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Many books have been made of this myth; yet its meaning, its source, its antiquity seem to be still in dispute. One thing can, however, be said...that the legend in one form or other dates back, beyond reasonable doubt, to antiquity and the earliest recorded history of mankind.
In a prior article I shared with the reader that there were basically two ways to correctly understand the Osiris Myth:
We examined them and took from them a basic understanding. For we may with some reason suspect that such myths are made to bear more than one meaning. In this instance we find an agricultural interpretation as related to the Osiris myth along with an astronomical interpretation one as well. Often more than not, scholars miss completely this astronomical interpretation of the Osiris myth. Moreover, the myth of Osiris was closely bound up with his Mysteries. One key is, I think, found in Plutarch. In Egypt vegetation and husbandry have ever been wholly dependent on the rise and the fall the Nile. To the Nile's annual inundation the country, almost as a whole, ever owed its amazing fertility. Plutarch, moreover, reports that among the more scholarly priests the great river of the Nile was known as Osiris; they also called Typhon the sea (Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, p. 33).
One must read Plutarch to understand these hidden meanings to the Osiris myth for these same "ideas" are traceable through successive Gentile nations and religions. Osiris is just the starting place for such agricultural and astrological religious ideas which later become personified in various personages of various nations.
For our study it is important to note up front:
Proceeding, says Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson, with the examination of the different parts of this allegorical fable, Plutarch observes that, “Osiris being the inundation of the Nile, and Isis the land irrigated by it from the conjunction of these two, Horus was born meaning thereby that just and seasonable temperature of the circumambient air which preserves and nourish all things. Horus is, moreover, supposed to have been brought up by Latona, in the marshy country about Butus, because a moist and watery soil is best adapted to produce those vapours and exhalations which serve to relax the excessive drought arising from heat. In like manner, they call the extreme limits of their country, their confines, and sea-shores, Nephthys, Teleute or the end, whom they suppose to have been married to Typho. Now as the overflowings of the Nile are sometimes very great, and extend to the boundaries of the land, this gave rise to the story of the secret intercourse between Osiris and Nephthys, as the natural consequence of so great an inundation would be the springing up of plants in those parts of the country which were formerly barren. Hence they imagine that Typho was first made acquainted with the infidelity of his wife by the melilot-garland which fell from the head of Osiris while in her company; and that the legitimacy of Horus, the son of Isis, may thus be explained, as well as the illegitimacy of Anubis, who was born of Nephthys.” After quoting a passage from Plutarch, this author continues as follows: To sum up the details of this story according to the foregoing interpretation, we may apply to each its distinct meaning, as follows :
According to Sir. J. Gardner Winkenson, this, or something at least very like it, is to be taken to be one of the meanings which the myth of Osiris embodies.
But what I want to emphasize is that all of nature is first of all dependent upon the Sun in one way or the other. The Sun was understood to be an image of the unseen God who is both Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer. The Sun brings life, causes crops to grow, sustains them through photosynthesis, but then at times its harsh heat destroys them. In this picture primitive man saw in this Sun a picture of God; Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer. This is mankind's understanding of the first Trinity of God! What is important for us to know is that the Sun is primary for the success of nature and that all agricultural benefits, or interpretations of the Osiris myth, must begin not with the agricultural interpretation, but with the Astrological interpretation! The Sun gives man life...it was understood as symbolic of his Savior!
The astrological understanding of the Osiris myth is yet today a secret to most. The key to it seemingly lies in what Plutarch, narrating the myth or expanding the points in his tract, has to say of the sun and the moon and the time when Osiris was murdered. While bearing once more in our minds a few facts that relate to the Nile, we must turn to certain facts of astronomy converted into figure and myth.
Let us recall that the central idea of the legend of Osiris, and the theme around which it was woven, was the strife of Osiris and Typhon. You will see its importance as we progress in this study. We referred above to the rise of the Nile. But the rise of the Nile year by year was dependent in turn on the sun. Summer solstice, when the Nile begins to rise.
And the sun and Osiris were one and the same in this second, more recondite meaning. In the following accounts one must remember that Osiris, the sun, is light and Typhon, the evil one who murders Osiris, is the darkness. Just as Osiris and Typhon are in perpetual battle (a cosmic spiritual warfare in the Heavens...dualism), so Light and darkness are in a perpetual battle (sunrise, sunset, solstices, equinoxes); both ethically and astronomically as we see the setting and rising of the sun on a recurrent basis. Light, from the sun, depending on the equinoxes and solstices, is longer or shorter and we recognize this by the length of the days. This fact, the shortening of the light of the sun, gives the foundation for the descent of the sun/son to the dark-evil (Devil) for 3 days at the winter solstice. Such "facts" of astronomical science were well know to the ancients and they "personified such events" in stories of heroes and villains. Osiris and Typhon is just the earliest of this allegory and a host of others will be built off this "Osiris Pattern." You will need to draw upon the information from a earlier article where you read of the Osiris Myth as this myth was originally played out in the heavens. With this basic information we are ready somewhat to tackle more complicated information which follows.
Now Typhon, Osiris' brother, by a ruse nailed him down in a coffer (sarcophagus-nailed to wood) and flung them both into the Nile. We learn, too, from Plutarch's account, which may seem at first sight on this point to be marked with excessive precision, that the sun was in Scorpion then and the date was the seventeenth day of the month the Egyptians called Athyr. The moon, be it added, was full. That these statements formed part of the legend, in spite of the tenses in Greek, and refer to the mythical time when Osiris was murdered by Set. Connected with these myths of the death of Osiris we find that at the same time the Nile (the life source for Egypt) then began to recede; vegetation was once more arrested. These facts we infer from Herodotus. The Grecian historian goes on to tell us that the Nile, rises at the solstice in June, and a hundred days after that date (roughly speaking, three months or so later) the Nile once more commenced to retire, to fall short in its stream and recede. All the records appear to confirm this, whatever the date they refer to. This means, according to the myth, Osiris was murdered toward the end of September when the light of the Sun begins to recede and the waters of the Nile begin to recede.
As it is with the time of his death, so it is with Osiris's birth. The date of his birth the myth itself indicates clearly. It speaks of a feast of the Pamylia. This resembled, says Plutarch, the festival in honour of the Greek Dionysus, when the phallus was borne in procession (again we see the connection with fertility worship). We must remember that this was the only member of Osiris body which was not found by Isis prior to Osiris' resurrection.
In the Pamylia, an image would be carried about, the genital member of which would be three times the normal dimensions. But the phallus was surely the symbol of the generative powers of the SUN at the time of the spring equinox (so we find tied together Astro-theology, Nature worship, and Phallic worship as stated previously). The Christian Church celebrates both aspects of Ostara as the day of the Annunciation (when Mary conceives Christ as Isis conceives Horus) and the day of the Resurrection (when Christ returns triumphant from the darkness of death as Osiris returned in the form of Horus). This special time, Easter, is celebrated in the Western Christian Church on the first Sunday after the Paschal ('Passover') moon (usually the full moon that occurs on or next after the vernal equinox, taken as March 21). Many Pagan customs from this spring equinox continue to this day. For instance, the Easter Egg is a common Pagan custom. Eggs have always been a symbol of fertility (as was Isis' model of Osiris' penis) and thus used as a symbol for this holiday. These eggs were traditionally painted red or scarlet to symbolize the Suns rays in hopes that the rays of the Sun would warm the Egg and from it would spring Life. It is at this time of year we see the gathering of different colored eggs from a variety of birds. These eggs were then used as amulets for fertility, prosperity, and protection. Ostara were the hare and the egg. Both represented fertility. From these, we have inherited the customs and symbols of the Easter egg and Easter rabbit. Dyed eggs also formed part of the rituals of the Babylonian mystery religions. Eggs were sacred to many ancient civilizations and formed an integral part of religious ceremonies in Egypt and the Orient. Dyed eggs were hung in Egyptian temples, and the egg was regarded as the emblem of regenerative life proceeding from the mouth of the great Egyptian god.
Easter is celebrated around this time because it has always been, in older traditional religions, the time of the willing sacrifice and rebirth of the God. Therefore it was only logical for Rome to place the sacrifice and rebirth of Jesus around this time.
Many, perhaps most, Pagan religions in the Mediterranean area had a major seasonal day of religious celebration at or following the Spring Equinox. Cybele, the Phrygian fertility goddess, had a fictional consort who was believed to have been born via a virgin birth. He was Attis, who was believed to have died and been resurrected each year during the period MAR-22 to MAR-25. About 200 B.C. mystery cults began to appear in Rome just as they had earlier in Greece. Most notable was the Cybele cult centered on Vatican hill ...Associated with the Cybele cult was that of her lover, Attis ([the older Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, or Orpheus under a new name). He was a god of ever-reviving vegetation. Born of a virgin, he died and was reborn annually. The festival began as a day of blood on Black Friday and culminated after three days in a day of rejoicing over the resurrection.
Wherever Christian worship of Jesus and Pagan worship of Attis were active in the same geographical area in ancient times, Christians used to celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus on the same date; and pagans and Christians used to quarrel bitterly about which of their gods was the true prototype and which the imitation.
Many religious historians believe that the death and resurrection legends were first associated with Attis, many centuries before the birth of Jesus. They were simply grafted onto stories of Jesus' life in order to make Christian theology more acceptable to Pagans. Ancient Christians had an alternate explanation; they claimed that Satan had created counterfeit deities in advance of the coming of Christ in order to confuse humanity.
Finally we must mention another result of the Osiris Story: the Easter Sunrise Service. This custom can be traced back to the ancient Pagan custom of welcoming the Sun God (Osiris) at the vernal equinox - when daytime is about to exceed the length of the nighttime (Osiris is being resurrected...reborn in the form of Horus). It was a time to celebrate the return of life and reproduction to animal and plant life as well.
Because of this situation of Osiris and the Pamylia, we know that the Great Dionysia at Athens in classical times was observed in the month we call March and the phallus was carried about there as well. We should naturally, therefore, conclude the Pamylia was kept at that time. In this context we may, perhaps, notice that Plutarch himself plainly says that Osiris and Bacchus were one; therefore the Osiris Myths is spreading as is the "Osiris Pattern." This he holds to be quite beyond doubt and conceives he has numerous proofs.
But the terms of the legend itself will provide at least one further hint. The wanderings of Isis conclude, when she finds or rediscovers Osiris. Isis was, doubtless, the moon. Now the sun and the moon were united once more at the spring equinox. But when Isis recovered Osiris, or all but his genital member, she made a replica of Osiris' penis since it could not be found or recovered in the fourteen pieces of Osiris, and, so says the myth, consecrated it. It is from this model of Osiris' penis following his death that Osiris become pregnante with Osiris' son...Horus. This is both an immaculate conception and a forthcoming virgin birth. As you read the articles on the spring equinox tie in the concepts of re-birth; Osiris' rebirth in the form of his son Horus and the connection with fertility and the spring harvest. The pious Egyptians ever after celebrated a feast in its honour. As the model, of course, was the phallus, which Plutarch has told us that Isis ordained to be carried about, this feast was, no doubt, the Pamylia.
Then Plutarch refers to a feast, which took place, when the spring-time commenced - called the entrance of Osiris into the moon. Here again to anticipate somewhat, I think this strange title must mean the conjunction of the sun and the moon (in more modern and technical terms) at the time of the spring equinox, when the sun impregnated the moon (Osiris' penis after his death and Isis) and the moon impregnated the earth. This feast in his own day, says Plutarch, was observed on the new moon of Phamenoth, a month coinciding very nearly in the late Alexandrian year with the month that is now known as March. This feast most likely was the the Pamylia.
We saw that Osiris was murdered in the twenty-eighth year of his reign or, perhaps, as some say, of his life. But why in the twenty-eighth year? The explanation may possibly lie in what Plutarch has elsewhere to say in regard to the Nile and its risings. He reports that the Nile's greatest rising was twenty-eight cubits in height. Each cubit could stand for a year in the figurative language of myth. This agrees with the view we put forward that Osiris was murdered by Typhon at the time of the autumnal equinox. The Nile then began to recede. Notice that the receding of the Nile is connected with the death of Osiris; the Nile being the life-giver and the Savior of Egypt! And, of course, with his murder by Typhon the reign of Osiris would end. That he died in his twenty-eighth year may, perhaps, in a more general way signify that he died prematurely, as died, too, the handsome Adonis, cut short in the pride of his youth.
That Osiris is one with the sun, while admitted by some modern writers, is hotly disputed by others. For instance, Sir James Frazer says: "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 Renouf, 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 sense can he be said to be torn in pieces". One only needs remember that between the full moon and the new moon there were fourteen days; again reminiscent that Osiris was cut into fourteen pieces after his murder. For these, among other reasons, Sir James Frazier thinksthe death of Osiris should be taken to mean in this legend the death or decay of vegetation (agricultural interpretation of Osiris' death). Either way we have the link between the Sun and sun-gods and sun-godmen and the Vegetation cycle and the vegetation gods. But, if we are right in the main, it is neither the sun in his annual nor the sun in his diurnal course that, on this view, the story refers to. The theme is Osiris, the sun, not as rising and setting and so forth, but viewed as creative, fertilizing, the source and the giver of life. Vegetation, its growth and decay come to some extent into the myth. But Osiris is neither the corn nor a sort, as he says, of corn-god. Yet again, while the sun's daily course is in no sense the theme of the legend, it does represent, notwithstanding, the sun's annual journey or course through the various signs of the zodiac.
The war of Osiris and Typhon was the conflict between good and evil in the physical and spiritual worlds. And either prevailed in his turn. Now, good in the physical world was the same with light, life, warmth and so on. When mythically murdered by Typhon, the Sun was deprived for the time of his generative, fertilizing powers. Vegetation decayed; the leaves fell, and the Nile sank within its own stream. Then the night triumphed over the day and the darkness over the light. And for six months was Typhon supreme. It was not till the spring equinox that Osiris recovered his realm. Day then grew longer than night, and new life stirred in all the broad earth with the promise of harvests to come. Nature was rejuvenated.
And, therefore, in one of its aspects the conflict between the two brothers represented those marked alternations, light, darkness, heat, cold, life and death, so incessant and ever recurring throughout the material world. Set was as real as Osiris, and Isis could not root him out. There were order and law in the world.
The two principles of goodness and evil, inscribed, as it were, in the sky, will be found in all ancient cosmogonies.
Answer for yourself: And are they not Ormuzd and Ahriman in that old Persian mythology?
Answer for yourself: Apollo and Python in Greece or, again, Dionysus and the Titans?
I suppose that, when men had conceived of a being all-wise and all-good, they perforce postulated another, his constant, implacable foe.
Answer for yourself: How otherwise could they account for the manifest evil in nature?
Osiris was fabled to die; but the gods, though they died, were immortal. They died often under one name, and their tombs would be found upon earth, while they lived the while under another. So man, though he died, was immortal; he, too, had a soul, like to theirs. We may, therefore, suppose in the mysteries the death and rebirth of the god symbolized also man's resurrection. It seems, too, that life in the body, "the descent into matter" so-called, was a death, strictly speaking, in life.
The "gods" were incarnate in matter - at least in a good many cases, becoming incarnate for man, to bestow all their riches upon him. They dwelt in the same world as he but were also his living precursors. They "became," metaphorically, "men" and were, therefore, supposed to submit to the terms of all mortal existence. They were born, suffered, died, like mankind. They were married, like men, and had children and, dying, were buried in tombs shown at places like Sais and Delphi. King of gods and of men though he was, even Zeus had his tombstone in Crete.
Answer for yourself: Whence first of all came the notion of a dead or a dying divinity?
We can at best only conjecture. The meaning we ventured to give to the death of Osiris in the myth can hardly, I think, be called primitive in any strict sense of that term. It can hardly belong to the time when mankind, looking into the skies, first essayed to explain what they saw. Nor, again, could that other conception of life as more properly death have emerged in those primitive days, unless we suppose primal man had some primal "revelation" accorded him. Perhaps the phenomena of nature were read in too literal a fashion. Man, when he died, would be buried - "put", we still say, "under ground". And the earth would be then a flat surface, extending how far no one knew; but the sun in its diurnal course would ascend and descend, rise and set, and at last sink beneath it, removed, like the dead men, from out of men's sight.
Answer for yourself: And who in those times could be sure he would once more appear on the morrow? Each night, as he sank in the west, the great fear would come over men's minds that the darkness might not be dispelled but had settled upon them for ever.
Answer for yourself: Would not darkness thus seem the great evil, against which such beings were helpless, and light, the sun's light, the great blessing? So, if light played, in some sense or other, much part in both myth and religion from the days of men's first speculations, we may, I think, here find the foundation at the center of the Osiris myth.
As we read of the Osiris myth, and the solar implications as Osiris' death was seen in the sun and it's course through the heavens, when the sun's light is hidden and kept from men, and when darkness increases as determined by the length of days, primitive man reasoned as best he could such sights in the Heavens. Heavy into superstition, early man saw in such events the death of the Sun along with it's resurrection as patterned in the regular changing of the seasons. Primitive man saw in the changing of the seasons and the Solstices and Equinoxes the cyclical death and rebirth of the Sun as well as Nature. He could see the resurrection of the sun (which became later personified in stores of Godmen) in the spring solstice when new life emerges on the planet from the lengthening of light from the sun and warmer temperatures. In Egypt this was allegorically understood to be the death of Osiris (the Sun) along with his rebirth or resurrection in the spring.
Such a "pattern" must be understood because of its importance since it will be applied to false gods throughout time immemorial and ultimately to Jesus as well by the earliest Gentile believers.