Volume II Part 12 (2/2)
Such is a _precis_ of the mythical part of the hymn. The rest regards Osiris in his religious capacity as a sovereign of nature, and as the guide and protector of the dead. The hymn corroborates, as far as it goes, the narrative of the Greek two thousand years later. Similar confirmation is given by ”The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys,” a papyrus found within a statue of Osiris in Thebes. The sisters wail for the dead hero, and implore him to ”come to his own abode”. The theory of the birth of Horus here is that he was formed out of the scattered members of Osiris, an hypothesis, of course, inconsistent with the other myths (especially with the myth that he dived for the members of Osiris in the shape of a crocodile),**** and, therefore, all the more mythical.
* De Is. et Os., 211.
** Rev. Archeol., May, 1857.
*** The Greek version says that Isis took the form of a swallow.
**** Mariette, Denderah, iv. 77, 88, 89.
The ”Book of Respirations,” finally, contains the magical songs by which Isis was feigned to have restored breath and life to Osiris.* In the representations of the vengeance and triumph of Horus on the temple walls of Edfou in the Ptolemaic period, Horus, accompanied by Isis, not only chains up and pierces the red hippopotamus (or pig in some designs), who is Set, but, exercising reprisals, cuts him into pieces, as Set cut Osiris. Isis instructs Osiris as to the portion which properly falls to each of nine G.o.ds. Isis reserves his head and ”saddle”; Osiris gets the thigh; the bones are given to the cats. As each G.o.d had his local habitation in a given town, there is doubtless reference to local myths. At Edfou also the animal of Set is sacrificed, symbolically in his image made of paste, a common practice in ancient Mexico.**
* Records of Past, iv. 121.
** Herodotus, ii. 47; De. Is. et Os., 90. See also Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras, who sacrificed a bull made of paste, Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 436.
Many of these myths, as M. Naville remarks, are doubtless ratiological: the priests, as in the Brahmanas, told them to account for peculiar parts of the ritual, and to explain strange local names. Thus the names of many places are explained by myths setting forth that they commemorate some event in the campaign of Horus against Set. In precisely the same way the local superst.i.tions, originally totemic, about various animals were explained by myths attaching these animals to the legends of the G.o.ds.
Explanations of the Osiris myth thus handed down to us were common among the ancient students of religion. Many of them are reported in the familiar tract De Iside et Osiride. They are all the interpretations of civilised men, whose method is to ask themselves, ”Now, if _I_ had told such a tale as this, or invented such a mystery-play of divine misadventures, what meaning could _I_ have intended to convey in what is apparently blasphemous nonsense?” There were moral, solar, lunar, cosmical, tellurian, and other methods of accounting for a myth which, in its origin, appears to be one of the world-wide early legends of the strife between a fabulous good being and his brother, a fabulous evil being. Most probably some incidents from a moon-myth have also crept into, or from the first made part of, the tale of Osiris. The enmity of Typhon to the eyes of Horus, which he extinguishes, and which are restored,* has much the air of an early mythical attempt to explain the phenomena of eclipses, or even of sunset. We can plainly see how local and tribal superst.i.tions, according to which this or that beast, fish, or tree was held sacred, came to be tagged to the general body of the myth. This or that fish was not eaten; this or that tree was holy; and men who had lost the true explanation of these superst.i.tions explained them by saying that the fish had tasted, or the tree had sheltered.
* Livre des Moris, pp. 112, 118.
This view of the myth, while it does not pretend to account for every detail, refers it to a large cla.s.s of similar narratives, to the barbarous dualistic legends about the original good and bad extra-natural beings, which are still found current among contemporary savages. These tales are the natural expression of the savage fancy, and we presume that the myth of the mutilated Osiris survived in Egypt, just as the use of flint-headed arrows and flint knives survived during millenniums in which bronze and iron were perfectly familiar. The cause a.s.signed is adequate, and the process of survival is verified.
Whether this be the correct theory of the fundamental facts of the myth or not, it is certain that the myth received vast practical and religious developments. Orisis did not remain the mere culture-hero of whom we have read the story, wounded in the house of his friends, dismembered, restored and buried, reappearing as a wolf or bull, or translated to a star. His wors.h.i.+p pervaded the whole of Egypt, and his name grew into a kind of hieroglyph for all that is divine.
”The Osirian type, in its long evolution, ended in being the symbol of the whole deified universe--underworld and world of earth, the waters above and the waters below. It is Osiris that floods Egypt in the Nile, and that clothes her with the growing grain. His are the sacred eyes, the sun that is born daily and meets a daily death, the moon that every month is young and waxes old. Osiris is the soul that animates these, the soul that vivifies all things, and all things are but his body. He is, like Ra of the royal tombs, the earth and the sun, the creator and the created.”*
* Lefebure, Osiris, p. 248.
Such is the splendid sacred vestment which Egyptian theology wove for the mangled and ma.s.sacred hero of the myth. All forces, all powers, were finally recognised in him; he was sun and moon, and the maker of all things; he was the truth and the life; in him all men were justified.
On the origin of the myth philology throws no light. M. Lefebure recognises in the name Osiris the meaning of ”the infernal abode,” or ”the nocturnal residence of the sacred eye,” for, in the duel of Set and Horus, he sees a mythical account of the daily setting of the sun.*
”Osiris himself, the sun at his setting, became a centre round which the other incidents of the war of the G.o.ds gradually crystallised.” Osiris is also the earth. It would be difficult either to prove or disprove this contention, and the usual divergency of opinion as to the meaning and etymology of the word ”Osiris” has always prevailed.** The Greek***
identifies Osiris with Hades. ”Both,” says M. Lefebure, ”originally meant the dwellings--and came to mean the G.o.d--of the dead.” In the same spirit Anubis, the jackal (a beast still dreaded as a ghost by the Egyptians), is explained as ”the circle of the horizon,” or ”the portals of the land of darkness,” the gate kept, as Homer would say, by Hades, the mighty warden. Whether it is more natural that men should represent the circle of the horizon or the twilight at sunset as a jackal, or that a jackal-totem should survive as a G.o.d, mythologists will decide for themselves.****
* Osiris, p. 129. So Lieblein, op. cit., p. 7.
** See the guesses of etymologists (Osiris, pp. 132,133).
Horus has even been connected with the Greek Hera, as the atmosphere!
*** De Is. Os., 75.
**** Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 112-114, 237.
The jackal, by a myth that cannot be called pious, was said to have eaten his father, Osiris. Mr. Frazers theory of Osiris as somehow connected with vegetation will be found in his _Golden Bough_. His master, Mannhardt, the great writer on vegetation myths, held that Osiris was the sun.
The conclusions to be drawn from so slight a treatment of so vast a subject are, that in Egypt, as elsewhere, a mythical and a religious, a rational and an irrational stream of thought flowed together, and even to some extent mingled their waters. The rational tendency, declared in prayers and hymns, amplifies the early human belief in a protecting and friendly personal power making for righteousness. The irrational tendency, declared in myth and ritual, retains and elaborates the early human confusions of thought between man and beast and G.o.d, things animate and inanimate. On the one hand, we have almost a recognition of supreme divinity; on the other, savage rites and beliefs, shared by Australians and Bushmen. It is not safe or scientific to call one of those tendencies earlier than the other; perhaps we know no race so backward that it is not influenced by forms of both. Nor is it safe or scientific to look on ruder practices as corruptions of the purer beliefs. Perhaps it may never be possible to trace both streams to the same fountain-head; probably they well up from separate springs in the nature of man. We do but recognise and contrast them; the sources of both are lost in the distance, where history can find no record of actual experience. Egyptian religion and myth are thus no isolated things; they are but the common stuff of human thought, decorated or distorted under a hundred influences in the course of unknown centuries of years.
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