Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday, so we are heading into the vault for an older episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is part one of our series on Osiris and the Cult of Osiris, originally published on April second, twenty twenty four.
That's right, let's geek out on some Egyptomania.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick.
And in this episode, we're going to be diving into ancient Egyptian mythology once more to discuss an important deity connected to the topic of resurrection, which I think was probably on my mind over the weekend due to first five. It was the Easter holiday. Also on Weird House Cinema, which is of our Friday episode in the Stuffed Blue Mind podcast feed, we talked about doctor FIBs rises. Again, I did not think about this in terms of the holiday at all. I didn't think, oh, this is our
Easter selection. But then I noticed our social media posts about it on Easter Sunday, and it's like, you know, talking about the rise of doctor Fibb's He's rising again. I was like, oh, wow, we sort of accidentally nailed it there.
It's a movie that has so many resurrections. It has Doctor Fhibes himself coming out of a sort of a chemically induced slumber where at the end of the first movie he replaces his blood with embalming fluid and then goes to sleep in a giant glass contraption under the floor. At the beginning of this movie he wakes up again. So that's one sense of rising, though I guess it's questionable whether he technically died or not there, so he
rises at the beginning of the movie. There. The rest of the movie is about him trying to live, literally resurrect his wife Victoria played by Carolyn Monroe from the dead. She sort of spins the whole movie in a glass display case, and he is going to take her to a temple in ancient Egypt under which lies the secret to resurrection and eternal life. And he departs the end of the movie on a barge, singing somewhere over the rainbow to take Carolyn and row down there and bring
her back to life. And I would mention a third resurrection in the film, which is that the character Vulnavia, which is melted like sort of a robot clockwork organism. We're not exactly sure. From the first movie, it's Doctor Fibes's hinchwoman who helps him commit his quote amazing murders. She is melted by acid at the end of the first movie, and then just inexplicably comes back in the
second movie. Also, they resurrect Terry Thomas, remember he bites it in the first movie, and then he just comes back playing a totally separate character in the second movie. And I think that motif of coming back in bodily form but playing a different character, maybe maybe may it may have some thematic resonance. That's right.
So what we're gonna be We're gonna be talking about Osiris. Uh. I don't think Osiris came up in Doctor five Rises again, maybe they made passing reference to him. I think I made passing reference to Osiris when we were talking about the film. But this is a deity best known for his connections to fertility, to the ancient Egyptian underworld, and to rights of mummification.
So, you know, I've seen lots of depictions of the god o Cyrus before I was familiar with the imagery
associated with him. But something I had never noticed until I was reading up in preparation for this episode is that while on the top half of his body, he is often depicted, you know, looking kind of like a like a king or a pharaoh, you know, very stately with a beard, with his with his face exposed under the crown and all that, if you looked down at the lower part of his body, apparently his legs are depicted wrapped together in the in the wrappings of mummification,
so it's like the bottom half of his body is already mummified. That's right.
Yeah, And I invite listeners who are in a position to do so safely to go ahead and look up some images of of of historical depictions of Osiris from ancient Egypt. Yeah, he's generally depicted as a mummified king, you know, bounds as in the wrappings of mummification. His skin as is exposed, you know, in his face and
neck and hands, is apparently either black or green. I tend to find more images of green color choices, though that may have at one point signified putrification and death, but came to symbolize his connection to the cycle of death and life, of resurrection and rebirth, particularly resurrection and rebirth linked to that of plant life. On top of this, he is generally depicted as wearing a crown and he brandishes a crook and a flail, so strong agricultural vibes already.
But also with power and authority. You know, it's the crook and the flail and the autaf crown, the crown I think of Upper Egypt. This is the imagery of a king.
Yeah, absolutely so. He is very much like an embodimentimum of a mummified king. So let's get a little bit into the myth of Osiris. Now standard caveat with mythology, you know, as usually as the case, we're not dealing with a singular idea from a singular time and place, but rather a figure and associated narratives that stirred in
the minds of ancient peoples for thousands of years. We have various accounts of Osiris to go off of, but our understanding of Osiris is also incomplete, and indeed we don't know with one hundred percent certainty what his name even means. It might well mean the Mighty One, but I think there are some other ideas out there. There's plenty that experts have had to piece together about Osiris
that is not explicitly, you know, obvious in the source material. Now, one of the books that I that I turned to for this episode is the two thousand and two book Egyptian Mythology by Geraldine Pinch. Pinch also points out that we don't know when, how and where Osiris was first worshiped. He might have kicked things off as kind of a deified pre dynastic king. He might have been an old vegetation spirit, a jackal god, or even a mother goddess.
And I'm also assuming based on this that you know, there might have been some interplay between these concepts, you know, various varied possible origins, gods that are combined into new gods and so forth. Now, Pinch summarizes the sort of the what you might think of as the canonical rise and fall and resurrection of Osiris, pointing out that first of all, he's generally thought to have been born with
a crown on his head. So taking that concept of born king that is theay referenced in Christian hymns, sometimes referring to Jesus, but taking it to a literal degree.
Ah. So, whereas a lot of kings, say, might be born with a right to the throne that has then recognized in a coronation by placing the crown upon their head, that this king is born with the crown already there, like, it doesn't need to be recognized.
Exactly king at his birth literally because he's look, he's wearing a little crown, and I guess maybe the crown grows with him. I mean, he's a god. He can do these things. And fortunately his mother was also a god, so he was the eldest son. It is that of the earth god Geb and the sky god as Newt. So in many respects, he is the place where earth
and sky converge. He's the very horizon now. Pinch shares that some accounts allude to him overcoming his father in a vicious dynastic struggle for rule, and one late text claims that he died for the first time during this struggle. However, she stresses that no accounts of Osiris's rule and his death survive from before the Greco Roman period concerning this issue. So but one way or another he comes to reign over Egypt with his sister consort Isis at his side.
But of course this rule does not last according to the pyramid texts of the Late Old Kingdom, so these are for more than four thousand years ago. Osiris was murdered by his brother Seth or set who we've talked about on the show before, in part because there is some mystery and disagreement on what the set animal or Seth animal is that his iconography is based upon. But anyway,
we have this. Yeah, this brother Seth strikes his brother down and tramples him and or drowns him in the Nile River, and Pinch writes that a double death may have been deemed necessary to kill a god.
Okay, So, one way or another, either drowned in the water or trampled or both, Osiris is dead.
That's right, He's overthrown. He's been murdered. And one way or another, Osiris's dead body becomes fragmented, either via a deliberate chopping up of his corpse by Seth or possibly due to decomposition. In either event, the dead body of Osiris becomes divided. Into in some cases fourteen pieces, though
sometimes it's like forty two pieces. A certain number of pieces of the Dead God come into circulation here, and I think this varies from something that happens right away again, like I've killed you and now I'm going to chop you up, to something that Seth does later comes and despoils the corpse of Osiris, or something that happens naturally later on. In any case, the pieces are either scattered or become scattered.
Okay, So yeah, that's something I don't know if I ever understood before. Do the pieces come apart as something that his enemy does to him? Is it kind of a William Wallace situation or is it more kind of a some kind of magical principle at work.
Yeah. Based on my understanding of the different accounts that are looking at here, it looks like it does vary. And it also seems to vary whether those pieces stays to some degree scattered or are truly brought together. Again, I guess it kind of depends on what sort of
concepts are important to the story. That may make more sense when I start talking about specifics here in a minute, But in any event, it falls to Isis to gather the pieces of the fallen Osiris and seek his resurrection via powerful magic, with the aid of Annibus, an underworld deity and thought a god of magic who we've also talked about on the show before. Now Isis herself was the mother and throne goddess, so each Egyptian king is
her child. It falls to her to find and gather the pieces of slain Osiris, to assemble him and hold a long vigil over the corpse along with their sister Nephthus, and they use a spoken magic, Pinch says, to drive away Seth the disturber. So I guess there's this idea that even as they are trying to bring him back, Seth is trying to disrupt their attempt.
Almost like a scavenger or predatory animal circling. Yeah.
Now, during this reassembly Osiris is he's described by Pinch as the inert one. So all of the pieces of Osiris are either in teared together or assembled into a hole except for his fallas. And remember again that Osiris is also a god of fertility, and by this fallus or depending on the story, by a flash of divine fire, whatever the case isis becomes pregnant with the Sun by the deceased God, and this Sun is going to be Horace, the Sun destined to overcome Seth. So she raises Horace
in the marshes. She has to raise him in safety and secrecy until he is old enough to challenge his father's usurper, which he does. He defeats Seth and he becomes the new ruler.
Now, I think you're going to get into this in a minute, but that part of the myth is important because this will come to have a great significance for the succession in the real world of divine kingship as a concept in Egypt.
Right now, Another interesting part here is that despite Osiris's connection with the concept of resurrection by many definitions or in certainly sort of modern interpretations and I guess like dungeons and dragons to interpretations, he is not truly resurrected at this point. He does not become a living flesh again. He is not resurrected into this world.
Right and this will be an important point of contention for a question that I think we're going to get into in part two of this series about the concept of resurrection in ancient religions. But yeah, Osiris is not thought to be raised back to the form and the place where he originally lived. There is a instead, he goes on living, but it is in a new form in a new world. There is in a sense a new Osiris.
That's right. So basically, the higher powers and other powers of note here decide that okay, Osiris, you were just, but your death was not just. So therefore he's permitted to leave his now mummified body and become the Lord of the dead in the afterlife, the judge and ruler of the kingdom of the dead. And it seems like a pretty cool gig to have a Pinch points out that.
Quote.
At all periods. There are a few texts that describe Osiris as a terrifying figure who dispatches demon messengers to drag the living into the gloomy realm of the dead. So inert but not powerless by any means, and he is just. He is an appropriate judge. He said to rule over the dead as when enifer, which either means the one whose body did not decay, and we see that again his connection to mummification and rites vocation, though I think it's also according to Pinch, sometimes translated as
the beneficent one. Uh. This was also apparently the title for the high priest of Osiris in you know, religious traditions. These are like the basic core myths concerning Osiris to consider, but you know, we always go deeper than that, Like what are we to make of these myths? What do people think they meant? What did they signify? Why did they have such you know, cultural significance. And again we have to realize that understandings and interpretations change over time.
Middle Kingdom rituals seem to associate the body of Osiris with barley and the trampling seth. Again, remember the trampling being part of the murder of Osiris. Uh, there seems to be a strong case for associating that trampling with the donkeys that would thresh the grain via trampling, thus linking his death and resurrection in this earliest known example to the cyclical reaping and sowing of crops.
Yes, and again asterisk on the word resurrection there. But you know, it's an interesting thing how people often do associate religious ideas of resurrection with the cycles of life, in the cycles of plant life in the seasons. But
when you were talking about donkeys threshing grain. You know, I made another kind of association there, which is that the grain begins as something that is from the living plant, but then when it is is put through agricultural processing, it is in a way reborn, and it doesn't go on to live again as a plant, but instead it goes on to live in a different way. It becomes something else, which is grain and ultimately food.
Yeah, these different sort of phase changes occur. It has also pointed out that you would have these i the phallic figures of Osiris that would would be planted with crops, so they would have like a representation of the god planted with the the grains planted with the seeds that you know, that would that would help enable everything to grow into its next form.
If if phallic, does that mean that's a representation of the God with an erection?
Yes, that's the literal. Different definition though. I was looking at an image of one of these figures in the British Museum's website and and I'm not sure that that's really as pronounced in this image, but but that is that is all. That's how it's classified.
Oh wait, I see it.
Well, it's well compared to it's not as it's not as as obvious as one might expect.
Yeah, it's certainly not as obvious as you might see. And like some other statuary from the ancient world.
Well, I assume the thing is Osiris is wrapped in bandages, so it's like it's he's not naked.
I get you. Now.
There were also New Kingdom period traditions that link o Cyrus to water, with all the liquids of his putrefying body being linked to the annual inundation of the Nile, and not necessarily just putrefying liquids, like you know, just the various liquids of the body, but also like putrification liquids thrown in there. So I don't want to make
it sound like it's all gross or anything. And at least one tradition holding that his body parts are buried at scattered sites throughout Egypt and the tomb of the left Leg on the Nile island of Baiga. I've also seen this place referred to simply as the tomb of Osyrius. Anyway, different traditions hold that this is the source of the inundation.
Now I'm thinking about the underworld and the cosmos of the ancient Egyptians, which I think on one hand it's easy to think of that, Okay, these are the worlds beyond our world, but also they're kind of tied to to what is seen and what is not seen but kind of implied, and they The one area I want to touch on here is the idea of the sun barge, the manget, the boat of millions of years that travels through the sky with the sun and then down each
night over the horizon and then through the underworld to emerge once more on the other side. And of course there's there's fighting that takes place. It is like a kind of a it's a perilous journey for the sun through the underworld to come back again when the sun rises.
Yeah, it's a whole quest. It's a whole quest line.
Yeah, which is which is at once again very epic and otherworldly, but also tied directly to what we observe occurring with the sun. Like the sun goes here and then it goes under seemingly and comes back. What's going on there? And then we have this mythic extrapolation of that. But according to Pinch.
It's singing somewhere over the rainbow.
According to Pinch, the New Kingdom under and the New Kingdom Underworld books specify that during the darkest hour of the night, the god that is is driving the sun barge ray or raw passes through the underworld chamber where the body of Osiris rests, and in this moment may become one soul, and this allows Osyrus and all the dead to live again. So, now that we've established some of the basics about this underworld fertility god, I wanted
to get into the cult of Osiris a bit more. Again, we don't know exactly when, where or how Osiris was first worshiped, or indeed the earliest form or forms that he took in these ancient Egyptian belief systems, but over time he becomes vitally linked with the cycle of life and death, with crops, with the inundation, with mummification, and the promise of resurrection.
And just a note on terminology. When we talk about things like the cult of Osiris, cult in that sense does not have the negative connotations that cult has in the modern world. That's just the term you use for any any group in the ancient world that is devoted to the care and worship of a god.
Now, one topic that I was really taken with was discussion of the popularity of Osiris, and to a certain extent, the overall popularity of the ancient Egyptian religion, because, on one hand, I don't remember where I read this, but I know I've read commentary that the ancient Egyptian religion was something very much all of the desert of this nile nourished region and something that just did not travel well and was not picked up by other cultures in
a meaningful deeper way. But on the other hand, the trappings of ancient Egypt clearly have fascinated other cultures for an exceedingly long period of time, often in these waves of Egyptomania, as it's sometimes termed. So I really wanted to get into this latter idea a bit more so. I turned to various sections dealing with Osiris in the excellent twenty sixteen book Egyptomania, A History of Fascination, Obsession, and Fantasy by Ronald H.
Fritz.
Okay, so Fritz mentions that the aforementioned pyramid texts from more than four thousand years ago refer to differing ideas about life and death but also they bring up the rising popularity of Osiris within the pantheon, and I was
thinking about this as well. This is I think this is something interesting to observe in religion, that it's mostly within these polytheistic traditions that you really get to see or in the and or imagine this idea of the rise and fall of particular gods and goddesses, as well as the more like straightforward adoption of foreign originating gods
into a given pantheon. You know, we've discussed examples of this before, but there's not there's either no room for this or not as much room for this in monotheistic traditions.
Yeah, I mean, I guess it depends on the specific monotheistic religion, but yes, like growing up a lot of people, this is another one of the many ways that if you grow up in a certain religious context, you might just assume that all religions are similar to your religion. So like growing up in a Christian context, I think a lot of people think that all religions have a quote jealous God, like the like the Abrahamic faiths. Do you know a God who says you shall worship me
and me alone? And there's basically one right way to have a religion, and it's it's the one you've got, whereas with a lot of polytheistic religions it's it's much more free form. You know that you can add gods on to the list of gods that you worship, you can remove gods, you can sort of like just shift your focus wherever you think it is best. And that doesn't compute. Like a lot of Christians look back on the pagan context of the Roman Empire, say, and they
don't realize that. Like when you would be preaching about Jesus to Roman pagans, to a lot of them, they just be hearing about this is well, this is another god. You know, I've got Apollo, and I've got Jupiter and these other gods that I worship, and here somebody's talking about a new one. Oh, except this is weird. They're telling me that if I worship this new one, if I worship Christ, I can't worship any of the others anymore. That would be weird and different.
Yeah, it's like downloading apps for your phone, right, Like, what's this one due? This is a new one? Sounds useful. I'll get it too. Whoa, this one says, I can't use any other apps. I've just I've got to use this one universal app for everything. Yeah, does it work? Is what it sounds like. If it's promises to do everything, it probably doesn't do them as well as these specialized apps that I already had.
But to come back to your your original example, Yeah, sort of the rise and fall in the popularity of various gods within these polytheistic pantheons, where you can believe in multiple gods and devote whatever time and care you think is appropriate to each one of them. I guess, you know, the institution of a monotheistic faith like Christianity would be an outlier there where it's like suddenly you pick that, you pick the new God, the Christ, and
you can't believe in any of the others anymore. That one goes right to the top. But with the others, Yeah, you do get to see these fluctuations over time.
Yeah, like some of the Christian examples we've looked at in the past, it's like, oh, your God, actually it can be part of this religion. But I'm sorry they're a demon now, Yeah, the demons were rebel angels that our God defeated. So but yeah, we can work them
in as that. But then again I was thinking about this, it's like, well, well, we've also looked at examples where, you know, in various Greek myths where something that was once a deity for a particular time in place then later on becomes more of a supporting character or a monster or something to that effect. So it's something that takes place just in general, I guess, and is not
particular to monotheistic or polytheistic one way. I kept thinking of those kind of like if you had like a stock ticker for belief, you know, it's like polytheism, you have a lot of different stocks that are going up and down, but under monotheism, like you're supposed to just have the one stock. Yeah, and you're either all invested in that or people are falling out of interest of that.
I don't know. It's not a perfect way of thinking about it, but it does seem like, certainly with the polytheistic religions of the Greeks and the Romans, there is a lot more openness to hey, there's a new god this other country has. Let's take a look at. Let's see what worshiping this god is like, what's going to this.
Cult Like, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of just absorption of other figures. One example that I was just reading about earlier today again, I think we're going to talk about this more in the second episode, is there's a Greek figure sometimes referred to as a god. He was like a mortal lover of Aphrodite named Adonis, who is very much thought to have been derived from from other deities, other ancient Near Eastern deities like Mesopotamian agriculture gods such
as Tammuz or DEMUSI. So it's just here, here's a cult figure from one part of the world is absorbed into the number of gods believed in in a different part of the world.
I just want to add a quick note since we are talking at least briefly here about monotheism and polytheism, and in an episode that deals with ancient Egyptian religion, where we're not going to have time to get into discussion of at and Autanism here. But of course that has been like a discussion I think we've touched on in the past. Where as some experts agree or disagree on whether Autanism is truly a monotheistic religion or should
be thought of as such. So that's a whole different subject for another time.
The short version is one ancient Egyptian king tried to elevate a particular deity from the Egyptian pantheon above all others and make that the exclusive focus of state worship. But yeah, you can read more about that if you go look up Auten.
Yeah, and basically after that king's death, everyone's like, well, let's go back to the other thing we were telling where maybe not as into the sun disc as we
were pretending to be anyway, back to o Cyrus here. So, Fritz writes that the Old Kingdom, so this is roughly twenty seven hundred to twenty two hundred BCE, was more rigid, was more formal, but that the Middle Kingdom to follow, also known as the Period of Reunification from twenty forty to seventeen eighty two BC, it was more balance, more sympathetic.
There's greater literacy, there was more of a melding of sort of high mythology and the folklore of the people, and the rulers of this period promoted the worship of Osiris and the cult s emphasis on resurrection, and the afterlife. Now, I think it's easy to take this last bit for granted, because if you adhere to a religion, or you're closely aligned with one or one or more religions via your culture, your upbringing, or just your general interests, then the continuation
of the soul is not a radical concept. It's like it's it's hard to put yourself in a mindset where someone is coming at you with some radically new concept of religious continuation of the soul, of some sort of immortality of the soul, someone saying, hey, guess what, you know that part of you that feels special inside your consciousness and heart and all of that. What if that
doesn't have to be annihilated when you die? And I have to stress I say this as someone who was raised in a Protestant church that even now sometimes for me it's more challenging to exercise or entertain a worldview in which there is no continuation of the human soul
after death. And that's regardless of logic or reason. It's just such a huge part of not only the Christian worldview view but also the mainstream worldview that of course what we have is special, and that somehow it continues on in one form or another, either directly aligned with some sort of belief system or just you know, in sort of the general pop culture sense of like spirits and angels and like there's just something that must live
on after we die in our physical bodies. And there's nothing wrong with that concept, I think, at least just when it's employed in a way that gives us hope and peace, though of course it can also be used for opposite aims. But to bring us back to this period in which like the cult of Osiris is rising and it's becoming more and more popular, imagine a religious world and a worldview in which the afterlife is largely unavailable. It exists, but it's not for the common people. It
is not for most people. It is for a very small percentage of people. It is like the equivalent of like extreme opulent wealth in our world, you know, like it is the SuperMansion with the apocalypse bunker. You know, this is only for a very small, very slender portion of society. It is not for you. But during the Middle Kingdom you have this ongoing democratization of the afterlife where it describes and this was enhanced by the Cult
of Cyrus. So I want to read a passage from Fittzer where he goes through an example of this quote. Prior to the Middle Kingdom, Egyptians believed that all people possessed a ka, or a soul or life force, but only rulers possessed a ba, which was the individual uniqueness that constitutes a personality. It required the ka and the ba to be kept united or at least in close
proximity for immortality in the afterlife. When the people of the Middle Kingdom came to believe that all humans had a ba, they were conceding that everyone could enjoy the after life if the proper burial rituals were followed. Yeah, so suddenly it's available to everyone who at least can undergo the proper rituals. And so you saw certain rituals become more popular and are more present in the archaeological record, such as the use of shabti statues. They begin to
appear in more tombs. These would have been like little representations of servants, servants that would work for the deceased in the afterlife, like this will be buried with you, and now you will have a servant to help you in the afterlife, this sort of general idea we see in various other religions as well. Okay, and so Osiris becomes very popular within Egypt. But then eventually the ancient Greeks and then the ancient Romans they also get a whiff of Osiris and they're like, oh, we would like
some of that as well. He points out that, yeah, the ancient Greeks and Romans were some of the initial egyptomaniacs. And while the Greeks found on the whole that the religion of the Egyptians was profoundly different from their own, they were intrigued by its systems of magic and by it, you know, its deities, just as we are intrigued by these things today. And they did recognize some fundamental similarities.
He writes that the Greeks frequently attempted to synchronize the gods of other cultures with their own, and they certainly did this with the Egyptians. So and actually, for some Greek writers, these fundamental similarities were incredibly important.
Right. So they might say, actually, we're talking about the same god when we say this god and they say that god. But we just have different names for the same one here.
Right, and they seem to take it even a step beyond that, because there's one thing to say, well, you know, I have my concept of God and you have yours, but we're really on the same you know, we're really on the same wavelength. But it's another to say yours came first. I'm pretty sure mine's just a knockoff of yours, you know, And we kind of see this. According to Fritz, so fifth century BC Greek historian Herodotus concluded that knowledge of the gods spread from Egyptian origins to the Greeks.
So it's like, well, the Egyptians discovered the gods first, and we just followed. We learned of this from them, and anyway, he ends up drawing numerous lines between Greek gods and possible Egyptian word origins, though Fritz points out that there are clear exceptions to this line of thinking, such as Poseidon, who was apparently brought to Greece more from the direction of Libya. Still, others made these connections.
To Plutarch made these connections, so there seems to have been at the very least like a recognized heritage in all of this. Now that and certainly the Greeks and the Romans were particularly taken by not only of Cyrus, but also Isis. Here's another bit from Fritz that I want to read.
Quote.
Although in the modern stereotype the Egyptian religion is depicted as mystical, mysterious, and magical, Greek and Roman visitors did not see it in this way. Plutarch's staunchly defended Egyptian religion as rational and ethical, rather than merely superstitious. Herotogus went so far as to credit the Egyptians with the invention of the common practices of ancient religion, such as altars, statues,
and temples dedicated to the various gods. The cult of Isis became so populated that it spread throughout the lands of the Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Empire.
I mean, first of all, ancient Egypt was simply so ancient, like there were there were these remnants of great civilizations that had been around for so long. We've mentioned this on the show before, but the astounding fact that to the Romans, like Plutarch, the you know, the old Kingdom of Egypt, the pyramids were older to them than the Roman Empire is to us. The distance of history there
is is crazy to believe. So so there's there. On one hand, ancient Egypt was just so evidently ancient as a great civilization, you could imagine things, many things you had might have come from it. But then also as you're saying, there's just this clear spread of say the cult of isis.
Yeah, and at the same time, yes, sometimes attributing things to the Egyptians that that they probably didn't invent. Like Fritz mentions that that Diodorus credited of Cyrus with the invention of great cultivation and ultimately wine making, though there does not seem to be evidence of this, you know that they're that wine and great cultivation has an Egyptian origin now, but eventually we do see more of a
full on appropriation and recreation of Egyptian concepts. And in one of the strong examples of this, and one that concerns of Cyrus is the god so Rapists. This would have been a Greco Egyptian syncretic deity. So it's it's like an amalgam of both Cyrus and in Oppus, as well as aspects of various Greek deities, Like I think there's a little Zeus and Hades in there. This would have been a being that would have that would have
become popular on under the the Ptolemaic rule. But still that doesn't mean that, for instance, that doesn't really seem to impact Isis. Based on what I've read, the worship of Isis may have spread even more in Roman culture. Worship of Isis would travel along trade routes through the Mediterranean world, into Spain and even to the British Isles, so I think there I've read articles about archaeological evidence
of Isis worship, like ancient Isis worship in London. So I'm not talking about like later periods of Egypt Domania where you had occultists and so forth bringing in the concept of Isis, but kind of like original Isis worship, if you will. But then again to the point, and I don't want to go through all the examples of
Egypt Domania. I do recommend everyone check out that book, because this is a book that deals not only with like ancient Egyptian religion and culture in its origin, but also these various levels of Egypt Domania from like you know, dealing with examples from say the Victorian world and the Renaissance on up through like trashy b movies give like, you know, brief breakdowns of some really bad mummy movies. But they are examples of at least the reverberations of
international and multicultural interest in ancient Egypt. And it may in many cases it might not be that deep. You know, it might be just like, oh, I kind of like how this looks and this sounds weird to me, so I'm gonna make a horror movie. But it's still, you know, reverberations are the same energy. But we'll mention one really quickly. So during Renaissance Egyptomania, there was there was still a
fair amount of pull toward Osyrus. There's a character that was an Italian who was originally named Giovanni Nani who lived fourteen thirty two through fifteen oh two, went by the name Viterbo, and he made various connections between Etruscan traditions and the Egyptians. But he even went so far as to claim that the Boreses were the descendants of Osiris. I'm not sure what sort of supporting material he made for that, but in anyway, Osiris would continue to serve
as a central figure in various waves of Egyptomania. Moving forward, So, Osiris is invoked in various occultist movements, and Osiris is definitely invoked by various ancient astronaut writers. And you also see the use of Osiris in the movements of Afrocentrists and also Afrofuturists. It's just I mean, he is a powerful figure mythologically, and of course he's going to We're going to keep coming back to him and finding new ways to sort of think about him and new ways to invoke him.
Okay, well, I think maybe that will do it for part one of our series on Osiris, but we've got more to talk about next time. That's right.
We shall return in a part two and that will be on Thursday. In the meantime, certainly write in if you have feedback on this episode, other examples of Osiris or isisigyptomania that you want to bring up. Everything is fair game, but just reminder stuff Blow your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on
Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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