Volume II Part 12 (1/2)

After civilising Egypt, he travelled over the world, like the Greek Dionysus, whom he so closely resembles in some portions of his legend that Herodotus supposed the Dionysiac myth to have been imported from Egypt.* In the absence of Osiris, his evil brother, Typhon, kept quiet.

But, on the hero's return, Typhon laid an ambush against him, like aegisthus against Agamemnon. He had a decorated coffer (mummy-case?) made of the exact length of Osiris, and offered this as a present to any one whom it would fit. At a banquet all the guests tried it; but when Osiris lay down in it, the lid was closed and fastened with nails and melted lead. The coffer, Osiris and all, was then thrown into the Nile. Isis, arrayed in mourning robes like the wandering Demeter, sought Osiris everywhere lamenting, and found the chest at last in an _erica_ tree that entirely covered it. After an adventure like that of Demeter with Triptolemus, Isis obtained the chest. During her absence Typhon lighted on it as he was hunting by moonlight; he tore the corpse of Osiris into fourteen pieces, and scattered them abroad. Isis sought for the mangled remnants, and, whenever she found one, buried it, each tomb being thenceforth recognised as ”a grave of Osiris”. Precisely the same fable occurs in Central Australian myths of the Alcheringa, or legendary past.**

* ”Osiris is Dionysus in the tongue of h.e.l.las” (Herodotus, ii. 144, ii. 48). ”Most of the details of the mystery of Osiris, as practised by the Egyptians, resemble the Dionysus mysteries of Greece.... Methinks that Melampus, Amythaon's son, was well seen in this knowledge, for it was Melampus that brought among the Greeks the name and rites and phallic procession of Dionysus.” (Compare Dels, et Os., x.x.xv.) The coincidences are probably not to be explained by borrowing; many of them are found in America.

** Spencer and Gillen, p. 399.

The wives ”search for the murdered man's mutilated parts”. It is a plausible suggestion that, if graves of Osiris were once as common in Egypt as cairns of Heitsi Eibib are in Namaqualand to-day, the existence of many tombs of one being might be explained as tombs of his scattered members, and the myth of the dismembering may have no other foundation.

On the other hand, it must be noticed that a swine was sacrificed to Osiris, at the full moon, and it was in the form of a black swine that Typhon a.s.sailed Horus, the son of Osiris, whose myth is a _doublure or replica_, in some respects, of the Osirian myth itself.1 We may conjecture, then, that the fourteen portions into which the body of Osiris was rent may stand for the fourteen days of the waning moon.** It is well known that the phases of the moon and lunar eclipses are almost invariably accounted for in savage science by the attacks of a beast--dog, pig, dragon, or what not--on the heavenly body. Either of these hypothesis (the Egyptians adopted the latter)*** is consistent with the character of early myth, but both are merely tentative suggestions.****

* In the Edfou monuments Set is slain and dismembered in the shape of a red hippopotamus (Naville, Mythe d'Horus, p. 7).

** The fragments of Osiris were sixteen, according to the texts of Deuderah, one for each nome.

*** De Is. et Os., x.x.xv.

**** Compare Lefebure, Les Yeux d'Horus, pp. 47 48.

The phallus of Osiris was not recovered, and the totemistic habit which made the people of three different districts abstain from three different fish--_lepidotus, phagrus and oxyrrhyncus_--was accounted for by the legend that these fish had devoured the missing portion of the hero's body.

So far the power of evil, the black swine Typhon, had been triumphant.

But the blood-feud was handed on to Horus, son of Isis and Osiris. To spur Horus on to battle, Osiris returned from the dead, like Hamlet's father. But, as is usual with the ghosts of savage myth, Osiris returned, not in human, but in b.e.s.t.i.a.l form as a wolf.* Horus was victorious in the war which followed, and handed Typhon over bound in chains to Isis. Unluckily Isis let him go free, whereon Horus pushed off her crown and placed a bull's skull on her head.

There the Greek narrator ends, but** he expressly declines to tell the more blasphemous parts of the story, such as ”the dismemberment of Horus and the beheading of Isis”. Why these myths should be considered ”more blasphemous” than the rest does not appear.

It will probably be admitted that nothing in this sacred story would seem out of place if we found it in the legends of Pund-jel, or Cagn, or Yehl, among Australians, Bushmen, or Utes, whose own ”culture-hero,”

like the ghost of Osiris, was a wolf. This dismembering of Osiris in particular resembles the dismembering of many other heroes in American myth; for example, of Chokanipok, out of whom were made vines and flint-stones. Objects in the mineral and vegetable world were explained in Egypt as transformed parts or humours of Osiris, Typhon and other heroes.***

* Wicked squires in Shrops.h.i.+re (Miss Burns, Shrops.h.i.+re Folk- Lore) ”come” as bulls. Osiris, in the Mendes nonie, ”came”

as a ram (Marietta, Denderah, iv. 75).

** De Is, et Os., xx.

***Magical Text, nineteenth dynasty, translated by Dr. Birch Records of Past vi. 115; Lefebure, Osiris, pp. 100, 113,124, 205; Livre des Morts chap. xvii.; Records of Past, x. 84.

Once more, though the Egyptian G.o.ds are buried here and are immortal in heaven, they have also, like the heroes of Eskimos and Australians and Indians of the Amazon, been transformed into stars, and the priests could tell which star was Osiris, which was Isis, and which was Typhon.*

Such are the wild inconsistencies which Egyptian religion shares with the fables of the lowest races. In view of these facts it is difficult to agree with Brugsch** that ”from the root and trunk of a pure conception of deity spring the boughs and twigs of a tree of myth, whose leaves spread into a rank impenetrable luxuriance ”. Stories like the Osiris myth--stories found all over the whole world--spring from no pure religious source, but embody the delusions and fantastic dreams of the lowest and least developed human fancy and human speculation. And these flourish, like mistletoe on the oak, over the st.u.r.dier growth of a religious conception of another root.

The references to the myth in papyri and on the monuments, though obscure and fragmentary, confirm the narrative of the _De Iside_. The coffer in which Osiris foolishly ventured himself seems to be alluded to in the Harris magical papyrus.*** ”Get made for me a shrine of eight cubits. Then it was told to thee, O man of seven cubits, How canst thou enter it? And it had been made for thee, and thou hast reposed in it.”

* Custom and Myth, ”Star Myths”; De Rouge, Nouv. Not., p.

197; Lefebure, Osiris, p. 213.

** Religion und Mythologie, p. 99.

*** Records of Past, x. 154.

Here, too, Isis magically stops the mouths of the Nile, perhaps to prevent the coffer from floating out to sea. More to the point is one of the original ”Osirian hymns” mentioned by Plutarch.* The hymn is on a stele, and is attributed by M. Chabas, the translator, to the seventeenth dynasty.** Osiris is addressed as the joy and glory of his parents, Seb and Nut, who overcomes his enemy. His sister, Isis, accords to him due funeral rites after his death and routs his foes. Without ceasing, without resting, she sought his dead body, and wailing did she wander round the world, nor stopped till she found him. Light flashed from her feathers.*** Horus, her son, is king of the world.