Osiris myth

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Osiris was cut into pieces, and priests across ancient Egypt each claimed that some of his remains had been found in their own province. That single, gruesome image sits at the center of the Osiris myth, the most detailed and widely retold story to survive from ancient Egyptian religion. Who dismembered him, and why did so many different places insist on holding a piece of his body? What became of his throne, his wife, and the son born to her after his death? And why did this one myth, more than any other Egyptian story, keep being told long after the temples emptied and the old writing systems went unread?

• 2. The Textual Trail

  ›

  Spells carved onto the walls of burial chambers at the end of the Fifth Dynasty, in the 24th century BCE, contain the earliest known mentions of the myth. These are the Pyramid Texts, disparate "utterances" concerned with the afterlife of the king buried inside, and they already reference the death and restoration of Osiris and the strife between Horus and Set.

  The Coffin Texts, from the Middle Kingdom, and the Book of the Dead, from the New Kingdom, carried fragments of the story into new generations of funerary writing. A different kind of evidence survives in the Dramatic Ramesseum Papyrus, which describes the coronation of a king named Senusret I, and in the Ikhernofret Stela, which alludes to the annual Khoiak festival; both festivals reenacted parts of the myth in ritual form. The Great Hymn to Osiris, an inscription from the Eighteenth Dynasty, gives the fullest outline of the whole story, though with little detail. The Memphite Theology links the kingship of Osiris and Horus to the god Ptah and was long assumed to date to the Old Kingdom, until Egyptologists concluded, starting in the 1970s, that it actually belongs to the New Kingdom at the earliest.

  On temple walls from the New Kingdom, the Ptolemaic era, and the Roman era, ritual texts show Isis and Nephthys lamenting their brother's death, pleas meant to rouse him, and through him the deceased, back to life. Magical healing spells, used by Egyptians of every class, describe Horus poisoned or sickened and Isis healing him; people poured water over inscribed stone stelae called cippi and drank it, hoping the water now carried the spell's power to cure their own ailments.

  "The Contendings of Horus and Set," a text from the Twentieth Dynasty, retells the divine rivalry as comedy. The Egyptologist Donald B. Redford describes its Horus as "a physically weak but clever Puck-like figure," its Set as "a strong-man buffoon of limited intelligence," and its Osiris as "an articulate curmudgeon with an acid tongue."

  Herodotus mentioned parts of the myth in the 5th century BCE, and four centuries later Diodorus Siculus summarized it in his Bibliotheca historica. In the early 2nd century CE, Plutarch wrote the fullest surviving account, On Isis and Osiris, addressed to a Greek priestess of Isis. Griffiths argued that much of Plutarch's version borrowed from Greek mythology rather than Egyptian sources; his colleague John Baines countered that Plutarch may have drawn on now-lost temple records instead.

• 3. A God Undone

  ›

  A spell in the Pyramid Texts gives Set's motive for murder as revenge for a kick Osiris once gave him. A separate Late Period text instead blames the killing on Osiris having sex with Nephthys, who was Set's own consort. Egyptian sources never describe the murder outright, since the Egyptians believed that writing down something so negative could make it real; some texts even deny Osiris died at all. What survives instead are hints that Set took the form of a crocodile or bull to kill him, or that the body was thrown into the water and drowned, a tradition behind the later Egyptian belief that anyone who drowned in the Nile became sacred.

  By the end of the New Kingdom, a tradition held that Set had cut the body into pieces and scattered them across the country, and rival cult centers each insisted the corpse, or a fragment of it, had turned up near them. Isis then searched for her husband with Nephthys at her side, the two goddesses likened in the texts to falcons or kites. Once the New Kingdom linked Osiris's death and renewal to the Nile's annual flood, the floodwaters themselves came to be identified with Isis's tears or with Osiris's own bodily fluids.

  Thoth, credited with great magical and healing power, and Anubis, god of embalming, helped the goddesses recover and restore the body, making Osiris the first mummy and giving Egyptian embalming its mythic basis. One spell in the Coffin Texts hints that Isis was made pregnant by a flash of lightning; other versions describe her, still in the form of a bird, fanning breath back into the corpse with her wings before conceiving Horus. Osiris's revival did not last, and from this point on he appears only as ruler of the Duat, the distant realm of the dead.

  Plutarch's version diverges sharply from these Egyptian accounts. His Set, whom he calls "Typhon," conspires with seventy-two accomplices and a queen from Aethiopia, building a chest fitted exactly to Osiris's measurements and offering it as a banquet prize to whoever fits inside. Only Osiris does, and once he lies down, Set's men seal the chest and cast it into the Nile, from where it drifts to Byblos and lodges inside a tree that grows up around it. Isis eventually strips the chest from that tree, an episode with no known Egyptian parallel, explaining a cult of Isis and Osiris that existed at Byblos in Plutarch's own time. Plutarch adds that Set dismembers the body only after Isis has already recovered it, and that she loses the penis to a fish and has to remake it with magic, the reason he gives for an Egyptian taboo against eating fish; Egyptian sources, by contrast, describe the organ as found intact.

• 4. The Hidden Child

  ›

  Isis hid from Set inside a thicket of papyrus in the Nile Delta known in Egyptian as Akh-bity, meaning the papyrus thicket of the king of Lower Egypt. Greek writers called the place Khemmis and placed it near the city of Buto, though the myth treats it less as a real location than as a symbol of safety, a status reflected in how often Egyptian art depicts it. There Isis gave birth to Horus and raised him, and the spot was also called the nest of Horus, while images of Isis nursing her son became one of the most common motifs in Egyptian art.

  The Metternich Stela, a Late Period text, shows Isis moving among ordinary people who have no idea who she really is, begging them for help, an unusual reversal of the normal separation between gods and humans. One magical spell describes seven minor scorpion deities traveling with her as guards; when a wealthy woman refuses to shelter Isis, the scorpions sting the woman's own son in revenge, and Isis heals the innocent child anyway, a story meant to show that the poor can act more virtuously than the rich.

  Most often in these healing texts, the endangered Horus has been bitten by a snake, a detail that reflects the Egyptians' fear of snakebite and its poison, though other spells give him scorpion stings or stomachaches depending on the ailment each spell was written to treat. Some texts blame these threats directly on agents of Set. To save her son, Isis sometimes draws on her own magic and sometimes pleads with or threatens gods such as Ra or Geb, carrying into this stage of the story the same devoted-mother role she played as mourner in the one before it.

• 5. Throne of Rivals

  ›

  Once grown, Horus challenges Set for the throne of Egypt, a contest waged partly through violence and partly as a formal case argued before the Ennead, the assembled Egyptian gods. Geb, who held the throne before his sons Osiris and Set did, may serve as judge, or the role may fall to the creator gods Ra or Atum; Thoth typically acts as conciliator, while in "Contendings" Isis uses her own cunning to help her son. Egyptian sources disagree on the two rivals' exact relationship: spells in the Pyramid Texts make Horus the son of Osiris and nephew of Set, while another tradition casts Horus and Set as brothers, and later texts sometimes use both descriptions within the same document.

  "Contendings" has the two gods racing boats and fighting each other as hippopotami before a divine audience, with Horus winning most rounds and most of the other gods on his side. The dispute nonetheless drags on for eighty years, mainly because the presiding creator god keeps favoring Set. At one point, aiming to harpoon Set during their fight, Isis strikes her own son by mistake, and Horus beheads her in a fury; Thoth replaces her head with a cow's, an episode meant to explain the cow-horn headdress Isis wears in Egyptian art.

  In a fragmentary Middle Kingdom papyrus, the earliest surviving version of one key episode, Set proposes sex with Horus, who agrees only if Set will hand over some of his strength. Because Egyptian tradition treated semen as a substance as dangerous as poison, the encounter puts Horus at risk; some texts say Set's semen makes him ill, though in "Contendings" Horus foils the plan by catching it in his hands. Isis retaliates by feeding Set lettuce smeared with Horus's own semen, and when it later emerges from Set's forehead as a golden disk, in "Contendings" Thoth takes the disk and sets it on his own head.

  A related set of mutilations follows: Horus injures or steals Set's testicles, while Set tears out one, or sometimes both, of Horus's eyes. Because one of Horus's roles was as a sky god, with his right eye standing for the sun and his left for the moon, the loss of his Eye came to represent the moon's darkening during its phases or an eclipse. Other gods, including Isis, Thoth, and Hathor, may retrieve or heal the stolen Eye. The Egyptologist Herman te Velde has argued that the testicle tradition is a later variant of the semen episode, and that the disk emerging from Set's head is in fact the Eye of Horus, with Thoth, also a moon deity, stepping in to mediate because of that link.

  The realm's division, when it happens, mirrors dualities the Egyptians saw across their world: Horus taking the fertile land by the Nile against Set's barren desert, or Horus ruling the earth against Set's sky, or each holding one of Upper and Lower Egypt. The Memphite Theology instead has Geb first split the realm and then reverse himself, giving Horus sole control, resolving the two gods' rivalry into a single reconciled whole. A separate strand of the tradition denies Set any reconciliation at all, showing him exiled or destroyed outright, a harsher ending that grew more common the later the source. When Horus finally takes the throne amid the other gods' celebration, he performs funerary rites for his father and offers him food, including at times the Eye of Horus itself, acts some sources say are needed before Osiris can be fully restored as king of the dead.

• 6. Tracing the Origins

  ›

  James Frazer, writing in 1906, proposed that Osiris began as a personification of vegetation, one of several "dying and rising gods" he identified across the ancient Near East, with the god's death and restoration mirroring the yearly death and regrowth of plants. Many Egyptologists initially accepted this reading, but J. Gwyn Griffiths later argued that Osiris originated instead as a divine ruler of the dead, with the vegetation link arriving only as a secondary development. Some scholars of comparative religion have gone further and questioned the whole "dying and rising gods" category itself. More recently, the Egyptologist Rosalie David has written that Osiris originally "personified the annual rebirth of the trees and plants after the Nile inundation."

  Egypt's own early history offers another line of explanation. Archaeological and traditional evidence shows Egypt unified when an Upper Egyptian kingdom in the south conquered Lower Egypt in the north, and its rulers styled themselves "followers of Horus." In 1930, Kurt Sethe proposed that Osiris had originally been a human ruler of a unified, prehistoric Egypt, overthrown by a rebellion of Upper Egyptian Set-worshippers before Lower Egyptian followers of Horus retook the land by force, an event Sethe saw echoed in the myth of Horus's eventual triumph.

  Griffiths, writing later in the 20th century, focused instead on the inconsistency between Horus and Set described sometimes as brothers and sometimes as uncle and nephew. He concluded that the sibling rivalry between Horus and Set was originally a separate story from Osiris's murder, merged into one myth only before the Pyramid Texts were composed, a reading later scholars including Jan Assmann and George Hart have accepted. Griffiths still sought a historical root for the Horus-Set rivalry itself, proposing two separate predynastic unifications of Egypt by Horus's followers.

  Before Upper Egypt even had a single ruler, two of its major cities, Nekhen in the far south and Naqada farther north, may hold a clue: Horus was Nekhen's patron god, whose rulers are thought to have unified Upper Egypt including Naqada, while Set was associated with Naqada itself. Centuries later, at the end of the Second Dynasty, a king named Peribsen wrote his own name using the Set animal in place of the usual Horus falcon, while his successor Khasekhemwy used both animals together, evidence some scholars read as a real clash between rival factions followed by reconciliation. Herman te Velde has cautioned against leaning too hard on any of these historical readings, writing that "the origin of the myth of Horus and Seth is lost in the mists of the religious traditions of prehistory."

• 7. A Myth That Outlived Egypt

  ›

  From the era of the Pyramid Texts onward, kings hoped to emulate Osiris's own restoration to life and his rule over the dead. By the early Middle Kingdom, ordinary Egyptians outside the royal family had come to believe that worshipping Osiris and receiving the funerary rites modeled on his story could let them overcome death too, and Osiris became Egypt's most important afterlife god. The New Kingdom idea that only the virtuous could reach the afterlife grew directly from the myth's own resolution, with Osiris, as ruler of the dead, judging each deceased soul the way the gods once judged him and Horus. New Kingdom funerary texts such as the Amduat and the Book of Gates even depict Ra himself as a deceased soul traveling through the Duat to merge with Osiris and be reborn at dawn.

  By late in the Middle Kingdom, Egyptians had come to regard the centuries-old tomb of the First Dynasty ruler Djer, near Osiris's cult center at Abydos, as the tomb of Osiris himself, and it became a major pilgrimage site. For the next 1,500 years, an annual procession traveled from Osiris's main temple to that tomb, while kings and commoners alike built cenotaph chapels along the route. A separate national festival held each year in the month of Khoiak became linked to Osiris during the Middle Kingdom, its rites including the ritual raising of the djed pillar, one of his emblems, to symbolize his restoration; by Ptolemaic times, Khoiak also involved planting seeds in a mummy-shaped bed of soil called an Osiris bed.

  Mortuary offerings of food to the dead were understood as a reenactment of the mythical offering of the Eye of Horus to Osiris, so closely that temple priests making offerings to any god took on the role of Horus while the deity receiving the gift became, for that moment, Osiris. The same Eye, restored after its mutilation in the myth, was carried into daily life as a protective symbol on personal amulets. Because the myth cast Horus as Egypt's first king, later rulers appeared alongside him and his predecessors in king lists such as the Turin Royal Canon, and royal coronations echoed Osiris's burial rites as each new king was said to renew maat just as Horus once had.

  The same story shaped Set's reputation as chaotic and dangerous, even though other Egyptian traditions credited him with positive traits; wisdom texts contrasted a calm ideal person with an impulsive one under the labels Horus-type and Set-type. Yet Horus and Set were also shown as a reconciled pair, sometimes worshipped together and sometimes merged into a single figure bearing both their heads. Only in the first millennium BCE did Set become viewed as wholly malevolent, a shift driven mainly by his association with foreign lands rather than by the myth itself, though by then temple rites of ceremonially destroying Set were often tied back to the Osiris story.

  Isis and Nephthys, remembered for protecting and restoring Osiris's body, became protectors of the dead in general, and Khoiak rites reenacted their mourning and revival of their brother. As Horus's mother, Isis was considered the mother of every king, who were said to have nursed at her breast as proof of their legitimacy, and by Roman times she had become Egypt's most important goddess; panel paintings of her holding her child, used in household shrines, closely resemble and may have influenced the earliest Christian icons of Mary holding Jesus. Her cult spread from Egypt across the Mediterranean in the last centuries BCE, carrying Horus and Osiris with it into Greco-Roman initiation rites that simulated a descent into the underworld and promised initiates the same protected afterlife Isis had once secured for her husband. It was to a Greek priestess of Isis that Plutarch addressed his own account of the myth, a text that helped preserve the story of Osiris after Egyptian religion itself had died out and the scripts used to record it had gone unread, so that the myth still reaches new fiction, new scholarship, and new religious movements today.