As in India, the Osiris festival lasted for five days. (The period is worth noting.) The ceremonies began with ploughing the earth. We do not know for certain that a human victim was immolated; but many side-analogies would lead us to that conclusion, and suggest that as elsewhere the sacred victim was torn to pieces in the eagerness of the cultivators and worshippers to obtain a fragment of his fertilising body. For in the myth, Typhon cuts up the corpse of the god into fourteen pieces, which he {309}scatters abroad (as the naked leather-dresser scatters the sacred buffalo): and we know that in the Egyptian ceremonies one chief element was the search for the mangled portions of Osiris, the rejoicings at their discovery, and their solemn burial. On one of the days of the feast, a procession of priests went the round of the temples--or beat the bounds: and the festival closed with the erection of a pillar or stone monument to the Osiris, which, in a bas-relief, the king himself is represented as assisting in raising. I think it is impossible to overlook the general resemblance of these rites to the rites of Potraj. I ought to add, though I cannot go into that matter fully here, that the many allusions to the flinging of the coffer containing the Osiris into the Nile are clear indications of the rain-charm obtained by throwing the human victim into a spring or river. In this case, however, it must of course be regarded locally as a charm to make the Nile rise in due season. The character of the later Osiris, or the god-victim identified with him, as a corn and vegetable god, is amply borne out by several other pieces of evidence. Osiris, it is said, was the first to teach men the use of corn. He also introduced the cultivation of the vine. Mr. Frazer notes that in one of the chambers dedicated to Osiris in the great temple of Isis at Philæ, the dead body of Osiris is represented with stalks of corn springing from it, and a priest is watering the stalks from a pitcher which he holds in his hand. That human corn-victims were at least not unknown in Egypt we have on the direct authority of Manetho, who tells us that red-haired men used to be burned, and their ashes scattered with winnowing fans. (Similar cases elsewhere have been previously mentioned.) So, too, the legend tells us that Isis placed the severed limbs of Osiris on a corn-sieve. Red-haired oxen were also sacrificed in Egypt, apparently in order to produce red wheat. This is the analogue of the bull sacrificed as Dionysus.