They are mainly allusive, without any connected narrative. Fortunately the narrative, as related by the priests of his own time, is given by the author of De Iside et Osiride, and is confirmed both by the Egyptian texts and by the mysterious hints of the pious Herodotus. Here we follow the myth as reported in the Greek tract, and illustrated by the monuments.
The reader must, for the moment, clear his mind of all the many theories of the meaning of the myth, and must forget the lofty, divine and mystical functions attributed by Egyptian theologians and Egyptian sacred usage to Osiris. He must read the story simply as a story, and he will be struck with its amazing resemblances to the legends about their culture-heroes which are current among the lowest races of America and Africa.
Seb and Nut—earth and heaven—were husband and wife. In the De Iside version, the sun cursed Nut that she should have no child in month or year; but thanks to the cleverness of a new divine co-respondent, five days were added to the calendar. This is clearly a later edition to the fable. On the first of those days Osiris was born, then Typhon or Set, "neither in due time, nor in the right place, but breaking through with a blow, he leaped out from his mother's side".*
* De Iside et Osiride, xii. It is a most curious coincidence
that the same story is told of Indra in the Rig- Veda, iv.
18, 1. "This is the old and well-known path by which all
the gods were born: thou mayst not, by other means, bring
thy mother unto death." Indra replies, "I will not go out
thence, that is a dangerous way: right through the side will
I burst". Compare (Leland, Algonquin Legends, p. 15) the
birth of the Algonquin Typhon, the evil Malsumis, the wolf.
"Glooskap said, 'I will be born as others are'." But the
evil Malsumis thought himself too great to be brought forth
in such a manner, and declared that he would burst through
his mother's side. Mr. Leland's note, containing a Buddhist
and an Armenian parallel, but referring neither to Indra nor
Typhon, shows the bona fides of the Algonquin report. The
Bodhisattva was born through his mother's right side (Kern..
Der Buddhismus, 30). The Irish version is that our Lord was
born through the crown of the head of the Virgin, like
Athene. Saltair na Rann, 7529, 7530. Se« also Liebrecht,
Zur Volkskunde, p. 490. For the Irish and Buddhist legends
(there is an Anglo-Saxon parallel) I am indebted to Mr
Whitley Stokes. Probably the feeling that a supernatural
child should have no natural birth, and not the borrowing of
ideas, accounts for those strange similarities of myth.
Isis and Nephthys were later-born sisters. The Greek version of the myth next describes the conduct of Osiris as a "culture-hero". He instituted laws, taught agriculture, instructed the Egyptians in the ritual of worship, and won them from "their destitute and bestial mode of living". After civilising Egypt, he travelled over the world, like the Greek Dionysus, whom he so closely resembles in some portions of his legend that Herodotus supposed the Dionysiac myth to have been imported from Egypt.* In the absence of Osiris, his evil brother, Typhon, kept quiet. But, on the hero's return, Typhon laid an ambush against him, like Ægisthus against Agamemnon. 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". Precisely the same fable occurs in Central Australian myths of the Alcheringa, or legendary past.**
* "Osiris is Dionysus in the tongue of Hellas" (Herodotus,
ii. 144, ii. 48). "Most of the details of the mystery of
Osiris, as practised by the Egyptians, resemble the Dionysus
mysteries of Greece.... Methinks that Melampus, Amythaon's
son, was well seen in this knowledge, for it was Melampus
that brought among the Greeks the name and rites and phallic
procession of Dionysus." (Compare Dels, et Os., xxxv.) The
coincidences are probably not to be explained by borrowing;
many of them are found in America.
** Spencer and Gillen, p. 399.
The wives "search for the murdered man's mutilated parts". 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 might 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.1 We 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.** 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 hypothesis (the Egyptians adopted the latter)*** is consistent with the character of early myth, but both are merely tentative suggestions.****
* In the Edfou monuments Set is slain and dismembered in the
shape of a red hippopotamus (Naville, Mythe d'Horus, p. 7).
** The fragments of Osiris were sixteen, according to the
texts of Deuderah, one for each nome.
*** De Is. et Os., xxxv.
**** Compare Lefebure, Les Yeux d'Horus, pp. 47 48.
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 oxyrrhyncus—was accounted for by the legend that these fish had devoured the missing portion of the hero's body.
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.* Horus was victorious in the war which followed, and 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.