(M101) Osiris has been sometimes interpreted as the sun-god; and in modern
times this view has been held by so many distinguished writers that it
deserves a brief examination. If we inquire on what evidence Osiris has
been identified with the sun or the sun-god, it will be found on analysis
to be minute in quantity and dubious, where it is not absolutely
worthless, in quality. The diligent Jablonski, the first modern scholar to
collect and sift the testimony of classical writers on Egyptian religion,
says that it can be shown in many ways that Osiris is the sun, and that he
could produce a cloud of witnesses to prove it, but that it is needless to
do so, since no learned man is ignorant of the fact.(302) Of the writers
whom he condescends to quote, the only two who expressly identify Osiris
with the sun are Diodorus and Macrobius. The passage in Diodorus runs
thus:(303) “It is said that the aboriginal inhabitants of Egypt, looking
up to the sky, and smitten with awe and wonder at the nature of the
universe, supposed that there were two gods, eternal and primaeval, the
sun and the moon, of whom they named the sun Osiris and the moon Isis.”
Even if Diodorus’s authority for this statement is Manetho, as there is
some ground for believing,(304) little or no weight can be attached to it.
For it is plainly a philosophical, and therefore a late, explanation of
the first beginnings of Egyptian religion, reminding us of Kant’s familiar
saying about the starry heavens and the moral law rather than of the rude
traditions of a primitive people. Jablonski’s second authority, Macrobius,
is no better, but rather worse. For Macrobius was the father of that large
family of mythologists who resolve all or most gods into the sun.
According to him Mercury was the sun, Mars was the sun, Janus was the sun,
Saturn was the sun, so was Jupiter, also Nemesis, likewise Pan, and so on
through a great part of the pantheon.(305) It was natural, therefore, that
he should identify Osiris with the sun,(306) but his reasons for doing so
are exceedingly slight. He refers to the ceremonies of alternate
lamentation and joy as if they reflected the vicissitudes of the great
luminary in his course through the sky. Further, he argues that Osiris
must be the sun because an eye was one of his symbols. It is true that an
eye was a symbol of Osiris,(307) and it is also true that the sun was
often called “the eye of Horus”;(308) yet the coincidence hardly suffices
to establish the identity of the two deities. The opinion that Osiris was
the sun is also mentioned, but not accepted, by Plutarch,(309) and it is
referred to by Firmicus Maternus.(310)
(M102) Amongst modern scholars, Lepsius, in identifying Osiris with the
sun, appears to rely mainly on the passage of Diodorus already quoted. But
the monuments, he adds, also show “that down to a late time Osiris was
sometimes conceived as _Ra_. In this quality he is named _Osiris-Ra_ even
in the ‘Book of the Dead,’ and Isis is often called ‘the royal consort of
Ra.’ ”(311) That Ra was both the physical sun and the sun-god is
undisputed; but with every deference for the authority of so great a
scholar as Lepsius, we may doubt whether the identification of Osiris with
Ra can be accepted as proof that Osiris was originally the sun. For the
religion of ancient Egypt(312) may be described as a confederacy of local
cults which, while maintaining against each other a certain measure of
jealous and even hostile independence, were yet constantly subjected to
the fusing and amalgamating influence of political centralization and
philosophic thought. The history of the religion appears to have largely
consisted of a struggle between these opposite forces or tendencies. On
the one side there was the conservative tendency to preserve the local
cults with all their distinctive features, fresh, sharp, and crisp as they
had been handed down from an immemorial past. On the other side there was
the progressive tendency, favoured by the gradual fusion of the people
under a powerful central government, first to dull the edge of these
provincial distinctions, and finally to break them down completely and
merge them in a single national religion. The conservative party probably
mustered in its ranks the great bulk of the people, their prejudices and
affections being warmly enlisted in favour of the local deity, with whose
temple and rites they had been familiar from childhood; and the popular
dislike of change, based on the endearing effect of old association, must
have been strongly reinforced by the less disinterested opposition of the
local clergy, whose material interests would necessarily suffer with any
decay of their shrines. On the other hand the kings, whose power and glory
rose with the political and ecclesiastical consolidation of the realm,
were the natural champions of religious unity; and their efforts would be
seconded by the refined and thoughtful minority, who could hardly fail to
be shocked by the many barbarous and revolting elements in the local
rites. As usually happens in such cases, the process of religious
unification appears to have been largely effected by discovering points of
similarity, real or imaginary, between the provincial deities, which were
thereupon declared to be only different names or manifestations of the
same god.
(M103) Of the deities who thus acted as centres of attraction, absorbing
in themselves a multitude of minor divinities, by far the most important
was the sun-god Ra. There appear to have been few gods in Egypt who were
not at one time or other identified with him. Ammon of Thebes, Horus of
the East, Horus of Edfu, Chnum of Elephantine, Tum of Heliopolis, all were
regarded as one god, the sun. Even the water-god Sobk, in spite of his
crocodile shape, did not escape the same fate. Indeed one king, Amenophis
IV., undertook to sweep away all the old gods at a stroke and replace them
by a single god, the “great living disc of the sun.”(313) In the hymns
composed in his honour, this deity is referred to as “the living disc of
the sun, besides whom there is none other.” He is said to have made “the
far heaven” and “men, beasts, and birds; he strengtheneth the eyes with
his beams, and when he showeth himself, all flowers live and grow, the
meadows flourish at his upgoing and are drunken at his sight, all cattle
skip on their feet, and the birds that are in the marsh flutter for joy.”
It is he “who bringeth the years, createth the months, maketh the days,
calculateth the hours, the lord of time, by whom men reckon.” In his zeal
for the unity of god, the king commanded to erase the names of all other
gods from the monuments, and to destroy their images. His rage was
particularly directed against the god Ammon, whose name and likeness were
effaced wherever they were found; even the sanctity of the tomb was
violated in order to destroy the memorials of the hated deity. In some of
the halls of the great temples at Carnac, Luxor, and other places, all the
names of the gods, with a few chance exceptions, were scratched out. The
monarch even changed his own name, Amenophis, because it was compounded of
Ammon, and took instead the name of Chu-en-aten, “gleam of the sun’s
disc.” Thebes itself, the ancient capital of his glorious ancestors, full
of the monuments of their piety and idolatry, was no longer a fit home for
the puritan king. He deserted it, and built for himself a new capital in
Middle Egypt at the place now known as Tell-el-Amarna. Here in a few years
a city of palaces and gardens rose like an exhalation at his command, and
here the king, his dearly loved wife and children, and his complaisant
courtiers led a merry life. The grave and sombre ritual of Thebes was
discarded. The sun-god was worshipped with songs and hymns, with the music
of harps and flutes, with offerings of cakes and fruits and flowers. Blood
seldom stained his kindly altars. The king himself celebrated the offices
of religion. He preached with unction, and we may be sure that his
courtiers listened with at least an outward semblance of devotion. From
the too-faithful portraits of himself which he has bequeathed to us we can
still picture to ourselves the heretic king in the pulpit, with his tall,
lanky figure, his bandy legs, his pot-belly, his long, lean, haggard face
aglow with the fever of religious fanaticism. Yet “the doctrine,” as he
loved to call it, which he proclaimed to his hearers was apparently no
stern message of renunciation in this world, of terrors in the world to
come. The thoughts of death, of judgment, and of a life beyond the grave,
which weighed like a nightmare on the minds of the Egyptians, seem to have
been banished for a time. Even the name of Osiris, the awful judge of the
dead, is not once mentioned in the graves at Tell-el-Amarna. All this
lasted only during the life of the reformer. His death was followed by a
violent reaction. The old gods were reinstated in their rank and
privileges: their names and images were restored, and new temples were
built. But all the shrines and palaces reared by the late king were thrown
down: even the sculptures that referred to him and to his god in
rock-tombs and on the sides of hills were erased or filled up with stucco:
his name appears on no later monument, and was carefully omitted from all
official lists. The new capital was abandoned, never to be inhabited
again. Its plan can still be traced in the sands of the desert.
(M104) This attempt of King Amenophis IV. is only an extreme example of a
tendency which appears to have affected the religion of Egypt as far back
as we can trace it. Therefore, to come back to our point, in attempting to
discover the original character of any Egyptian god, no weight can be
given to the identification of him with other gods, least of all with the
sun-god Ra. Far from helping to follow up the trail, these identifications
only cross and confuse it. The best evidence for the original character of
the Egyptian gods is to be found in their ritual and myths, so far as
these are known, and in the manner in which they are portrayed on the
monuments. It is mainly on evidence drawn from these sources that I rest
my interpretation of Osiris.
(M105) The ground upon which some modern writers seem chiefly to rely for
the identification of Osiris with the sun is that the story of his death
fits better with the solar phenomena than with any other in nature. It may
readily be admitted that the daily appearance and disappearance of the sun
might very naturally be expressed by a myth of his death and resurrection;
and writers who regard Osiris as the sun are careful to indicate that it
is the diurnal, and not the annual, course of the sun to which they
understand the myth to apply. Thus Renouf, who identified Osiris with the
sun, admitted that the Egyptian sun could not with any show of reason be
described as dead in winter.(314) But if his daily death was the theme of
the legend, why was it celebrated by an annual ceremony? This fact alone
seems fatal to the interpretation of the myth as descriptive of sunset and
sunrise. Again, though the sun may be said to die daily, in what sense can
he be said to be torn in pieces?(315)
(M106) In the course of our inquiry it has, I trust, been made clear that
there is another natural phenomenon to which the conception of death and
resurrection is as applicable as to sunset and sunrise, and which, as a
matter of fact, has been so conceived and represented in folk-custom. That
phenomenon is the annual growth and decay of vegetation. A strong reason
for interpreting the death of Osiris as the decay of vegetation rather
than as the sunset is to be found in the general, though not unanimous,
voice of antiquity, which classed together the worship and myths of
Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, and Demeter, as religions of essentially
the same type.(316) The consensus of ancient opinion on this subject seems
too great to be rejected as a mere fancy. So closely did the rites of
Osiris resemble those of Adonis at Byblus that some of the people of
Byblus themselves maintained that it was Osiris and not Adonis whose death
was mourned by them.(317) Such a view could certainly not have been held
if the rituals of the two gods had not been so alike as to be almost
indistinguishable. Herodotus found the similarity between the rites of
Osiris and Dionysus so great, that he thought it impossible the latter
could have arisen independently; they must, he supposed, have been
recently borrowed, with slight alterations, by the Greeks from the
Egyptians.(318) Again, Plutarch, a very keen student of comparative
religion, insists upon the detailed resemblance of the rites of Osiris to
those of Dionysus.(319) We cannot reject the evidence of such intelligent
and trustworthy witnesses on plain matters of fact which fell under their
own cognizance. Their explanations of the worships it is indeed possible
to reject, for the meaning of religious cults is often open to question;
but resemblances of ritual are matters of observation. Therefore, those
who explain Osiris as the sun are driven to the alternative of either
dismissing as mistaken the testimony of antiquity to the similarity of the
rites of Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, and Demeter, or of interpreting
all these rites as sun-worship. No modern scholar has fairly faced and
accepted either side of this alternative. To accept the former would be to
affirm that we know the rites of these deities better than the men who
practised, or at least who witnessed them. To accept the latter would
involve a wrenching, clipping, mangling, and distorting of myth and ritual
from which even Macrobius shrank.(320) On the other hand, the view that
the essence of all these rites was the mimic death and revival of
vegetation, explains them separately and collectively in an easy and
natural way, and harmonizes with the general testimony borne by the
ancients to their substantial similarity.