Horus, according to one story, later attacked and slew his uncle, the wicked Seth, to avenge his father; and in this contest between the good Osiris and the bad Seth we perhaps see an attempt to account for the good and evil in the world. If that is so, the good finally triumphed in that story, because Horus, the good son of the good father, killed the bad Seth.
Another story, however, says that the struggle between Horus and Seth was so equal that Egypt was divided between them, Lower Egypt going to Horus and Upper Egypt to Seth.
On the inscriptions, in the hieroglyphic, or sacred graving, to which we will come directly, Horus is represented by the figure of a falcon, Seth by that of some animal which has been variously guessed to be a jerboa or an okapi, but which looks very much as if it might be some kind of dog. It has been conjectured that the contest recorded between Horus and Seth may be a growth from wars waged between tribes represented the one by the falcon and the other by this four-footed animal of Seth's, whatever it may be.
The story, and the different shapes it takes, and the way in which the incidents get transformed so as to fit in with the incidents of quite a different story, may help you to understand something of the way in which the legends grew. They not only grew, separately, into very strange shapes, but they grew into one another, like neighbouring trees with their branches inter-tangled, so that it is very hard to distinguish them.
One thing you may have noticed in the story—that Osiris, according to one version at least, becomes king of the dead in the nether world. That means, of course, that these people so very long ago believed in the life of a man's soul after his body was dead. That is curious, is it not, seeing that they had had no revelation, so far as we know, to tell them that it was so? We may speak of that a little more, in a minute or two.
Probably you may have seen pictures of some of the hieroglyphics or sacred inscriptions, and if you have you may have noticed that some of the figures have human bodies and beasts' heads.
Thus Horus is often shown with a man's body and a falcon's head. Anubis has a man's body and a jackal's head, and the like happens with many of the other animal gods. We may take it all as sign of the confusion in the minds of these early people with regard to the difference between gods and man and other animals.
Various religions
The confusion of religions in Egypt is particularly great, very likely because different tribes brought in different beliefs and gods, and they grew confused with the beliefs and gods already there. Where they believed that there was such a great number of gods, it was almost necessary that the power of each god must be supposed to be restricted to a certain place. Otherwise the fighting between them for mastery would be endless. We have seen, however, how, as time went on, the idea grew of Osiris as a god universal throughout Egypt. That was a long step forward in the direction of belief in a single god, ruler and maker of all the universe. And yet then a further confusion arose, which led a step farther again in the same right direction, when Osiris began to be identified with—that is to say, to be considered the same as—the Sun-god, whom they called Re or Ra.
They had very many and various stories and fancies about this great god Re, the Sun—that at dawn he began to sail across the sky in a boat called the boat of the dawn, and again, at night, that he got into another boat, the boat of the dark, and sailed along underneath the earth all night to catch his morning boat again. Another story was that he was born a baby in the dawn, grew to his full manly strength at midday, and then declined again into an old man, dying at night. Stories of the same sort were invented to account for the apparent movements of the moon and stars and other planets. Of course they had no knowledge of the earth turning on its own axis, or travelling round the sun.