Osiris

Who Osiris actually is

Osiris (wsjr — etymology uncertain, possibly meaning "the mighty one" or "the seat of the eye") is the *single most-important deity in Egyptian funerary religion*, the foundation on which the entire afterlife-theology of the civilization rested for three thousand years. In the foundational myth (preserved fully only in Plutarch, but assembled from fragments across the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, Book of the Dead, and temple inscriptions): Osiris was the first king of Egypt, ruling with his sister-wife Isis. He civilized humanity, taught agriculture, gave the law. His jealous brother Set tricked him into lying down in a coffin sized exactly to his body, then sealed it and threw it into the Nile. The coffin floated to Byblos in Lebanon, where it became enclosed in a tamarisk tree that the king of Byblos cut down and used as a pillar in his palace. Isis traveled to Byblos, recovered the coffin, brought it home — but Set found Osiris's body and dismembered it into fourteen pieces (some sources say sixteen), scattering them across Egypt. Isis (with her sister Nephthys) traveled the length of Egypt finding the pieces. She found thirteen; the fourteenth (the phallus) had been eaten by a Nile fish (the *oxyrhynchus*), so she fashioned a replacement of gold. She reassembled Osiris using bandages (the iconographic source of the mummy-wrap), revived him with magic long enough to conceive Horus, and Osiris descended permanently to the underworld to become *king of the dead*. From the Old Kingdom forward, every dead pharaoh *became Osiris* — was wrapped in linen bandages like the resurrected god, was buried with the *Osiris-position* (arms crossed over the chest holding the crook and the flail). In the Middle Kingdom this Osirification was *democratized* to non-royal Egyptians: any Egyptian who could afford a proper burial and whose heart passed the *Weighing of the Heart* against the feather of Ma'at in the Hall of Two Truths joined Osiris's court as one of the *Westerners* (the dead in the western afterlife). The *Negative Confession* (Book of the Dead Spell 125) is the most-preserved Osirian liturgy: the dead recites a list of forty-two sins they have not committed, before forty-two divine assessors, with Osiris enthroned as judge and Ma'at's feather on the scale opposite the heart. Pass the weighing, and you become *justified before Osiris* (mꜣꜥ-ḫrw, "true of voice"). Fail, and Ammit (the devourer) eats your heart and you cease to exist. The *Abydos Passion Plays* annually reenacted the Osirian death-and-rebirth at his chief cult-center; the *Khoiak festival* in winter ritually buried and resurrected the god as the grain-cycle.

Iconography

Mummiform man — wrapped tightly in white linen bandages, only the head and hands free, arms crossed over the chest holding the *crook* (hekat — the shepherd's crook, sign of guidance) and the *flail* (nekhakha — the winnowing-flail, sign of fertility-through-threshing). Crowned with the *atef* (a tall white crown flanked by two ostrich feathers, with horizontal ram's horns at the base — combining the *hedjet* of Upper Egypt with the feathers of Ma'at). Skin painted *green* (the color of vegetation, regrowth, the grain rising from the black silt) or *black* (the color of the fertile Nile silt itself — Egypt was *Kemet*, "the Black Land," named for this color, and Osiris's blackness is the same blackness). Throne behind him in the judgment scenes. The *djed-pillar* (the pillar-fetish with four horizontal bars, originally a tree-trunk with the branches stripped — the iconographic representation of Osiris's spine, sign of stability, raised in the annual djed-raising ceremony as the resurrection of Osiris). The flowering wheat sometimes shown growing out of his prone body in the "Osiris-bed" iconography — actual barley-bed shaped like Osiris's body, planted in tombs, the grain sprouting from the god's body as the literal-visible resurrection.

How to invoke Osiris

The Khoiak festival (winter inundation, December-January in the modern calendar). The annual djed-raising ceremony. Sunset (the going-into-the-West, the Osirian crossing). Offer: green wheat or barley (the grain that is his body), the white linen wrap (a small piece is enough), water from the Nile (or any river, in modern practice — the inundation-water is his), incense (frankincense for the funerary register). The traditional invocation is the *Pyramid-Text utterance* that became the *htp-di-nsw* offering formula: *"An offering which the king gives to Osiris, Foremost of the Westerners, Lord of Abydos, that he may give a voice-offering of bread and beer, beef and fowl, alabaster and linen, every good and pure thing, to the ka of [name]."* Especially called by anyone in *grief* (Osiris is the god who has *been* dismembered — the grief register is his); anyone in a *resurrection* — coming back from a death-experience (literal, professional, relational); anyone *crossing over* (death, but also the smaller crossings — leaving a job, leaving a country, leaving a relationship that has died); anyone planting (the grain-god is the patron of agriculture); anyone facing judgment (the Weighing-of-the-Heart register, before any tribunal that will assess one's life).

In love

Osiris in love is the partner whose *body has been dismembered by the world* and who needs to be gathered piece by piece by an Isis-figure to be reassembled. Osiris-energy in a partnership is *the dying-and-rising love* — the relationship that has actually died at some point and has been brought back, the marriage that survived its own collapse, the partner whose previous incarnation has been laid in the coffin and whose next incarnation has been conceived after the resurrection. The shadow is the partner who has been *waiting in the coffin in the Byblos-pillar for the Isis who never comes* — the chronic-grief register, the love-locked-in-an-unfound-state. The other shadow: the partner whose Osiris-resurrection has become a permanent *underworld-king* register — never fully rejoining the world of the living, perpetually presiding over the Hall of Two Truths instead of also walking in the daylight.

In work

Osiris in work is the founder-who-died-and-was-resurrected (the bankrupt entrepreneur who came back, the failed-and-rebuilt company, the project that was killed and revived); the eternal-judge (the senior figure who presides over the assessment of others' work — the editor, the reviewer, the tenure-committee chair); the grain-god (the patron of all cyclical-agricultural work — the farmer, the gardener, the slow-cultivation craft). Osiris-energy is *the legitimate authority that has died and returned*. The shadow is the workplace whose Osiris-figure has been *dismembered and never reassembled* — the founder pushed out by a Set-figure whose project lives on as Set's, with no Isis to gather the pieces. The other shadow: the *Osiris-in-the-coffin* leader — the founder who has died (creatively, energetically) but is still nominally on the throne, the chairman emeritus who refuses to actually let the next Horus take over.

The gift

Osiris gives the recognition that *dismemberment is the necessary middle of the resurrection arc*. The Set-figure that murdered the king, the fourteen pieces scattered across the land, the body in the Byblos-pillar — these are not the end of the story; they are the *necessary* middle. The Isis-figure will come (or one will find an Isis-figure). The pieces can be gathered. The grain *will* rise from the black silt; that is what black silt is *for*. The gift is the willingness to undergo the dying — to lie down in the coffin Set has prepared, trusting that the dying is the precondition for the kingship-of-the-dead-that-makes-resurrection-possible-for-everyone-else.

The shadow

19th-c. comparative-mythology (Frazer's *Golden Bough* 1890, the cult-of-the-dying-and-rising-god comparative project) flattened Osiris into one of a series of "dying gods" alongside Adonis, Attis, Tammuz, Dionysus, and Christ — a flattening that, while not entirely wrong, missed the *specifically-Egyptian* funerary-judicial dimension (the Weighing of the Heart, the forty-two assessors, the Negative Confession) that has no parallel in the other figures. The other shadow: pop-culture-Osiris (countless mummy-movies, comics, video games) reduces him to a generic-ancient-king or, worse, to a horror-villain — entirely inverting the actual mythic register (Osiris was *murdered*, was the *victim*, and Set the murderer is the actual horror-villain in the original story). The third shadow: Egyptomania-Osiris (the New-Age "Osiris-rituals," the Hermetic / Masonic appropriation, the 19th-c. Theosophical lineage) frequently strips the specifically-Egyptian Negative-Confession content and replaces it with generic-occult resurrection-theology. The fourth shadow: the *democratization-of-Osirian-afterlife* in the Middle Kingdom was a genuine religious revolution (the afterlife is no longer just for pharaohs) — but this democratization has been almost entirely missed in popular-Egyptology, which tends to focus on royal-tombs and erase the burial practices of ordinary Egyptians who *also* became Osiris when they died.

Pair with