In that name which is thine, of God Moon.”
And again:—
“Thou who comest to us as a child each month,
We do not cease to contemplate thee.
Thine emanation heightens the brilliancy
Of the stars of Orion in the firmament.”[334]
Here then Osiris is identified with the moon in set terms. If in the same hymn he is said to “illuminate us like Ra” (the sun), that is obviously no reason for identifying him with the sun, but quite the contrary. For though the moon may reasonably be compared to the sun, neither the sun nor anything else can reasonably be compared to itself.
8. In art Osiris is sometimes represented as a human-headed mummy grasping in his hands his characteristic emblems and wearing on his head, instead of the usual crown, a full moon within a crescent.[335]
The identification of Osiris with the moon appears to be based on a comparatively late theory that all things grow and decay with the waxing and waning of the moon.
Now if in one of his aspects Osiris was originally a deity of vegetation, we can easily enough understand why in a later and more philosophic age he should come to be thus identified or confounded with the moon.[336] For as soon as he begins to meditate upon the causes of [pg 132] things, the early philosopher is led by certain obvious, though fallacious, appearances to regard the moon as the ultimate cause of the growth of plants. In the first place he associates its apparent growth and decay with the growth and decay of sublunary things, and imagines that in virtue of a secret sympathy the celestial phenomena really produce those terrestrial changes which in point of fact they merely resemble. Thus Pliny says that the moon may fairly be considered the planet of breath, “because it saturates the earth and by its approach fills bodies, while by its departure it empties them. Hence it is,” he goes on, “that shell-fish increase with the increase of the moon and that bloodless creatures especially feel breath at that time; even the blood of men grows and diminishes with the light of the moon, and leaves and herbage also feel the same influence, since the lunar energy penetrates all things.”[337] “There is no doubt,” writes Macrobius, “that the moon is the author and framer of mortal bodies, so much so that some things expand or shrink as it waxes or wanes.”[338] Again, Aulus Gellius puts in the mouth of a friend the remark that “the same things which grow with the waxing, do dwindle with the waning moon,” and he quotes from a commentary of Plutarch's on Hesiod a statement that the onion is the only vegetable which violates this great law of nature by sprouting in the wane and withering in the increase of the moon.[339] Scottish Highlanders allege that in the increase of the moon everything has a tendency to grow or stick together;[340] and they call the second moon of autumn “the ripening moon” (Gealach an abachaidh), because they imagine that crops ripen as much by its light as by day.[341]