156 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniaparadise of early Babylonia, which too was“at the mouth of
the rivers.”But it soon migrated to the north-eastern portion of
the sky, and the Milky Way became the heavenly Nile. Here
[169] the dead lived in perpetual happiness under the rule of Osiris,
working, feasting, reading, even fighting, as they would below,
only without pain and eternally.^142
But, in order to share in this state of bliss, it was necessary for
the believer in Osiris to become like the god himself. He must
himself be an Osiris, according to the Egyptian expression. His
individuality remained intact; as he had been on earth, so would
he be in heaven. The Osiris, in fact, was a spiritualised body in
which the immortal parts of man were all united together. Soul
and spirit, heart and double, all met together in it as they had
done when the individual was on earth.
It is clear that the doctrine of the Osiris in its developed form
is inconsistent with the idea of theka. But it is also clear that
without the idea of thekait would never have been formed. Both
presuppose an individuality separate from the person to which
it belongs, and yet at the same time material, an individuality
which continues after death and manifests itself under the same
shape as that which characterised the person in life. The popular
conception of the ghost, which reproduces not only the features
but even the dress of the dead, is analogous. Fundamentally the
Osiris is aka, but it is akawhich represents not only the outward
shape, but the inner essence as well. The whole man is there,
spiritually, morally, intellectually, as well as corporeally. The
doctrine of the Osiris thus absorbs, as it were, the old idea of the
ka, and spiritualises it, at the same time confining it to the life
[170] after death.
But if the conception of a double, unsubstantial and yet
(^142) The constellation of Osiris was called“the soul of Osiris,”and Professor
Maspero notes that the Pyramid texts place his kingdom near the Great Bear
(Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie, ii. p. 20). Isis became Sirius, and
Horus the morning star.