144 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniawho watched over the cemeteries of Upper Egypt, has been
foisted into it, and has become the servant and minister of the
god of the dead who superseded him. The doctrine of the Trinity
has been applied to it, and Anubis and Nephthys, who originally
were the allies of Osiris, have been forced to combine with Set.
Here and there old forgotten customs or fragments of folk-lore
have been embodied in the legend: the dismemberment of Osiris,
for example, points to the time when the neolithic inhabitants of
Egypt dismembered their dead; and the preservation of the body
of Osiris in the heart of a tree has its echo in the Tale of the Two
Brothers, in which the individuality of the hero was similarly
preserved. The green face with which Osiris was represented
was in the same way a traditional reminiscence of the custom
of painting the face of the dead with green paint, which was
practised by the neolithic population of Egypt.
There are three main facts in the personality of Osiris which
stand out clearly amid the myths and theological inventions
[156] which gathered round his name. He was a human god; he was
the first mummy; and he became the god of the dead. And the
paradise over which he ruled, and to which the faithful souls who
believed in him were admitted, was the field of Alu, a land of
light and happiness.
Sekhet Alu,“the field of Alu,”seems to have been the cemetery
of Busiris among the marshes of the Delta.^128 The name meant
“the field of marsh-mallows,”—the“asphodel meadows”of the
Odyssey,—and was applied to one of the islands which were so
numerous in the north-eastern part of the Delta. Here, then, in
the nome of which Osiris was the feudal god, the paradise of
his followers originally lay, though a time came when it was
translated from the earth to the sky. But when Osiris first became
lord of the dead, the land to which they followed him was still
(^128) So Lauth, Aus Aegypten's Vorzeit, p. 61; Brugsch, Dictionnaire
géographique, pp. 61, 62; Maspero,The Dawn of Civilisation, p. 180.
The evidence, however, is not quite clear.