomb was discovered in recent years, for
only the bird’s claws remain in position. Finely carved heads of lions,
one at each corner of the bier, with the claws to match below, complete
the impressive monument. The scene represented is unquestionably the
impregnation of Isis in the form of a hawk by the dead Osiris; the Copts
who dismantled the shrine appear to have vented their pious rage on the
figure of the hawk Isis by carrying it off or smashing it. If any doubt
could exist as to the meaning of these sculptured figures, it would be set
at rest by the ancient inscriptions attached to them. Over against the
right shoulder of the shrouded figure, who lies stretched on the bier, are
carved in hieroglyphics the words, “Osiris, the Good Being, true of
speech”; and over against the place where the missing hawk perched on the
body of the dead god is carved the symbol of Isis. Two relics of the
ancient human occupants of the tomb escaped alike the fury of the fanatics
and the avarice of the plunderers who pillaged and destroyed it. One of
the relics is a human skull, from which the lower jawbone is missing; the
other is an arm encircled by gorgeous jewelled bracelets of gold,
turquoises, amethysts, and dark purple lapis lazuli. The former may be the
head of King Khent himself; the latter is almost certainly the arm of his
queen. One of the bracelets is composed of alternate plaques of gold and
turquoise, each ornamented with the figure of a hawk perched on the top of
it.(40) The hawk was the sacred bird or crest of the earliest dynasties of
Egyptian kings. The figure of a hawk was borne before the king as a
standard on solemn occasions: the oldest capital of the country known to
us was called Hawk-town: there the kings of the first dynasty built a
temple to the hawk: there in modern times has been found a splendid golden
head of a hawk dating from the Ancient Empire; and on the life-like statue
of King Chephren of the third dynasty we see a hawk with out-spread wings
protecting the back of the monarch’s head. From the earliest to the latest
times of Egyptian civilization “the Hawk” was the epithet of the king of
Egypt and of the king alone; it took the first place in the list of his
titles.(41) The sanctity of the bird may help us to understand why Isis
took the form of a hawk in order to mate with her dead husband; why the
queen of Egypt wore on her arm a bracelet adorned with golden hawks; and
why in the holy sepulchre the four sons of Horus were represented in the
likeness of hawks keeping watch over the effigy of their divine
grandfather.(42)
(M19) The legend recorded by Plutarch which associated the dead Osiris
with Byblus in Phoenicia(43) is doubtless late and probably untrustworthy.
It may have been suggested by the resemblance which the worship of the
Egyptian Osiris bore to the worship of the Phoenician Adonis in that city.
But it is possible that the story has no deeper foundation than a verbal
misunderstanding. For Byblus is not only the name of a city, it is the
Greek word for papyrus; and as Isis is said after the death of Osiris to
have taken refuge in the papyrus swamps of the Delta, where she gave birth
to and reared her son Horus, a Greek writer may perhaps have confused the
plant with the city of the same name.(44) However that may have been, the
association of Osiris with Adonis at Byblus gave rise to a curious tale.
It is said that every year the people beyond the rivers of Ethiopia used
to write a letter to the women of Byblus informing them that the lost and
lamented Adonis was found. This letter they enclosed in an earthen pot,
which they sealed and sent floating down the river to the sea. The waves
carried the pot to Byblus, where every year it arrived at the time when
the Syrian women were weeping for their dead Lord. The pot was taken up
from the water and opened: the letter was read; and the weeping women
dried their tears, because the lost Adonis was found.(45)