 CHAPTER 37 Oriental religions in the West The worship of the great mother of the gods, and her lover or son, was very popular under the Roman Empire. Inscriptions prove that the two received divine honors, separately or conjointly, not only in Italy and especially at Rome, but also in the provinces, particularly in Africa, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, and Bulgaria. Their worship survived the establishment of Christianity by Constantine, for Semicis records the recurrence of the festival of the great mother. And in the days of Augustine, her effeminate priests still paraded the streets and squares of Carthage with whitened faces, scented hair, and mincing gait, while, like the mendicant friars of the Middle Ages, they begged alms from the passers-by. In Greece, on the other hand, the bloody orgies of the Asiatic goddess and her consort appear to have found little favor. The barbarous and cruel character of the worship, with its frantic excesses, was doubtless repugnant to the good taste and humanity of the Greeks, who seemed to have preferred the kindred but gentler rites of Adonis. Yet the same features which shocked and repelled the Greeks may have positively attracted the less refined Romans and barbarians of the West. The ecstatic frenzies, which were mistaken for divine inspiration, the mangling of the body, the theory of a new birth, and the remission of sins through the shedding of blood, have all their origin in savagery, and they naturally appealed to people in whom the savage instincts were still strong. Their true character was indeed often disguised under a decent veil of allegorical or philosophical interpretation, which probably suffice to impose upon the rapt and enthusiastic worshippers, reconciling even the more cultivated of them to things which otherwise must have filled them with horror and disgust. The religion of the Great Mother, with its curious blending of crude savagery with spiritual aspirations, was only one of a multitude of similar oriental faiths which in the later days of paganism spread over the Roman Empire, and by saturating the European peoples with alien ideals of life gradually undermined the whole fabric of ancient civilization. The Greek and Roman society was built on the conception of the subordination of the individual to the community, of the citizen to the state. It set the safety of the commonwealth as the supreme aim of conduct, above the safety of the individual, whether in this world or in the world to come. Trained from infancy in this unselfish ideal, the citizens devoted their lives to the public service, and were ready to lay them down for the common good. Or if they shrank from the supreme sacrifice, it never occurred to them that they acted otherwise than basely in preferring their personal existence to the interests of their country. All this was changed by the spread of oriental religions which inculcated the communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only objects worth living for, objects in comparison with which the prosperity and even the existence of the state sank into insignificance. The inevitable result of this selfish and immoral doctrine was to withdraw the devotee more and more from the public service, to concentrate its thoughts on his own spiritual emotions, and to breed in him a contempt for the present life which he regarded merely as a probation for a better and an eternal. The saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and wrapped in ecstatic contemplation of heaven, became in popular opinion the highest ideal of humanity, displacing the old ideal of the patriot and hero, who, forgetful of self, lives and is ready to die for the good of his country. The earthly city seemed poor and contemptible to men whose eyes beheld the city of God coming in the clouds of heaven. Thus the center of gravity, so to say, was shifted from the present to a future life, but however much the other world may have gained, there can be little doubt that this one lost heavily by the change. A general disintegration of the body politic set in. The ties of the state and the family were loosened. The structure of society tended to resolve itself into its individual elements and thereby to relapse into barbarism. For civilization is only possible through the active cooperation of the citizens and their willingness to subordinate their private interests to the common good. Men refused to defend their country and even to continue their kind. In their anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were content to leave the material world, which they identified with the principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for a thousand years. The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle Ages, marked the return of Europe to the native ideals of life and conduct, to saner, manlier views of the world. The long halt in the march of civilization was over. The tide of oriental invasion had turned at last. It is ebbing still. Among the gods of Eastern origin, who in the decline of the ancient world competed against each other for the allegiance of the West, was the old Persian deity Mithra. The immense popularity of his worship is attested by the monuments illustrative of it, which had been found scattered in profusion all over the Roman Empire. In respect both of doctrines and of rites, the cult of Mithra appears to have presented many points of resemblance not only to the religion of the mother of the gods, but also to Christianity. The similarity struck the Christian doctors themselves and was explained by them as a work of the devil, who sought to seduce the souls of men from the true faith by a false and insidious imitation of it. So to the Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru, many of the native heathen rites appeared to be diabolical counterfeits of the Christian sacraments. With more probability, the modern student of comparative religion traces such resemblances to the similar and independent workings of the mind of man in his sincere, if crude, attempts to fathom the secret of the universe, and to adjust his little life to its awful mysteries. However that may be, there can be no doubt that the Mithraic religion proved a formidable rival to Christianity, combining as it did a solemn ritual with aspirations after moral purity and a hope of immortality. Indeed the issue of the conflict between the two faiths appears for a time to have hung in the balance, and instructive relic of the long struggle is preserved in our festival of Christmas, which the church seems to have borrowed directly from its heathen rival. In the Julian calendar the 25th of December was reckoned the winter solstice, and it was regarded as the nativity of the sun, because the day begins to lengthen and the power of the sun to increase from that turning point of the year. The ritual of the nativity, as it appears to have been celebrated in Syria and Egypt, was remarkable. The celebrants retired into certain inner shrines, from which at midnight they issued with a loud cry, the virgin has brought forth, the light is waxing. The Egyptians even represented the newborn sun by the image of an infant, which on his birthday, the winter solstice, they brought forth and exhibited to his worshipers. No doubt the virgin who thus conceived and bore a son on the 25th of December was the great oriental goddess, whom the Semites called the heavenly virgin, or simply the heavenly goddess. In Semitic lands she was a form of a starty. Now Mithra was regularly identified by his worshipers with the sun, the unconquered sun as they called him, hence his nativity also fell on the 25th of December. The Gospels say nothing as to the day of Christ's birth, and accordingly the early church did not celebrate it. In time however the Christians of Egypt came to regard the 6th of January as the date of the nativity, and the custom of commemorating the birth of the Saviour on that day gradually spread until by the 4th century it was universally established in the East. But at the end of the 3rd or the beginning of the 4th century the Western church which had never recognized the 6th of January as the day of the nativity adopted the 25th of December as the true date, and in time its decision was accepted also by the Eastern church. At Antioch the change was not introduced till about the year 375 AD. What considerations led the ecclesiastical authorities to institute the Festival of Christmas? The motives for the innovation are stated with great frankness by a Syrian writer, himself a Christian. The reason, he tells us, why the Fathers transferred the celebration of the 6th of January to the 25th of December was this. It was a custom of the heathen to celebrate on the same 25th of December the birthday of the sun, at which they kindled lights and token of festivity. In these solemnities and festivities the Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival they took counsel and resolved that the true nativity should be solemnized on that day and the Festival of the Epiphany on the 6th of January. Accordingly along with this custom the practice has prevailed of kindling fires till the 6th. The heathen origin of Christmas is plainly hinted at, if not tacitly admitted, by Augustine when he exhorts his Christian brethren not to celebrate that solemn day like the heathen on account of the sun, but on account of him who made the sun. In like manner Leo the Great rebuked the pestilent belief that Christmas was solemnized because of the birth of the new sun as it was called, and not because of the nativity of Christ. Thus it appears that the Christian church chose to celebrate the birthday of its founder on the 25th of December in order to transfer the devotion of the heathen from the sun to him who was called the son of righteousness. If that was so there can be no intrinsic in probability in the conjecture that motives of the same sort may have led the ecclesiastical authorities to assimilate the Easter festival of the death and resurrection of their Lord to the festival of the death and resurrection of another Asiatic God which fell at the same season. Now the Easter rites still observed in Greece, Sicily, and southern Italy bear in some respects a striking resemblance to the rites of Adonis, and I have suggested that the church may have consciously adapted the new festival to its heathen predecessor for the sake of winning souls to Christ. But this adaptation probably took place in the Greek-speaking rather than in the Latin-speaking parts of the ancient world, for the worship of Adonis while it flourished among the Greeks appears to have made little impression on Rome and the West. Certainly it never formed part of the official Roman religion. The place which it might have taken in the affections of the vulgar was already occupied by the similar but more barbarous worship of Addis and the Great Mother. Now the death and resurrection of Addis were officially celebrated at Rome on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of March, the latter being regarded as the spring equinox, and therefore as the most appropriate day for the revival of a god of vegetation who had been dead or sleeping throughout the winter. But according to an ancient and widespread tradition Christ suffered on the twenty-fifth of March, and accordingly some Christians regularly celebrated the crucifixion on that day without any regard to the state of the moon. This custom was certainly observed in Phrygia, Cappadocia and Gaul, and there seems to be ground for thinking that at one time it was followed also in Rome. Thus the tradition which placed the death of Christ on the twenty-fifth of March was ancient and deeply rooted. It is all the more remarkable because astronomical considerations prove that it can have had no historical foundation. The inference appears to be inevitable that the Passion of Christ must have been arbitrarily referred to that date in order to harmonize with an older festival of the spring equinox. This is the view of the learned ecclesiastical historian Monsayou Duchenne, who points out that the death of the Saviour was thus made to fall upon the very day on which, according to a widespread belief, the world had been created. But the resurrection of Addis, who combined in himself the characters of the Divine Father and the Divine Son, was officially celebrated at Rome on the same day. When we remember that the Festival of St. George in April has replaced the ancient pagan festival of Perylia, that the Festival of St. John the Baptist in June has succeeded to a heathen midsummer festival of water, that the Festival of the Assumption of the Virgin in August has ousted the Festival of Diana, that the feast of all souls in November is a continuation of an old heathen feast of the dead, and that the Nativity of Christ himself was assigned to the Winter Solstice in December because that day was deemed the Nativity of the Sun, we can hardly be thought rash or unreasonable in conjecturing that the other cardinal festival of the Christian Church, the solemnization of Easter, may have been in like manner, and from like motives of edification, adapted to a similar celebration of the Phrygian god Addis at the vernal equinox. At least it is a remarkable coincidence, if it is nothing more, that the Christian and the heathen festivals of the Divine Death and Resurrection should have been solemnized at the same season and in the same places. For the places which celebrated the death of Christ at the spring equinox were Phrygia, Gaul, and apparently Rome, that is, the very regions in which the worship of Addis either originated or struck deepest root. It is difficult to regard the coincidence as purely accidental. If the vernal equinox, the season at which in the temperate regions the whole face of nature testifies to a fresh outburst of vital energy, had been viewed from of old as the time when the world was annually created afresh in the Resurrection of a god, nothing could be more natural than to place the Resurrection of the New Deity at the same cardinal point of the year. Only it is to be observed that if the death of Christ was dated on the 25th of March, his Resurrection, according to Christian tradition, must have happened on the 27th of March, which is just two days later than the vernal equinox of the Julian calendar, and the Resurrection of Addis. A similar displacement of two days and the adjustment of Christian to heathen celebrations occurs in the festivals of St. George and the assumption of the Virgin. However, another Christian tradition, followed by Lactantius, and perhaps by the practice of the church in Gaul, placed the death of Christ on the 23rd and his Resurrection on the 25th of March. If that was so, his Resurrection coincided exactly with the Resurrection of Addis. In point of fact it appears from the testimony of an anonymous Christian who wrote in the fourth century of our era that Christians and Pagans alike were struck by the remarkable coincidence between the death and resurrection of their respective deities, and that the coincidence formed a theme of bitter controversy between the adherents of the rival religions, the Pagans contending that the Resurrection of Christ was a spurious imitation of the Resurrection of Addis, and the Christians asserting with equal warmth that the Resurrection of Addis was a diabolical counterfeit of the Resurrection of Christ. In these unseemly bickerings the heathen took what to a superficial observer might seem strong ground by arguing that their God was the older and therefore presumably the original, not the counterfeit, since as a general rule an original is older than its copy. This feeble argument the Christians easily rebutted. They admitted indeed that in point of time Christ was the junior deity, but they triumphantly declared his real seniority by falling back on the subtlety of Satan, who on so important an occasion had surpassed himself by inverting the usual order of nature. Taken altogether the coincidences of the Christian with the heathen festivals are too close and too numerous to be accidental. They marked the compromise which the Church, in the hour of its triumph, was compelled to make with its vanquished yet still dangerous rivals. The inflexible Protestantism of the primitive missionaries, with their fiery denunciations of heathendom, had been exchanged for the simple policy, the easy tolerance, the comprehensive charity of shrewd ecclesiastics, that if Christianity was to conquer the world it could only do so by relaxing the two rigid principles of its founder, by widening a little the narrow gate which leads to salvation. In this respect an instructive parallel might be drawn between the history of Christianity and the history of Buddhism. Both systems were, in their origin, essentially ethical reforms born of the generous ardor, the lofty aspirations, the tender compassion of their noble founders, two of those beautiful spirits who appear at rare intervals on earth, like beings come from a better world, to support and guide our weak and airing nature. Both preached moral virtue, as the means of accomplishing what they regarded as the supreme object of life, the eternal salvation of the individual soul, though by a curious antithesis the one sought that salvation in a blissful eternity, the other in a final release from suffering and annihilation. But the austere ideals of sanctity which they inculcated were too deeply opposed not only to the frailties, but to the natural instincts of humanity ever to be carried out in practice by more than a small number of disciples, who consistently renounced the ties of the family and the state in order to work out their own salvation in the still seclusion of the cloister. If such faiths were to be nominally accepted by whole nations or even by the world, it was essential that they should first be modified or transformed so as to accord in some measure with the prejudices, the passions, the superstitions of the vulgar. This process of accommodation was carried out in after-ages by followers who, made of less ethereal stuff than their masters, were for that reason the better fitted to mediate between them and the common herd. Thus as time went on, the two religions, in exact proportion to their growing popularity, absorbed more and more of those baser elements which they had been instituted for the very purpose of suppressant. Such spiritual decadences are inevitable. The world cannot live at the level of its great men. Yet it would be unfair to the generality of our kind to ascribe wholly to their intellectual and moral weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from their primitive patterns. For it should never be forgotten that by their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the vast majority of mankind who refused to purchase a chance of saving their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species. CHAPTER 38 THE MYTH OF OSIRIS 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 Addis 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. 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. Osiris was the offspring of an intrigue between the earth god Ceb, Ceb or Geb, as the name is sometimes transliterated, and the sky goddess Newt. The Greeks identified his parents with their own deities Cronus and Rhea. When the sun god Ra perceived that his wife Newt 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 Toth, or Hermes, as the Greeks called him, and he, playing at drops with the moon, won from her a seventy-second part 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 harmony between lunar and solar time. 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. Throughout his nativity a voice rang out proclaiming that the Lord of all had come into the world. Some say that a certain Pamiles heard a voice from the temple at Thebes, bidding him anounce 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. Afterwards Set married his sister Nephthys, and Osiris married his sister Isis. Raining 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 traveled over the world, defusing 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 vine 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 worshiped as a deity. 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. While 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 Athur, 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 a lock of her hair, put on a mourning attire, and wandered disconsolently up and down, seeking the body. 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 side 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 herpocrides, 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. The scorpion had stung him. Then Isis prayed to the sun-god Ra for help. The god harkened to her, and stayed his bark in the sky, and sent down Tooth 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 Tooth ascended up into the sky, and took his place once more in the bark of the sun, and the bright pomp passed onward jubilant. Meantime the coffer containing the body of Osiris had floated down the river in a way out to sea, till at last it drifted ashore at Biblas, 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. A third of this came to Isis, and she journeyed to Biblas, and sat down by the well and 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 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. Then the wood stands in a temple of Isis, and is worshipped by the people of Biblis 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. And he knew the body, and rent it into fourteen pieces, and scattered them abroad. But Isis sailed up and down the marshes, and a shallot made of papyrus, looking for the pieces. And that is why, when people sail in shallots 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. 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. Isis writes the historian Diodorus Sycholus, quote, recovered all the parts of the body except the genitals, and because she wished that her husband's grave should be unknown and honored by all who dwell in the land of Egypt, she resorted to the following device. She molded 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 honor Osiris as a god. She also besought them to dedicate one of the animals of their country, whichever they chose, and to honor it in life as they had formerly honored Osiris, and when it died to granted obsequies like his. And because she would encourage the priests, in their own interest to bestow the aforesaid honors, 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 honor 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 Abis and the other Nevis, 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. Such is the myth or legend of Osiris, as told by Greek writers and eaked out by more or less fragmentary notices or illusions in native Egyptian literature. A long inscription in the temple at Dindara has preserved a list of the gods' 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 Athraibus, his backbone at Bucyrus, 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 Abidus as well as at Memphis, and his legs, which were remarkably numerous, would have sufficed for several ordinary mortals. In this respect, however, Osiris was nothing to St. Dennis, of whom no less than seven heads, all equally genuine, are extant. 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 has 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 my eyes desire thee. Come to her who loves thee. Who loves thee, O nafer, thou blessed one. Come to thy sister. Come to thy wife. To thy wife. Thou whose heart stands still. Come to thy house, wife. 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 here is not my voice. Yet I am thy sister, whom thou didst love on earth. Thou didst love none but me, my brother, my brother. This lament for the fair youth cut off in his prime reminds us of the laments for Adonis. The title of O nafer, 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. 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 Nephis, of Toath 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 want to perform over the bodies of the departed. Then Isis fan the cold clay with her wings. Osiris revived, and thenceforth reigned as king over the dead in the other world. There he bore the titles of Lord of the Underworld, Lord of Eternity, Ruler of the Dead. There too in the great hall of the two trues, 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. 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. Quote, 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 way 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 the characteristic of Osiris. 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, as Osiris died and rose again from the dead, so all men hoped to arise like him from death to life eternal. 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 scepter. Two cities above all others were associated with his myth or memory. One of them was Bucyrus and Lower Egypt, which claimed to possess his backbone. The other was Abidas, an upper Egypt, which gloried in the possession of his head. And circled by the nimbus of the dead yet living god, Abidas, 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 Abidas, 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 synotaphs 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. CHAPTER XXXIX A useful clue to the original nature of a god or goddess is often furnished by the season at which his or her festival is celebrated. Thus if the festival falls at the new or the full moon there is a certain presumption that the deity thus honored either is the moon or at least has lunar affinities. If the festival is held at the winter or summer solstice we naturally surmise that the god is the sun or at all events that he stands in some close relation to that luminary. Again if the festival coincides with the time of sowing or harvest we are inclined to infer that the divinity is an embodiment of the earth or of the corn. These presumptions or inferences taken by themselves are by no means conclusive, but if they happen to be confirmed by other indications the evidence may be regarded as fairly strong. Unfortunately in dealing with the Egyptian gods we are in a great measure precluded from making use of this clue. The reason is not that the dates of the festivals are always unknown, but that they shifted from year to year, until after a long interval they had revolved through the whole course of the seasons. This gradual revolution of the festival Egyptian cycle resulted from the employment of a calendar year which neither corresponded exactly to the solar year nor was periodically corrected by intercalation. If the Egyptian farmer of the olden time could get no help except at the rarest intervals from the official or sacerdotal calendar he must have been compelled to observe for himself those natural signals which marked the times for the various operations of husbandry. In all ages of which we possess any records the Egyptians have been an agricultural people, dependent for their subsistence on the growth of the corn. The cereals which they cultivated were wheat, barley, and apparently sorghum, holkis sorghum, Linnaeus, the dura of the modern falahin. Then as now the whole country, with the exception of a fringe on the coast of the Mediterranean, was almost rainless, and owed its immense fertility entirely to the annual inundation of the Nile, which, regulated by an elaborate system of dams and canals, was distributed over the fields, renewing the soil year by year with a fresh deposit of mud washed down from the great equatorial lakes and the mountains of Abyssinia. Hence the rise of the river has always been watched by the inhabitants with the utmost anxiety, for if it either falls short of or exceeds a certain height, dearth and famine are the inevitable consequences. The water begins to rise early in June, but it is not until the latter half of July that it swells to a mighty tide. By the end of September the inundation is at its greatest height. The country is now submerged, and presents the appearance of a sea of turbid water, from which the towns and villages built on higher ground rise like islands. For about a month the flood remains nearly stationary, then sinks more and more rapidly, till by December or January the river has returned to its ordinary bed. With the approach of summer the level of the water continues to fall. In the early days of June the Nile is reduced to half its ordinary breath, and Egypt, scorched by the sun, blasted by the wind that is blown from the Sahara for many days, seems a mere continuation of the desert. The trees are choked with a thick layer of gray dust. A few meager patches of vegetables, watered with difficulty, struggle painfully for existence in the immediate neighborhood of the villages. Some appearance of verger lingers besides the canals, and in the hollows from which the moisture has not wholly evaporated. The plain appears to pant in the pitiless sunshine, bare, dusty, ash-colored, cracked and seamed as far as the eye can see with a network of fishers. From the middle of April till the middle of June the land of Egypt is but half alive, waiting for the new Nile. For countless ages this cycle of natural events has determined the annual labours of the Egyptian husbandmen. The first work of the agricultural year is the cutting down of the dams which have hitherto prevented the swollen river from flooding the canals and the fields. This has done, and the pent-up waters were leased on their beneficent mission in the first half of August. In November, when the inundation has subsided, wheat, barley and sorghum are grown. The time of harvest varies with the district, falling about a month later in the north than in the south. In upper or southern Egypt barley is reaped at the beginning of March, wheat at the beginning of April, and sorghum about the end of that month. It is natural to suppose that the various events of the agricultural year were celebrated by the Egyptian farmer with some simple religious rites designed to secure the blessing of the gods upon his labours. These rustic ceremonies he would continue to perform year after year at the same season, while the solemn festivals of the priests continued to shift with the shifting calendar, from summer through spring to winter, and so backward through autumn to summer. The rites of the husbandmen were stable because they rested on direct observation of nature. The rites of the priests were unstable because they were based on a false calculation. Yet many of the priestly festivals may have been nothing but the old rural festivals disguised in the course of ages by the pump of sacerdotalism, and severed by the error of the calendar from their roots in the natural cycle of the seasons. These conjectures are confirmed by the little we know of both of the popular and of the official Egyptian religion. Thus we are told that the Egyptians held the festival of Isis at the time when the Nile began to rise. They believed that the goddess was then mourning for the lost Osiris, and that the tears which dropped from her eyes swelled the impetuous tide of the river. Now if Osiris was, in one of his aspects, a god of the corn, nothing could be more natural than that he should be mourned at mid-summer. For by that time the harvest was past, the fields were bare, the river ran low, life seemed to be suspended, the corn-god was dead. At such a moment people who saw the handiwork of divine beings and all the operations of nature might well trace the swelling of the sacred stream to the tears shed by the goddess at the death of the beneficent corn-god, her husband. In the sign of the rising waters on earth was accompanied by a sign in heaven. Before in the early days of Egyptian history, some three or four thousand years before the beginning of our era, the splendid star of Sirius, the brightest of all the fixed stars, appeared at dawn in the east just before sunrise about the time the summer solstice, when the Nile begins to rise. The Egyptians called it Sothis, and regarded it as the star of Isis, just as the Babylonians deemed the planet Venus the star of Astarti. To both peoples apparently the brilliant luminary in the morning sky seen the goddess of life and love come to mourn her departed lover or spouse, and awake him from the dead. Hence the rising of Sirius marked the beginning of the sacred Egyptian year, and was regularly celebrated by a festival which did not shift with the shifting official year. The cutting of the dams and the admission of the water into the canals and fields is a great event in the Egyptian year. At Cairo the operation generally takes place between the sixth and the sixteenth of August, and till lately was attended by ceremonies which deserved to be noticed, because they were probably handed down from antiquity. An ancient canal, known by the name of the Calige, formerly passed through the native town of Cairo. Near its entrance the canal was crossed by a dam of earth, very broad at the bottom, and diminishing in breadth upwards, which used to be constructed before or soon after the nile began to rise. In front of the dam, on the side of the river, was reared a truncated cone of earth called the Arusa, or bride, on the top of which a little maize or millet was generally sown. This bride was commonly washed down by the rising tide a week or a fortnight before the cutting of the dam. One runs that the old custom was to deck a young virgin in gay apparel and throw her into the river as a sacrifice to obtain a plentiful inundation. Whether that was so or not the intention of the practice appears to have been to marry the river, conceived as a male power, to his bride the corn land, which was so soon to be fertilized by his water. The ceremony was therefore a charm to ensure the growth of the crops. In modern times money used to be thrown into the canal on this occasion, and the populace dived into the water after it. This practice also would seem to have been ancient, for Seneca tells us that at a place called the Veins of the Nile, not far from Phile, the priests used to cast money and offerings of gold into the river at a festival which apparently took place at the rising of the water. The next great operation of the agricultural year in Egypt is the sowing of the seed in November, when the water of the inundation has retreated from the fields. With the Egyptians, as with many peoples of antiquity, the committing of the seed to the earth assumed the character of a solemn and mournful rite. On this subject I will let Plutarch speak for himself. What, he asks, quote, are we to make of the gloomy, joyless, and mournful sacrifices, if it is wrong either to omit the established rites or to confuse and disturb our conceptions of the gods by absurd suspicions. For the Greeks also perform many rites which resemble those of the Egyptians and are observed about the same time. Thus at the festival of the Thesmaphoria in Athens, women sit on the ground and fast. In the Bioscians open the vaults of the sorrowful one, naming that festival sorrowful because Demeter is sorrowing for the descent of the maiden. The month is the month of sowing about the setting of the Pleiades. The Egyptians call it ather, the Athenians pionepsion, the Bioscians the month of Demeter. For it was that time of year when they saw some of the fruits vanishing and failing from the trees, while they sowed others grudgingly and with difficulty, scraping the earth with their hands and huddling it up again, on the uncertain chance that what they deposited in the ground would ever ripen and come to maturity. Thus they did in many respects like those who bury and mourn their dead." The Egyptian harvest, as we have seen, falls not in autumn but in spring, in the months of March, April, and May. To the husbandmen the time of harvest, at least in a good year, must necessarily be a season of joy. In bringing home his sheaves he is required for his long and anxious labours. Yet if the old Egyptian farmer felt a secret joy at reaping and garnering the grain, it was essential that he should conceal the natural emotion under an air of profound ejection. For was he not severing the body of the corn-god with his sickle, and trampling it to pieces under the hooves of his cattle on the threshing floor? Accordingly, we are told that it was an ancient custom of the Egyptian corn-reapers to beat their breasts and lament over the first sheaf-cut, while at the same time they called upon ices. The invocation seems to have taken the form of a melancholy chant, to which the Greeks gave the name of Moneros. Similar plaintiff strains were chanted by corn-reapers in Phoenicia and other parts of western Asia. Probably all these doleful ditties were lamentations for the corn-god killed by the sickles of the reapers. In Egypt the slain deity was Osiris, and the name Moneros, applied to the dirge, appears to be derived from certain words meaning, come to thy house, which often occur in the lamentations for the dead god. Ceremonies of the same sort have been observed by other peoples, probably for the same purpose. Thus we are told that among all vegetables, corn, by which is apparently meant maize, holds the first place in the household economy and the ceremonial observance of the Cherokee Indians, who invoke it under the name of the old woman, an illusion to a myth that it sprang from the blood of an old woman killed by her disobedient sons. After the last working of the crop, a priest and his assistant went into the field and sang songs of invocation to the spirit of the corn. After that a loud wrestling would be heard, which was thought to be caused by the old woman bringing the corn into the field. A clean trail was always kept from the field to the house, so that the corn might be encouraged to stay at home and not go wandering elsewhere. Another curious ceremony, of which even the memory is now almost forgotten, was enacted after the first working of the corn, when the owner or priest stood in succession at each of the four corners of the field and wept and wailed loudly. Even the priests are now unable to give a reason for this performance, which may have been a lament for the bloody death of Silu, the old woman of the corn. In these Cherokee practices, the lamentations and invocations of the old woman of the corn resemble the ancient Egyptian customs of lamenting over the first corn cut and calling upon Isis, herself probably in one of her aspects an old woman of the corn. Further, the Cherokee precaution of leaving a clear path from the field to the house resembles the Egyptian invitation to Osiris come to thy house. So in the East Indies to this day, people observe elaborate ceremonies for the purpose of bringing back the soul of the rice from the fields to the barn. The Nandi of East Africa perform a ceremony in September when the LUC in grain is ripening. Every woman who owns a plantation goes out with her daughters into the corn fields and makes a bonfire of the branches and leaves of certain trees. After that they pluck some of the LUC, and each of them puts one grain in her necklace, chews another, and rubs it on her forehead, throat, and breast. Quote, no joy is shown by the women folk on this occasion, and they sorrowfully cut a basketful of the corn which they take home with them and place in the loft to dry. The conception of the corn spirit as old and dead at harvest is very clearly embodied and accustomed observed by the Arabs of Moab. When the harvesters have nearly finished their task, and only a small corner of the field remains to be reaped, the owner takes a handful of wheat tied up in a sheaf. A hole is dug in the form of a grave, and two stones are set upright, one at the head and the other at the foot, just as in an ordinary burial. Then the sheaf of wheat is laid at the bottom of the grave, and the sheaf pronounces these words, the old man is dead. Earth is afterwards thrown in to cover the sheaf with a prayer. May Allah bring us back the wheat of the dead. Section 2 The Official Rites Such then were the principal events of the farmer's calendar in ancient Egypt, and such the simple religious rites by which he celebrated them. But we have still to consider the Osirian festivals of the official calendar, so far as these are described by Greek writers or recorded on the monuments. In examining them it is necessary to bear in mind that, on account of the movable year of the old Egyptian calendar, the true or astronomical dates of the official festivals must have varied from year to year, at least until the adoption of the fixed Alexandrian year in 30 BC. From that time onward, apparently, the dates of the festivals were determined by the new calendar, and so ceased to rotate throughout the length of the solar year. At all events, Plutarch, writing about the end of the first century, implies that they were then fixed, not movable, for though he does not mention the Alexandrian calendar, he clearly dates the festivals by it. Moreover, the long, festal calendar of Ezni, an important document of the Imperial Age, is obviously based on the fixed Alexandrian year, for it assigns the mark for New Year's Day to the day which corresponds to the 29th of August, which was the first day of the Alexandrian year, and its references to the rising of the Nile, the position of the sun, and the operations of agriculture are all in harmony with the supposition. Thus we may take it as fairly certain that from 30 BC onwards the Egyptian festivals were stationary in the solar year. The Codotus tells us that the grave of Osiris was at Seas, in lower Egypt, and that there was a lake there upon which the sufferings of the god were displayed as a mystery by night. This commemoration of the divine passion was held once a year. The people mourned and beat their breasts at it to testify their sorrow for the death of the god, and an image of a cow, made of gilt wood with the golden sun between its horns, was carried out of the chamber in which it stood the rest of the year. The cow, no doubt, represented Isis herself, for cows were sacred to her, and she was regularly depicted with the horns of a cow on her head, or even as a woman with the head of a cow. It is probable that the carrying out of her cow-shaped image symbolized the goddess searching for the dead body of Osiris, for this was the native Egyptian interpretation of a similar ceremony observed in Plutarch's time about the winter solstice, when the gilt cow was carried seven times round the temple. A great feature of the festival was the nocturnal illumination. People fastened rows of oil lamps to the outside of their houses, and the lamps burned all night long. The custom was not confined to Seas, but was observed throughout the whole of Egypt. This universal illumination of the houses on one night of the year suggests that the festival may have been a commemoration not merely of the dead Osiris, but of the dead in general, in other words that it may have been a night of all souls. For it is a widespread belief that the souls of the dead revisit their old homes on one night of the year, and on that solemn occasion people prepare for the reception of the ghosts by laying out food for them to eat, and lighting lamps to guide them on their dark road from and to the grave. Herodotus, who briefly describes the festival, omits to mention its date, but we can determine it with some probability from other sources. Thus Plutarch tells us that Osiris was murdered on the 17th of the month Ather, and that the Egyptians accordingly observed mournful rites for four days from the 17th of Ather. Now in the Alexandrian calendar, which Plutarch used, these four days corresponded to the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th of November. In this date answers exactly to the other indications given by Plutarch, who says that at the time of the festival the Nile was sinking, the North winds dying away, the nights lengthening, in the leaves falling from the trees. During these four days a gilt cow swathed in a black pal was exhibited as an image of Isis. This no doubt was the image mentioned by Herodotus in his account of the festival. On the nineteenth day of the month the people went down to the sea, the priests carrying a shrine which contained a golden casket. Into this casket they poured fresh water, and thereupon the spectators raised a shout that Osiris was found. After that they took some vegetable mold, moistened it with water, mixed it with precious spices and incense, and molded the paste into a small moon-shaped image, which was then robed and ornamented. Thus it appears that the purpose of the ceremonies described by Plutarch was to represent dramatically, first the search for the dead body of Osiris, and second its joyful discovery, followed by the resurrection of the dead god who came to life again in the new image of vegetable mold and spices. Osiris tells us how on these occasions the priests with their shaven bodies beat their breasts and lamented, imitating the sorrowful search of Isis for her lost son Osiris, and how afterwards their sorrow was turned to joy when the jackal-headed god Anubis, or rather a mummer in his stead, produced a small boy, the living representative of the god who was lost and was found. Osiris lactantius regarded Osiris as the son instead of the husband of Isis, and he makes no mention of the image of vegetable mold. It is probable that the boy who figured in the sacred drama played the part not of Osiris but of his son Horus, but as the death and resurrection of the god were celebrated in many cities of Egypt it is also possible that in some places the part of the god come to life was played by a living actor instead of by an image. Another Christian writer describes how the Egyptians, with shorn heads, annually lamented over a buried idol of Osiris, smiting their breasts, slashing their shoulders, ripping open their old wounds, until, after several days of mourning, they profess to find the mangled remains of the god, at which they rejoiced. However the details of the ceremony may have varied in different places, the pretense of finding the god's body, and probably of restoring it to life, was a great event in the festival year of the Egyptians. The shouts of joy which greeted it are described or alluded to by many ancient writers. The funeral rites of Osiris, as they were observed at his great festival in the sixteen provinces of Egypt, are described in a long inscription of the Ptolemaic period, which is engraved on the walls of the god's temple at Dindara, the Tintara of the Greeks, a town of Upper Egypt situated in the western bank of the Nile, about forty miles north of Thebes. Unfortunately, while the information thus furnished is remarkably full and minute on many points, the arrangement adopted in the inscription is so confused and the expression often so obscure that a clear and consistent account of the ceremonies as a whole can hardly be extracted from it. Moreover we learn from the document that the ceremonies varied somewhat in the several cities, the ritual of Abidus, for example, differing from that of Bucyrus. Without attempting to trace all the particularities of local usage, I shall briefly indicate what seemed to have been the leading features of the festival, so far as these can be ascertained with tolerable certainty. The rites lasted eighteen days, from the twelfth to the thirtieth of the month Koyak, and set forth the nature of Osiris in his triple aspect as dead, dismembered, and finally reconstituted by the union of his scattered limbs. In the first of these aspects he was called Kentament, Kentamenti, in the second step Osiris Sep, and in the third Sokari, Seker. Small images of the god were molded of sand or vegetable earth and corn, to which incense was sometimes added. His face was painted yellow and his cheekbones green. These images were cast in a mold of pure gold, which represented the god in the form of a mummy, with the white crown of Egypt on his head. The festival opened on the twelfth day of Koyak with the ceremony of plowing and sowing. Two black cows were yoked to the plow, which was made of tamarisk wood, while the share was of black copper. A boy scattered the seed. One into the field was sown with barley, the other with spelt, and the middle with flax. During the operation the chief's celebrant recited the ritual chapter of the sowing of the fields. At Buciris, on the twentieth of Koyak, sand and barley were put in the god's garden, which appears to have been a sort of large flower pot. This was done in the presence of the cow goddess Shinti, represented seemingly by the image of a cow made of gilt sycamore wood with a headless human image in its inside. Quote, then fresh inundation water was poured out of a golden vase over both the goddess and the garden, and the barley was allowed to grow as the emblem of the resurrection of the god after his burial in the earth, for the growth of the garden is the growth of the divine substance. On the twenty-second of Koyak, at the eighth hour, the images of Osiris, attended by thirty-four images of deities, performed a mysterious voyage in thirty-four tiny boats made of papyrus, which were illuminated by three hundred and sixty-five lights. On the twenty-fourth of Koyak, after sunset, the effigy of Osiris and a coffin of mulberry wood was laid in the grave, and at the ninth hour of the night the effigy which had been made and deposited the year before, was removed and placed upon boughs of sycamore. Lastly, on the thirtieth day of Koyak, they repaired to the holy sepulcher, a subterranean chamber over which appears to have grown a clump of persia-trees. Entering the vault by the western door, they laid the coffined effigy of the dead god reverently on a bed of sand in the chamber. So they left him to his rest, and departed from the sepulcher by the eastern door. Thus ended the ceremonies in the month of Koyak. In the foregoing account of the festival, drawn from the great inscription of Dindara, the burial of Osiris figures prominently, while his resurrection is implied rather than expressed. This defect of the document, however, is amply compensated by a remarkable series of Ba reliefs which accompany and illustrate the inscription. In his exhibit, in a series of scenes, the dead god lying swathed as a mummy on his beer, then gradually raising himself up higher and higher, until at last he has entirely quitted the beer, and is seen erect between the guardian wings of the faithful ices, who stands behind him, while a male figure holds up before his eyes the crux ansata, the Egyptian symbol of life. The resurrection of the god could hardly be portrayed more graphically. Even more instructive, however, is another representation of the same event in a chamber dedicated to Osiris in the great temple of Isis at Phile. Here we see the dead body of Osiris with stalks of corn springing from it, while a priest waters the stalks from a pitcher which he holds in his hand. The accompanying inscription sets forth that this is the form of him whom one may not name, Osiris of the mysteries, who springs from the returning waters. Taken together, the picture and the words seem to leave no doubt that Osiris was here conceived and represented as a personification of the corn which springs from the fields after they have been fertilized by the inundation. This according to the inscription was the kernel of the mysteries, the innermost secret revealed to the initiated. So in the rites of Demeter and Elucis a reaped ear of corn was exhibited to the worshippers as the central mystery of their religion. We can now fully understand why at the great festival of sowing in the month of Coyac the priests used to bury effigies of Osiris made of earth and corn. When these effigies were taken up again at the end of a year or of a shorter interval the corn would be found to have sprouted from the body of Osiris, and this sprouting of the grain would be hailed as an omen, or rather as the cause of the growth of the crops. The corn god produced the corn from himself. He gave his own body to feed the people. He died that they might live. And from the death and resurrection of their great god the Egyptians drew not only their support and sustenance in this life, but also their hope of a life eternal beyond the grave. This hope is indicated in the clearest manner by the very remarkable effigies of Osiris which have come to light in Egyptian cemeteries. Thus in the valley of the kings at Thebes there was found the tomb of a royal fan-bearer who lived about 1500 B.C. Among the rich contents of the tomb there was a beer on which rested a mattress of reeds covered with three layers of linen. On the upper side of the linen was painted a life-size figure of Osiris, and the interior of the figure which was waterproof contained a mixture of vegetable mold, barley, and a sticky fluid. The barley had sprouted and sent out shoots two or three inches long. Again, in the cemetery at Sinopolis, quote, were numerous burials of Osiris figures. These were made of grain, wrapped in cloth, and roughly shaped like an Osiris, and placed inside a bricked up recess at the side of the tomb, sometimes in small pottery coffins, sometimes in wooden coffins, in the form of a hawk-mummy, sometimes without coffins at all, unquote. These corn-stuffed figures were bandaged like mummies with patches of gilding here and there, as if in imitation of the golden mold in which the similar figures of Osiris were cast at the festival of sewing. Again, effigies of Osiris, with faces of green wax and their interior full of grain, were found buried near the necropolis of Thebes. Finally, we are told by Professor Ehrman that between the legs of mummies, quote, there sometimes lies a figure of Osiris, made of slime. It is filled with grains of corn, the sprouting of which is intended to signify the resurrection of the God, unquote. We cannot doubt that, just as the burial of corn-stuffed images of Osiris in the earth at the festival of sewing was designed to quicken the seed, so the burial of similar images in the grave was meant to quicken the dead, in other words, to ensure their spiritual immortality. End of Chapter 39. CHAPTERS 40-42 OF THE GOLDEN BOW This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. THE GOLDEN BOW by Sir James Fraser. CHAPTER 40. THE NATURE OF OSIRIS. ONE. 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 Koyak, and at a later period in the month of Ather. That festival appears to have been essentially a festival of sewing, which properly fell at the time when the husbandmen actually committed the seed to the earth. On that occasion an effigy of the corn-god, molded 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 practiced 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. The details of his myth fit in well with his 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 fertilized 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 that Isis placed the severed limbs of Osiris on a corn-sive. 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 fertilize 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. 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 fertilization of the fig. Again, Greek legend told how Penthous, 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 frenzy Buccannols, 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 Chaius men were rent to 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 Buccannols 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 it sees to be fruitful, might regain its fertility. Further we read of a Norwegian king, Havdan 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 Snari Starlson. 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 a ringariki and intended for burial there, the chief men from Rammariki and Westfold and Heitmark 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 Stain in Hringariki, and each party took away their own share and buried it. All these barrows are called Havdan's Barrows." It should be remembered that this Havdan belonged to the family of the Inglings, who traced their descent from Frey, the great Scandinavian god of fertility. The natives of Kiwai, an island lying off the north of the Fly River in British New Guinea, tell of a certain magician named Sigera, who had Sego for his totem. When Sigera 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 Sego good, and no one was hungry any more. Old men who were alive some years ago affirmed that they had known Sigera and their youth, and the general opinion of the Kiwai people seems to be that Sigera died not more than two generations ago. 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. 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, red-haired victims were perhaps selected as best fitted to impersonate 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 a 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 newborn babies when the maize was sown, older children when it 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. Two. 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 Maternis. A pine tree, having been cut down, the center 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 Addis, which was attached to the pine tree. The ceremony of cutting the tree, as described by Firmicus Maternis, 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 Erika Tree. In the Hall of Osiris at Dindara, 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 Maternis. 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 Nepsini, written about 1550 D, Osiris is depicted sitting in a shrine, from the roof of which hangs clusters of grapes, and in the papyrus of the royal scribe Nect 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 seeded deity. The ivy was sacred to him, and was called his plant because it is always green. Three. 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 failed 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 streams. 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 Phile, the dead god is portrayed lying on his beer 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 nature. 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 inquirers, both ancient and modern, into identifying warships which, though certainly akin in nature, are perfectly distinct and independent in origin. Four, 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, labor 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 and do season. We may assume that in the faith of his worshipers, 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 sea to spring from the ground. Of that faith, the corn-stuffed effigies of Osiris found in Egyptian tombs furnish an eloquent and unequivocal 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. 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 and 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. Chapter 41, Isis. The original meaning of the goddess Isis is still more difficult to determine than that of her brother and husband, Osiris. Her attributes and epithets were so numerous that in the hieroglyphics she is called the many-named, the thousand-named, and in Greek inscriptions the myriad named. Yet in her complex nature it is perhaps still possible to detect the original nucleus round which by a slow process of accretion the other elements gathered. For if her brother and husband, Osiris, was in one of his aspects the corn god as we have seen reason to believe she must surely have been the corn goddess. There are at least some grounds for thinking so. For if we may trust Diodorus Siculus whose authority appears to have been the Egyptian historian Manetho, the discovery of wheat and barley was attributed to Isis, and at her festival stalks of these grains were carried in procession to commemorate the boon she had conferred on men. A further detail is added by Augustine. He says that Isis made the discovery of barley at the moment when she was sacrificing to the common ancestors of her husband and herself, all of whom had been kings, and that she showed the newly discovered ears of barley to Osiris and his counselor Thoth, or Mercury, as Roman writers called him. That is why, adds Augustine, they identify Isis with Suriis. Further, at harvest time, when the Egyptian reapers had cut the first stalks, they laid them down and beat their breasts, wailing and calling upon Isis. The custom has been already explained as a lament for the corn spirit slain under the sickle. Amongst the epithets by which Isis is designated in the inscriptions are Creatress of Green Things, Green Goddess, whose green color is likened to the greenness of the earth, Lady of Bread, Lady of Beer, Lady of Abundance. According to Bruksh, she is not only the Creatress of the fresh verger of vegetation which covers the earth, but is actually the green cornfield itself, which is personified as a goddess. This is confirmed by her epithet Soket, or Soket, meaning a cornfield, a sense which the word still retains in Coptic. The Greeks conceived of Isis as a corn goddess, for they identified her with Demeter. In a Greek epigram, she is described as she who has given birth to the fruits of the earth, and the mother of the ears of corn. And in a hymn composed in her honor, she speaks of herself as Queen of the Wheatfield, and is described as charged with the care of the fruitful furrow's wheat-rich path. Accordingly, Greek or Roman artists often represented her with ears of corn on her head or in her hand. Such, we may suppose, was Isis in the Olden Time, a rustic corn mother adored with uncouth rites by Egyptian swains. But the homely features of the clownish goddess could hardly be traced in the refined, the saintly form which, spiritualized by ages of religious evolution, she presented to her worshipers of after-days as the true wife, the tender mother, the beneficent queen of nature, encircled with the nimbus of moral purity, of immemorial and mysterious sanctity. Thus, chastened and transfigured, she won many hearts far beyond the boundaries of her native land. In that welter of religions, which accompanied the decline of national life in antiquity, her worship was one of the most popular at Rome and throughout the empire. Some of the Roman emperors themselves were openly addicted to it. And however the religion of Isis may, like any other, have been often worn as a cloak by men and women of loose life, her rites appear on the whole to have been honorably distinguished by a dignity and composure, a solemnity and decorum well fitted to soothe the troubled mind, to ease the burdened heart. They appealed, therefore, to gentle spirits and above all to women, whom the bloody and licentious rites of other oriental goddesses only shocked and repelled. We need not wonder, then, that in a period of decadence when traditional phase were shaken, when systems clashed, when men's minds were disquieted, when the fabric of empire itself, once deemed eternal, began to show ominous rints and fissures, the serene figure of Isis, with her spiritual calm, her gracious promise of immortality, should have appeared to many like a star in a stormy sky. And should have roused in their breasts a rapture of devotion, not unlike that which was paid in the Middle Ages to the Virgin Mary. Indeed, her stately ritual with its shaven and tauntured priests, its matins and vespers, its tinkling music, its baptism and aspersions of holy water, its solemn processions, its jeweled images of the mother of God, presented many points of similarity to the pumps and ceremonies of Catholicism. The resemblance need not be purely accidental. Ancient Egypt may have contributed its share to the gorgeous symbolism of the Catholic Church, as well as to the pale abstractions of her theology. Certainly, in art, the figure of Isis, suckling the infant Horus, is so like that of the Madonna and child, that it has sometimes received the adoration of ignorant Christians. And to Isis, in her later character of Patroness of Mariners, the Virgin Mary perhaps owes her beautiful epithet of Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, under which she is adored by Tempest Toss Stalers. The attributes of a marine deity may have been bestowed on Isis by the seafaring Greeks of Alexandria. They are quite foreign to her original character and to the habits of the Egyptians who had no love of the sea. On this hypothesis, Sirius, the bright star of Isis, which on July mornings rises from the glassy waves of the eastern Mediterranean, a harbinger of Halcyon weather to Mariners, was the true Stella Maris, the star of the sea. Chapter 42, Osiris and the Sun. 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 Yablonsky, 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. Of the ancient writers whom he condescends to quote, the only two who expressly identify Osiris with the sun are Diodorus and Microbius, but little weight can be attached to their evidence, for the statement of Diodorus is vague and rhetorical, in the reasons which Microbius, one of the fathers of solar mythology, assigns for the identification are exceedingly slight. 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 Reneuf, who identified Osiris with the sun, admitted that the Egyptian sun could not with any show of reason be described as dead in winter. 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 sins can he be said to be torn in pieces? 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 the 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, Addis, Dionysus, and Demeter, as religions of essentially the same type. 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 Biblis, that some of the people at Biblis themselves maintained that it was Osiris and not Adonis whose death was mourned by them. Such of you 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. Again, Plutarch, a very keen student of comparative religion, insists upon the detailed resemblance of the rites of Osiris to those of Dionysus. We cannot reject the evidence of such intelligent and trustworthy witnesses on plain matters of fact which fell under their own cognizance. Their explanation 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, Addis, 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 practiced 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 Microbius shrank. 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. End of chapters 40 through 42.