We must also take into brief consideration his personification of Ra,
whom he meets, blends with, and under whose name he nightly sails
through his own dominions. This would seem like the fusion of a sun and
moon myth; the myth of the sun travelling nightly beneath the earth
fused with that of the moon's nocturnal journey across the vault of
heaven. A moment's consideration will show how this fusion took place.
Osiris was a moon-god. That circumstance accounts for one half of the
myth; the other half is to be accounted for as follows: Ra, the sun-god,
must perambulate the underworld at night if he is to appear on the
fringes of the east in the morning. But Osiris as a lunar deity, and
perhaps as the older god, as well as in his character as god of the
underworld, is already occupying the orbit he must trace. The orbits of
both deities are fused in one, and there would appear to be some proof
of this in the fact that, in the realm of Seker, Afra (or Ra-Osiris)
changes the direction of his journey from north to south to a line due
east toward the mountains of sunrise. The fusion of the two myths is
quite a logical one, as the moon during the night travels in the same
direction as the sun has taken during the day--that is, from east to
west.
It will readily be seen how Osiris came to be regarded not only as
god and judge of the dead, but also as symbolical of the resurrection
of the body of man. Sir James Frazer lays great stress upon a picture
of Osiris in which his body is shown covered with sprouting shoots of
corn, and he seems to be of opinion that this is positive evidence that
Osiris was a corn-god. In our view the picture is simply symbolical of
resurrection. The circumstance that Osiris is represented in the picture
as in the recumbent position of the dead lends added weight to this
supposition. The corn-shoot is a world-wide symbol of resurrection. In
the Eleusinian mysteries a shoot of corn was shown to the neophytes as
typical of physical rebirth, and a North American Indian is quoted by
Loskiel, one of the Moravian Brethren, as having spoken: "We Indians
shall not for ever die. Even the grains of corn we put under the earth
grow up and become living things." Among the Maya of Central America,
as well as among the Mexicans, the maize-goddess has a son, the young,
green, tender shoot of the maize plant, who is strongly reminiscent of
Horus, the son of Osiris, and who may be taken as typical of bodily
resurrection. Later the vegetation myth clustering round Osiris was
metamorphosed into a theological tenet regarding human resurrection,
and Osiris was believed to have been once a human being who had died
and had been dismembered. His body, however, was made whole again by
Isis, Anubis and Horus acting upon the instructions of Thoth. A good
deal of magical ceremony appears to have been mingled with the process,
and this in turn was utilized in the case of every dead Egyptian by the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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