Osiris--the sun--had a war with Seb, or Typho, or Typhon, and was killed in the battle; he was subsequently restored to life, and became the judge of the under-world.[3] Seb, his destroyer, was a son of Ra, the ancient sun-god, in the sense, perhaps, that the comets, and all other planetary bodies, were originally thrown out from the mass of the sun. Seb, or Typho, was "the personification of all evil." He was the destroyer, the enemy, the evil-one. Isis, the consort of Osiris, learns of his death, slain by the great serpent, and ransacks the world in search of his body. She finds it mutilated by Typhon. This is the same mutilation which we find elsewhere, and which covered the earth with fragments of the sun. Isis was the wife of Osiris (the dead sun) and the mother of Horus, the new or returned sun; she seems to represent a civilized people; she taught the art of cultivating wheat and barley, which were always carried in her festal processions. When we turn to the Greek legends, we shall find [1. "Revue Archæologique," tome xxv, 1873, p. 393. 2. Notes to Rawlinson's "Herodotus," American edition, vol. ii, p.:219. 3. Murray's "Mythology," p. 347.] {p. 236} Typhon described in a manner that clearly identifies him with the destroying comet. (See page 140, _ante_.) The entire religion of the Egyptians was based upon a solar-myth, and referred to the great catastrophe in the history of the earth when the sun was for a time obscured in dense clouds. Speaking of the legend of "the dying sun-god," Rev. O. D. Miller says: "The wide prevalence of this legend, and its extreme antiquity, are facts familiar to all Orientalists. There was the Egyptian Osiris, the Syrian Adonis, the Hebrew Tamheur, the Assyrian _Du-Zu_, all regarded as solar deities, vet as having lived a mortal life, _suffered a violent death_, being subsequently _raised from, the dead_. . . . How was it possible _to conceive the solar orb as dying and rising from the dead_, if it had not already been taken for a mortal being, as a type of mortal man? . . . We repeat the proposition: it was impossible to conceive the sun _as dying and descending into hades_ until it had been assumed as a type and representative of man. . . . The reign of Osiris in Egypt, his war with Typhon, his death and resurrection, were events appertaining to the divine dynasties. We can only say, then, that the origin of these symbolical ideas was _extremely ancient_, without attempting to fix its chronology." But when, we realize the fact that these ancient religions were built upon the memory of an event which had really happened--an event of awful significance to the human race--the difficulty which perplexed Mr. Miller and other scholars disappears. The sun had, apparently, been slain by an evil thing; for a long period it returned not, it was dead; at length, amid the rejoicings of the world, it arose from the dead, and came in glory to rule mankind.