Ægistheus against Menelaus. 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.' 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 may 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 assailed Horus, the son of Osiris, whose myth is a doublure or replica, in some respects, of the Osirian myth itself.41 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.42 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 hypotheses (the Egyptians adopted the latter 43) is consistent with the character of early myth, but both are merely tentative suggestions.44 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 oxyrhyncus-was accounted for by the legend that these fish had devoured the missing portion of the hero's body.

We

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 bestial form, as a wolf.45 Horus was victorious in the war which followed, and

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

42 The fragments of Osiris were sixteen, according to the texts of Denderah, one for each nome. 4s De Is. et Os. XXXV.

44 Compare Lefébure, Les Yeux d'Horus, pp. 47, 48.

45 Wicked squires in Shropshire (Miss Burne, Shropshire Folk-Lore) come' as bulls. Osiris, in the Mendes nome, ' came' as a ram (Mariette, Denderah, iv. 75).

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 Plutarch ends, but 46 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 Pundjel, or Cagn, or Yehl, among Australians, Bushmen, or Utes, whose own 'culture hero,' like the ghost of Osiris, was a wolf. The 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.47

Once more, though the Egyptian gods are buried here, and are immortal in heaven, they have also, like the heroes of Eskimo 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.48 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 49 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.

6

The references to the myth in papyri and on the monuments, though obscure and fragmentary, confirm the narrative of Plutarch. The coffer in which Osiris foolishly ventured himself seems to be alluded to in the Harris Magical Papyrus.50 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.' 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.51 The hymn is on a stele, and is attributed by M. Chabas, the translator, to the seven

46 De Is. et Os. xx.

47 Magical Text, Nineteenth Dynasty, translated by Dr. Birch; Records of Past, vi. 115; Lefébure, Osiris, pp. 100, 113, 124, 205; Livre des Morts, chapter xvii. ; Records of Past, x. 84.

48 Custom and Myth, Star Myths;' De Rougé, Nour. Not. p. 197; Lefébure, Osiris, p. 213.

49 Religion und Mythologie, p. 99.

50 Records of Past, x. 154.

31 De Is. et Os. 211.

teenth century.52 Osiris is addressed as the joy and glory of his parents, Seb and Nou, 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.53 Horus, her son, is king of the world.

Such is a précis 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 Plutarch, two thousand years later. Similar confirmation is given by 'The Lamentations of Isis and Nepthys,' 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 54), and, therefore, all the more mythical. On the sarcophagus of Seti the First (now in the Soane Museum), among pictures and legends descriptive of the soul's voyage after death, there is a design of a mummy. Behind it comes a boat manned by a monkey, who drives. away a pig called 'the devourer of the body,' referring to Typhon as a swine, and to the dismemberment of Osiris and Horus. The Book of Respirations, finally, contains the magical songs by which Isis was feigned to have restored breath and life to Osiris.55 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 gods. Isis reserves his head and saddle,' Osiris gets the thigh, the bones are given to the cats. As each god 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.56 Many of these myths, as M. Naville remarks, are doubtless ætiological-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 superstitions, originally 52 Rev. Archéol. May 1857.

53 Plutarch says that Isis took the form of a swallow. 54 Mariette, Denderah, iv. 77, 88, 89.

56 Herodotus, I. ii. 47; Plutarch, Is. et Os. 90. Pythagoras, who sacrificed a bull made of paste.

55 Records of Past, iv. 121.

See also Porphyry's Life of

totemic, about various animals, were explained by myths attaching these animals to the legends of the gods. If the myth has any historical significance it may refer to the triumph of the religion of Horus over Semitic belief in Set.

Explanations of the Osiris myth, thus handed down to us, were common among the ancient students of religion. Plutarch reports many of them in his 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 moonmyth 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,57 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 superstitions, 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 to be eaten, this or that tree was holy; and men who had lost the true explanation of these superstitions explained them by saying that the fish had tasted, or the tree had sheltered, the mutilated Osiris.

This view of the myth, while it does not pretend to account for every detail, refers it to a large class of similar narratives, to the barbarous dualistic legends about the original good and bad extranatural 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 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 assigned 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. Osiris 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 worship 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-under-world and world of earth, the waters above and the

57 Livre des Morts, 112, 113.

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.58

Such is the splendid sacred vestment which Egyptian theology wove for the mangled and massacred 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. His functions as a king over death and the dead find their scientific place among other myths of the homes of the departed. M. Lefébure 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.59 Osiris himself, the sun at his setting, became a centre round which the other incidents of the war of the gods 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.60 Plutarch 61 identifies Osiris with Hades; 'both,' says M. Lefébure, originally meant the dwellings— and came to mean the god-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 as a jackal, or that a jackal totem should survive as a god, mythologists will decide for themselves. The jackal, by a myth that cannot be called pious, was said to have eaten his father, Osiris. Thus, throughout the whole realm of Egyptian myths, when we find beast-gods, blasphemous fables, apparent naturemyths, such as are familiar in Australia, South Africa, or among the Eskimo, we may suppose that these are survivals, or we may imagine that they are the symbols of nobler ideas deemed appropriate by priestly fancy. Thus the hieroglyphic name of Ptah, for example, shows a little figure carrying something heavy on his head, and this denotes him who raised the heaven above the earth.' But is this image derived from un point de vue philosophique,62 or is it borrowed from a tale like that of the Maori Tutenganahau, who first severed heaven and earth? The most enthusiastic anthropologist must admit that, among a race which constantly used a kind of picture-writing, symbols of noble ideas might be represented in the 59 Osiris, p. 129.

58 Lefébure, Osiris, p. 248.

60 See the guesses of etymologists (Osiris, pp. 132, 133). Horus has ever been connected with the Greek Hera, as the atmosphere !

61 De Is. et Os. 75.

62 Lefébure, Osiris, 159.