I do not deny that in later ages Osiris became much more than this. Nor do I deny that his name was accepted as a symbol for all the happy and pious dead. Furthermore, we shall find at a later stage that he was identified in the end with an annual slain Corn-God. I will even allow that there may have been more than one original Osiris—that the word may even at first have been generic, not specific. But I still maintain that the evidence shows us the great and principal Osiris of all as a Dead Chief of Abydos.
We must remember that in Egypt alone history goes back to an immense antiquity and yet shows us already at its very beginning an advanced civilisation and a developed picture-writing. Therefore the very oldest known state of Egypt necessarily presupposes a vast anterior era of slow growth in concentration and culture. Before ever Upper or Lower Egypt became united under a single crown, there must have been endless mud-built villages and petty palm-shadowed principalities along the bank of the Nile, each possessing its own local chief or king, and each worshipping its own local deceased potentates. The sheikh of the village, as we should call him nowadays, was then their nameless Pharaoh, and the mummies of his ancestors were their gods and goddesses. Each tribe had also its special totem, about which I shall have a little more to say hereafter; and these totems were locally worshipped almost as gods, and gave rise in all probability to the later Egyptian Zoolatry and the animal-headed deities. To the very last, Egyptian religion bore marked traces of this original tribal form; the great multiplicity of Egyptian gods seems to be due to the adoption of so many of them, after the unification of the country, into the national pantheon. The local gods and local totems, however, continued to be specially worshipped in their original sites. Thus the ithyphallic Amen-Khem was specially worshipped at Thebes, where his figure occurs with unpleasant frequency upon every temple; Apis was peculiarly sacred at Memphis; Pasht at Bubastis; Anubis at Sekhem; Neith at Sais; Ra at Heliopolis; and Osiris himself at Abydos, his ancient dwelling-place.
Even Egyptian tradition seems to preserve some dim memory of such a state of things, for it asserts that before the time of Menes, the first king of the First Dynasty, reputed the earliest monarch of a united Egypt, dynasties of the gods ruled in the country. In other words, it was recognised that the gods were originally kings of local lines which reigned in the various provinces of the Nile valley before the unification.
In the case of Osiris, the indications which lead us in this direction are almost irresistible. It is all but certain that Osiris was originally a local god of This or Thinis, a village near Abydos, where a huge mound of rubbish still marks the site of the great deity’s resting-place. The latter town is described in the Harris papyrus as Abud, the hand of Osiris; and in the monuments which still remain at that site, Osiris is everywhere the chief deity represented, to whom kings and priests present appropriate offerings. But it is a significant fact that Menes, the founder of the united monarchy, was born at the same place; and this suggests the probability that Osiris may have been the most sacred and most venerated of Menes’s ancestors. The suggestion derives further weight from the fact that Osiris is invariably represented as a mummy, and that he wears a peculiar head-dress or cap of office, the same as that which was used in historical times as the crown of Upper Egypt. He also holds in his hands the crook and scourge which are the marks of kingly office—the crook to lead his own people like a shepherd, the scourge to punish evil-doers and to ward off enemies. His image is therefore nothing more nor less than the image of a Mummied King. Sometimes, too, he wears in addition the regal ostrich plumes. Surely, naught save the blind infatuation of mythologists could make them overlook the plain inference that Osiris was a mummified chief of Abydos in the days before the unification of Egypt under a single rule, and that he was worshipped by his successors in the petty principality exactly as we know other kingly mummies were worshipped by their family elsewhere—exactly, for example, as on the famous Tablet of Ancestors found at Abydos itself, Sethi I. and Rameses II. are seen offering homage to seventy-six historical kings, their predecessors on the throne of United Egypt.
Not only, however, is Osiris represented as a king and a mummy, but we are expressly told by Plutarch (or at least by the author of the tract De Osiride which bears his name) that the tomb of Osiris existed at Abydos, and that the richest and most powerful of the Egyptians were desirous of being buried in the adjacent cemetery, in order that they might lie, as it were, in the same grave with the great god of their country. All this is perfectly comprehensible and natural if we suppose that a Thinite dynasty first conquered the whole of Egypt; that it extended the worship of its own local ancestor-god over the entire country; and that in time, when this worship had assumed national importance, the local god became the chief figure in the common pantheon.
I had arrived at this opinion independently before I was aware that Mr. Loftie had anticipated me in it. But in his rare and interesting Essay on Scarabs I find he has reached the same conclusions.
“The divinity of Pharaoh,” says Mr. Loftie, “was the first article in the creed of the pyramid period, the earliest of which we know anything. As time went on, though the king was still called divine, we see him engaged in the worship of other gods. At last he appears as a priest himself; and when Herodotus and the later Greek historians visited Egypt, there was so little of this part of the old religion left that it is not even mentioned by them as a matter of importance.” This is quite natural, I may remark parenthetically, for as the antiquity and grandeur of the great gods increased, the gulf between them and mere men, even though those men were kings, their offspring, must always have grown ever wider and wider. “I have myself no doubt whatever,” Mr. Loftie goes on, “that the names of Osiris and of Horus are those of ancient rulers. I think that, long before authentic history begins, Asar and Aset his wife reigned in Egypt, probably in that wide valley of the Upper Nile which is now the site of Girgeh and Berbé” (exactly where I place the principality of Osiris). “Their son was Hor, or Horus, the first king of Upper and Lower Egypt; and the ‘Hor seshoo.’ the successors of Horus, are not obscurely mentioned by later chroniclers. I know that this view is not shared by all students of the subject, and much learning and ingenuity have been spent to prove that Asar, and Aset, and Hor, and Ptah, and Anep, are representations of the powers of nature; that they do not point to ancient princes, but to ancient principles; and that Horus and his successors are gods and were never men. But in the oldest inscriptions we find none of that mysticism which is shown in the sculptures from the time of the eighteenth dynasty down to the Ptolemies and the Roman Emperors.” In short, Mr. Loftie goes on to set forth a theory of the origin of the great gods essentially similar to the one I am here defending.
Though a little out of place, I cannot help noting here the curious confirmatory fact that a number of ibis mummies have been found at Abvdos in close proximity to the mound where M. Mariette confidently expected to discover in the rock the actual tomb of Osiris himself. Hence we may conclude that the ibis was in all probability the totem of Abydos or This, as the bull was of Memphis, the crocodile of the Fayoum, the cat of Bubastis, and the baboon of Thebes. Now, the ibis-god of Abydos is Thoth; and it is noteworthy that Thoth, as recorder, always accompanies Osiris, in later legend, as judge of the dead: the local mummy-god, in other words, has as his assessor the local totem-god; and both are commonly to be seen on the monuments of Abydos, in company with Horus, Anubis, Isis, and other (probably) local divinities.
It is quite easy to see how, with this origin, Osiris would almost inevitably grow with time to be the King of the Dead, and supreme judge of the nether regions. For, as the most sacred of the ancestors of the regal line, he would naturally be the one whom the kings, in their turn, would most seek to propitiate, and whom they would look forward to joining in their eternal home. As the myth extended, and as mystical interpretations began to creep in, identifications being made of the gods with the sun or other natural energies, the original meaning of Osiris-worship would grow gradually obscured. But to the last, Osiris himself, in spite of all corruptions, is represented as a mummy: and even when identified with Amen, the later intrusive god, he still wears his mummy-bandages, and still bears the crook and scourge and sceptre of his primitive kingship.
It may be objected, however, that there were many forms of Orisis, and many local gods who bore the same name. He was buried at Abydos, but was also equally buried at Memphis, and at Philæ as well. The pretty little “Temple on the Roof” at Denderah is an exquisitely elaborate chapel to the local Osiris of that town, with chambers dedicated to the various other Osiris-gods of the forty-two nomes of ancient Egypt. Well, that fact runs exactly parallel with the local Madonnas and the local Apollos of other religions: and nobody has suggested doubts as to the human reality of the Blessed Virgin Mary because so many different Maries exist in different sacred sites or in different cathedrals. Our Lady of Loretto is the same as Our Lady of Lourdes. Jesus of Nazareth was nevertheless born at Bethlehem: he was the son of Joseph, but he was also the son of David, and the son of God. Perhaps Osiris was a common noun: perhaps a slightly different Osiris was worshipped in various towns of later Egypt; perhaps a local mummy-god, the ancestor of some extinct native line, often wrongly usurped the name and prerogatives of the great mummy-god of Abydos, especially under the influence of late priestly mysticism. Moreover, when we come to consider the subject of the manufacture of gods, we shall see that the body of an annual incarnation of Osiris may have been divided and distributed among all the nomes of Egypt. It is enough for my present purpose if I point out in brief that ancestor-worship amply explains the rise and prevalence of the cult of Osiris, the kingly mummy, with the associated cults of Horus, Isis, Thoth, and the other deities of the Osirian cycle.