Lecture VII. Osiris And The Osirian Faith.
The legend of Osiris as it existed at the end of the first century is
recorded by Plutarch. It has been pieced together from the myths
and folk-tales of various ages and various localities that were
current about the god. The Egyptian priests had considerable
difficulty in fitting them into a consistent story; had they been
Greek or Roman historiographers, they would have solved the
problem by declaring that there had been more than one Osiris;
as it was, they were contented with setting the different accounts
of his death and fortunes side by side, and harmonising them
afterwards as best they might.
As to the general outlines of the legend, there was no dispute.
Osiris had been an Egyptian Pharaoh who had devoted his life
to doing good, to introducing the elements of art and culture
among his subjects, and transforming them from savages into
civilised men. He was the son of the sun-god, born on the first
of the intercalatory days, the brother and husband of Isis, and
the brother also of Set or Sut, whom the Greeks called Typhon.
Typhon had as wife his sister Nephthys or Nebhât, but her son
Anubis, the jackal, claimed Osiris as his father.
Osiris set forth from his Egyptian kingdom to subdue the world
by the arts of peace, leaving Isis to govern in his absence. On his
return, Set and his seventy-two fellow conspirators imprisoned
him by craft in a chest, which was thrown into the Nile. In
[154] the days when Canaan had become a province of the Egyptian
empire, and there were close relations between the Phœnician
cities and the Delta, it was said that the chest had floated across
the sea to Gebal, where it became embedded in the core of a
tree, which was afterwards cut down and shaped into one of
the columns of the royal palace. Isis wandered from place to
place seeking her lost husband, and mourning for him; at last
she arrived at Gebal, and succeeded in extracting the chest from
its hiding-place, and in carrying it back to Egypt. But the older