Osiris

• 1. Introduction

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  Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the dead, was depicted wrapped from the legs up like a mummy, crowned with a towering atef crown, and holding the shepherd's crook and flail. He was one of the first deities to be shown in that mummy wrapping. His skin in artwork was painted either green, the color of rebirth, or black, the color of the fertile Nile floodplain. He was not simply a god of death. He also governed fertility, agriculture, vegetation, and resurrection. What drove such an unlikely combination? And how did a god who was murdered, dismembered, and scattered across Egypt become the lord whose blessing every Egyptian sought, in life and in death?

• 2. A God Murdered and Remade

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  Set, Osiris's brother, wanted the throne. In the version recorded by Plutarch, Set conspired with 72 accomplices, along with the Queen of Ethiopia, to kill Osiris. Set tricked Osiris into climbing inside a box, sealed it with lead, and threw it into the Nile. Osiris's wife and sister, Isis, searched until she found the box lodged inside a tamarisk tree trunk that was being used to hold up the roof of a palace at Byblos on the Phoenician coast. She retrieved the body, but Set found it again. He cut Osiris into pieces and distributed the parts among his conspirators to bind them to the crime. The number of pieces differs by source. Plutarch gives 26. A version preserved in the Papyrus Jumilhac says 14. Isis then spent 12 days, in that same account, reassembling the fragments. She collected every piece except the genitalia. By magic she revived him long enough to conceive a child, and that child was Horus. Because Horus was born after his father's resurrection, he came to represent new beginnings and the defeat of the usurper Set. Osiris, meanwhile, lived on as ruler of the underworld.

• 3. Lord of the Underworld

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  "Foremost of the Westerners" was one of Osiris's oldest titles. In Egyptian geography, the west was where the sun set, and the dead were buried on the western bank of the Nile. The epithet Khenti-Amentiu dates at least to the First Dynasty, predating by centuries the written sources that describe his mythology. In the Old Kingdom, which ran from around 2686 to 2181 BC, the pharaoh at death was believed to join the sun god Ra in the sky. After the spread of the Osiris cult, that belief shifted. Kings came to be associated with Osiris in death, hoping to share in his resurrection through what the sources describe as imitative magic. Osiris also carried the title "the one who continues to be perfect," or Wenennefer, which pointed to his continuing power even after death. At death, every person faced a tribunal of 42 divine judges. A life lived in accord with Maat, goddess of truth and right living, earned entry into the kingdom of Osiris. A verdict of guilt sent the soul to Ammit, a devourer, after which complete annihilation followed. Scholars have noted that these depictions of punishment may have shaped early Christian and Coptic ideas about hell, though the Egyptian system carried no concept of eternal torture, only final destruction.

• 4. Cycles of Nature

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  Osiris's death and return were read onto the Egyptian landscape. The annual flooding of the Nile, which deposited fertile soil and then retreated, mirrored his cycle of dying and rising. The heliacal rising of Orion and Sirius at the start of the new year also carried his symbolism. At Abydos, the traditional place where Osiris's body was said to have drifted ashore after being drowned in the Nile, a five-day festival was held each year at the end of the inundation, coinciding with spring. The Ikhernofret Stela, erected during the reign of Senwosret III around 1875 BC, records the public programme of events. On the first day, a procession led by Wepwawet, "opener of the way," enacted a mock battle against the enemies of Osiris. The second day saw the body of Osiris carried by boat, the Neshmet bark, to his tomb. The third day was given to mourning and the destruction of enemies. A night vigil of prayers and funeral rites followed on the fourth day. At dawn on the fifth day, Osiris was declared reborn and crowned with the crown of Maat, and his statue was returned to the temple. Inside the temples, priests performed more private rites. Plutarch describes priests bringing out a golden coffer, pouring water into it, and kneading fertile soil with that water to shape a crescent figure, treating the combined earth and water as the very substance of the god.

• 5. Wheat, Clay, and the Body

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  At the temple of Mendes, figures of Osiris were constructed from wheat paste. Grain and water were mixed in a trough over several days until the paste could be pressed into molds, then the resulting forms were taken to the temple to be buried. The sacred grain for these cakes was grown only in the temple's own fields. At Denderah, an inscription translated in detail describes making paste models of each dismembered part of Osiris and distributing them to the towns where Isis was said to have found those pieces. Molds were shaped from red wood in the forms of each of the 16 dismembered parts, cakes of divine bread were made from each mold, placed in a silver chest, and set near the head of the god. The festival also involved "Osiris Beds," frames shaped like the body of Osiris, filled with soil, then sown with seed. When the seed germinated, it represented the god rising from the dead. An almost untouched example of an Osiris Bed was found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. According to a report by Julius Firmicus Maternus of the fourth century, worshippers at the annual re-enactment beat their breasts and gashed their shoulders until the moment when the reassembled body was revealed, at which point mourning turned to rejoicing.

• 6. Soul, Ram, and River

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  At Mendes, in the Nile Delta, Osiris was worshipped in a distinct form called Banebdjed, a name meaning roughly "the ba of the lord of the djed." The djed was a pillar that represented Osiris's backbone. Ba, which loosely translates as soul but carries stronger associations with power and force of character, was also the Egyptian word for ram, so Banebdjed was depicted as a ram or with a ram's head. A living sacred ram was kept at Mendes as the physical incarnation of this aspect of Osiris, and dead rams were mummified and buried in their own necropolis. As Banebdjed, Osiris held the epithets Lord of the Sky and Life of Ra. Some scholars have pointed to the crook and flail, instruments of the shepherd, as further evidence of an origin for Osiris among herding peoples of the upper Nile. One theory, advanced by certain Egyptologists, holds that the Osiris mythos may have grown from the memory of an actual ruler, possibly a shepherd who lived during Predynastic times between about 5500 and 3100 BC in the Nile Delta, whose good governance was remembered so vividly that he was eventually elevated to the status of a god.

• 7. Names and Spread

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  The first firm evidence for Osiris worship comes from the middle of the Fifth Dynasty, placing it in the 25th century BC. The Pyramid Texts at the end of that same dynasty record the earliest mythological allusions. Early in the Fourth Dynasty, tomb inscriptions carried the formula "an offering the king gives and Anubis." By the end of the Fifth Dynasty, every tomb formula had replaced Anubis with Osiris. The original Egyptian name appears in hieroglyphs as wsjr, a writing that omits vowels, so Egyptologists have reconstructed pronunciations as varied as Asar, Ausar, Wesir, and Usir. What the name means remains unsettled. John Gwyn Griffiths proposed "The Mighty One" in 1980. Kurt Sethe in 1930 suggested a compound meaning "seat of the eye." David Lorton in 1985 read it as "product of ritual mummification." James P. Allen, revising his own earlier reading in 2013, proposed a meaning of "engendering male principle." Mark J. Smith in 2017 declined to settle the question, finding none of the proposals fully convincing. The cult endured long enough that at Philae the worship of Isis and Osiris continued into at least the 450s CE, well after imperial decrees in the late fourth century had ordered Egyptian temples to pagan gods to close. Philae was the last major ancient Egyptian temple to be shut.