The marriage of the two elements suggested that of the two divinities; Osiris wedded Isis and adopted the young Horus. But this prolific and gentle pair were not representative of all the phenomena of nature. The eastern part of the Delta borders upon the solitudes of Arabia, and although it contains several rich and fertile provinces, yet most of these owe their existence to the arduous labour of the inhabitants, their fertility being dependent on the daily care of man, and on his regular distribution of the water. The moment he suspends the straggle or relaxes his watchfulness, the desert reclaims them and overwhelms them with sterility. Sit was the spirit of the mountain, stone and sand, the red and arid ground as distinguished from the moist black soil of the valley. On the body of a lion or of a dog he bore a fantastic head with a slender curved snout, upright and square-cut ears; his cloven tail rose stiffly behind him, springing from his loins like a fork. He also assumed a human form, or retained the animal head only upon a man's shoulders. He was felt to be cruel and treacherous, always ready to shrivel up the harvest with his burning breath, and to smother Egypt beneath a shroud of shifting sand. The contrast between this evil being and the beneficent couple, Osiris and Isis, was striking. Nevertheless, the theologians of the Delta soon assigned a common origin to these rival divinities of Nile and desert, red land and black. Sibû had begotten them, Nûît had given birth to them one after another when the demiurge had separated her from her husband; and the days of their birth were the days of creation.[*]
* According to one legend which is comparatively old in
origin, the fous* children of Nûît, and Horus her grandson,
were born one after another, each on one of the intercalary
days of the year. This legend was still current in the Greek
period.
At first each of them had kept to his own half of the world. Moreover Sit, who had begun by living alone, had married, in order that he might be inferior to Osiris in nothing.
1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a painted wooden statuette
in my possession, from a funeral couch found at Akhmîm. On
her head the goddess bears the hieroglyph for her name; she
is kneeling at the foot of the funeral couch of Osiris and
weeps for the dead god.
2 Bronze statuette of the XXth dynasty, encrusted with
gold, from the Hoffmann collection: drawn by Faucher-Gudin
from a photograph taken by Legrain in 1891. About the time
when the worship of Sît was proscribed, one of the Egyptian
owners of this little monument had endeavoured to alter its
character, and to transform it into a statuette of the god
Khnûmû. He took out the upright ears, replacing them with
ram's horns, but made no other change. In the drawing I have
had the later addition of the curved horns removed, and
restored the upright ears, whose marks may still be seen
upon the sides of the head-dress.
As a matter of fact, his companion, Nephthys, did not manifest any great activity, and was scarcely more than an artificial counterpart of the wife of Osiris, a second Isis who bore no children to her husband;[*] for the sterile desert brought barrenness to her as to all that it touched.
* The impersonal character of Nephthys, her artificial
origin, and her derivation from Isis, have been pointed out
by Maspero (Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie
Égyptiennes, vol. ii. pp. 362-364). The very name of the
goddess, which means the lady (nibît) of the mansion
(haït), confirms this view.
[Illustration: 190.jpg PLAN OF THE RUINS OF HELIOPOLIS. 2]
2 Drawn by Thuillier, from the Description de l'Egypte (Atlas, Ant., vol. v. pl. 26, 1).
Yet she had lost neither the wish nor the power to bring forth, and sought fertilization from another source. Tradition had it that she had made Osiris drunken, drawn him to her arms without his knowledge, and borne him a son; the child of this furtive union was the jackal Anubis. Thus when a higher Nile overflows lands not usually covered by the inundation, and lying unproductive for lack of moisture, the soil eagerly absorbs the water, and the germs which lay concealed in the ground burst forth into life. The gradual invasion of the domain of Sît by Osiris marks the beginning of the strife. Sit rebels against the wrong of which he is the victim, involuntary though it was; he surprises and treacherously slays his brother, drives Isis into temporary banishment among her marshes, and reigns over the kingdom of Osiris as well as over his own. But his triumph is short-lived. Horus, having grown up, takes arms against him, defeats him in many encounters, and banishes him in his turn. The creation of the world had brought the destroying and the life-sustaining gods face to face: the history of the world is but the story of their rivalries and warfare.
None of these conceptions alone sufficed to explain the whole mechanism of creation, nor the part which the various gods took in it. The priests of Heliopolis appropriated them all, modified some of their details and eliminated others, added several new personages, and thus finally constructed a complete cosmogony, the elements of which were learnedly combined so as to correspond severally with the different operations by which the world had been evoked out of chaos and gradually brought to its present state. Heliopolis was never directly involved in the great revolutions of political history; but no city ever originated so many mystic ideas and consequently exercised so great an influence upon the development of civilization.[*]