Osiris

Also Known As: Egyptian wsjr, variously vocalised Wesir, Usir, Ausar or Asar; Greek Ὄσιρις; epithets Khenti-Amentiu, “Foremost of the Westerners”, and Wenennefer, “he who continues to be perfect”
Region/Culture: North Africa
Mythos: Egyptian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He died and was made whole again, and every Egyptian who was buried properly expected to follow him through the same door.
Role in Mythos: He is the murdered king who rules the land of the dead and presides over the judgment that decides who enters it.
Relation to Humans: Ordinary people did not petition him for rain or victory; they became him, taking his name onto their coffins so that his resurrection would carry theirs. From the late Old Kingdom onward the standard funerary offering formula in almost every Egyptian tomb was addressed to him.

A shallow wooden tray shaped like a man, packed with silt from the flood and sown with barley, was set down in the dark of a sealed tomb and watered once. Nobody came back to check on it. Weeks later, behind stone that would not be moved again for three thousand years, the figure had gone green and shaggy, grain standing up out of the chest and thighs of a body that had never been a body. One of these survived almost intact in the tomb of Tutankhamun. It is the entire theology of Osiris in a box of dirt.

He is first securely visible in the middle of the Fifth Dynasty, around the twenty-fifth century BC, though the epithet Khenti-Amentiu, Foremost of the Westerners, was already a royal title in the First Dynasty, and the west is where the dead go. Something quieter than a myth marks his arrival. In the earliest tomb chapels the offering formula runs “a boon which the king gives, and Anubis.” By the end of the Fifth Dynasty the same sentence, carved over and over, in tomb after tomb, up and down the river, says “and Osiris” instead. A god had taken over the business of the dead, and the change is written in the masonry rather than in any surviving story.

The Egyptians themselves left no continuous account of him. The Pyramid Texts allude, the Coffin Texts assume, the Book of the Dead addresses him directly, the Shabaka Stone and the raucous New Kingdom tale of the Contendings of Horus and Seth pick up pieces of the quarrel, but the connected narrative most people know was written in Greek by Plutarch around 120 AD, more than two millennia after the earliest Egyptian evidence, and coloured throughout by a Greek writer’s habits. Diodorus Siculus gives another version that disagrees on details as basic as the number of pieces. This is worth saying plainly: the famous story of Osiris comes to us mostly from foreigners writing very late.

In it he is the eldest child of Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky, brother to Isis, Nephthys and Set, and a king of Egypt who taught his people agriculture and law before his brother decided he had held the throne long enough. Some Egyptologists have suspected an older and humbler figure underneath, a Delta chieftain or herding god absorbed into the crown, and point to his insignia: the shepherd’s crook and the flail, both of which belonged first to Andjety of the ninth nome of Lower Egypt.

Set had a chest built to the exact interior measurements of his brother’s body. At a banquet, with seventy two conspirators in the room and the queen of the Ethiopians among them, he offered it to whoever it fitted. The others climbed in and out, laughing, too short or too broad. Osiris lay down in it and the lid came down, and the seams were poured full of molten lead, and the box went into the river in the dark. It fetched up on the Phoenician coast at Byblos, where a tamarisk grew around it until the trunk was thick enough to be cut for a pillar, and for a while the dead king of Egypt held up the roof of a foreign palace.

Isis found him. Then Set found him again, and cut the body into fourteen pieces, and scattered them the length of the country. She went after every one, and in the Papyrus Jumilhac the reassembly takes her twelve days, which fall exactly on the festival of ploughing. She recovered everything except the phallus, which had gone into the Nile, and made a replacement for it. What she did next depends on the telling: she revived him just long enough, or hovered over him in the form of a kite and drew the child out of him by sheer magic. Horus was conceived on a body that had already been embalmed. That son grew up, fought Set through eighty years of lawsuits and ambushes and outright farce, and took back the throne of the living, while his father kept the other one.

The dismemberment gave Egypt a useful theology and an even more useful tourist economy, since a dozen towns claimed a relic. At Dendera the temple walls describe wheat paste being pressed into moulds shaped like each severed part, one sent to every town where Isis had found it. At Mendes the paste was mixed and left to swell for days before being shaped and buried. Grain that is cut down, buried, and comes up again was never a metaphor here. It was the same event.

What the public saw was the passion play at Abydos, and the fullest description of it was left by a Middle Kingdom official named Ikhernofret on a stela, around 1875 BC. Five days. A procession behind Wepwawet, opener of the way, with a staged battle in which the god’s enemies are beaten off the road. The body carried out to the tomb in the Neshmet barque, which had to be defended on the way. A day of mourning. A night of vigil and recitation, cold under the desert sky, the smell of resin and burning fat. Then, at dawn, the god comes back and is crowned, and the statue goes home to the temple. Firmicus Maternus, writing in the fourth century AD and not sympathetically, describes worshippers beating their breasts and gashing their shoulders until the moment the body is declared found, whereupon the whole crowd turns from grief to rejoicing.

His ordinary work is quieter than any of that. He sits at the end of a long hall, wrapped, patient, green, while a heart is set on one pan of a balance and a single ostrich feather on the other, and forty two assessors wait to be told they have no case. Thoth writes the result. If the scales sit level, the newcomer is led forward and into the kingdom. If they do not, the thing crouching by the balance eats the heart, and there is no second court and no eternity of punishment, only the end.

His powers follow from what happened to him. He grants continued life because he received it, and he grants it by resemblance, which is why the dead took his name and his wrappings and his green face. The Nile rose for him, the barley came up for him, Orion and Sirius climbed back over the horizon for him at the turn of the year. Under Seti I his authority was invoked in royal decrees against wrongdoers who had escaped human notice, on the reasonable grounds that everyone eventually arrives in his hall.

His limits are just as exact. He does not come back to life the way the word usually means. He is restored, not returned, and the price of ruling the dead is that he stays with them; the god of resurrection never walks in daylight again, never sits on his own throne in Egypt, never fights his own case. Everything he has, a woman went out and gathered for him piece by piece, and one piece she never found. His strength is entirely posthumous, and so is his kingdom.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Osiris in Egyptian mythology?

Osiris is the ancient Egyptian god of the dead, the underworld, resurrection and vegetation, and the judge before whom the dead are weighed. He was the eldest son of the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut, the husband of Isis, and the father of Horus. He was murdered by his brother Set and afterwards ruled the realm of the dead rather than the land of the living.

How did Osiris die?

According to Plutarch, Set tricked Osiris into lying down inside a chest built to his exact measurements at a banquet, then sealed the lid with molten lead and threw it into the Nile. The chest drifted to Byblos on the Phoenician coast, where a tamarisk tree grew around it. After Isis recovered the body, Set found it again and cut it into fourteen pieces, which he scattered across Egypt.

What does Osiris look like and what does he carry?

Osiris is shown as a man wrapped like a mummy from the chest down, with skin painted green for new growth or black for the fertile Nile silt. He wears the tall white atef crown with an ostrich feather on each side and the plaited false beard of a pharaoh. In his hands he holds the crook and the flail, insignia that belonged first to the Delta god Andjety.

What is the connection between Osiris and grain?

Osiris was identified with barley and emmer that is cut down, buried in the earth and comes up green again. Egyptians built Osiris beds, wooden frames shaped like the god, filled them with Nile silt, sowed them with grain and sealed them in tombs, where the sprouting seed stood for his return; a well preserved example was found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Temple texts at Dendera and Mendes describe wheat paste being moulded into the shape of his scattered body parts for the same reason.

What happens in the judgment of the dead before Osiris?

The dead person’s heart is weighed against the feather of Maat, the principle of truth and right order, before Osiris and a tribunal of forty two divine assessors, with Thoth recording the verdict. A heart that balances the feather earns entry into the kingdom of Osiris. A heart that fails is devoured by the waiting monster, and the person is annihilated rather than tormented forever.