The Cult of Osiris, Part 2

Egyptian syncretic deity Serapists. This is the deity that is established under the rule of the Ptolemies in Egypt, a god that combines elements of Osiris and APIs, the Sacred Bull. These are both again Egyptian deities, along with various Greek

deities like Zeus and Hades. So I just wanted to add a little more context on this because I don't think I explained the scenario as well as I could have, or didn't go into as much detail as I could have in a way that I think benefits our understanding, because we get into this idea again of kind of like an amalgam god that is, to a certain degree, kind of built by committee with a certain purpose in mind.

And that purpose is not just like, oh, I have to figure out who you know, what God is real and I must convene with it and get its blessings.

If you didn't know exactly what deity this is, or what figure this is, you wouldn't have to know much at all about iconography and sculpture and depictions of the divine to say, oh, this looks very Greek to me.

These were the first foreigners to rule over part of Egypt, and there's much that's not known about them, with various theories about their exact origin, though it seems that some sort of Canaanite origin is possible, and there has also been some evidence to suggest that it was perhaps not an outward invasion, but an uprising of peoples who had previously immigrated to the regions. So there's a lot of scholarly dispute on exactly who these people were and what

this time period consisted of. Now, subsequent invasions by the Nubians, the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks also occurred, but pertinent to our discussion here is that in three point thirty two BCE, Macedonian king Alexander the Great conquered Egypt from the Persians and after his death. After Alexander's death in three twenty three BCE, likely by either poison or disease. He was only thirty two at the time, so there's

a lot of arguments for the poison theory here. But after he dies, a Macedonian general that had served under Alexander, by the of Ptolemy, declared himself ruler of Egypt, and the Ptolemy family would rule Egypt for three centuries. So in her book Egyptian Mythology that I cited in the last episode, Jeraldine Pinch writes a little bit about this and points out that the Ptolemy's ruled from Alexandria, and that is the course where they built the Great Library

of Alexandria. Though most of its contents, she points out, would not have concerned Egyptian culture, Egyptian history, and Egyptian mythology, you know, Greek culture was very much the focal point

of the lost contents of this place. Most of the Ptolemy's apparently never learned to speak Egyptian, but they did, she says, recognize the challenges of governing a multicultural society and keeping powerful Egyptian factions content and this is ultimately where the invention of Sirapis comes into play, which she describes as quote a symbol of cultural fusion. So Sirapis is often described as a patron deity for the Ptolemy

capital of Alexandria, so again a unifying entity. And also in combining all these elements, Serapists becomes a god of not only fertility and the underworld, which, if you know, we're already loaded in our concept of Osiris, but also he becomes the god of the sun in the sky and he sometimes credited in this role as Zeus Serapis. And it's interesting that by absorbing these various powers, he essentially becomes a god of everything, sort of a monotheism by monopoly or something like.

But distinct gods are combined into this entity now. According to Lauren Murphy and Beware Greeks, bearing God's serapis as a cross cultural deity, published in the journal Amphora in twenty twenty one, the invented God doesn't seem to have unified the people in any meaningful way as far as we can tell, but it does stand as an example of the diversity that was present in Egypt at the time. But it was the religion of the ruling class of foreigners and those wishing to mix with that ruling class

of foreigners. And also it seems like there were possible connections to an inspiration via a pre Ptolemaic cult of Osiris APIs, as one can see in images of Serapis, he's predominantly depicted as a Greek deity, but it does sound like there might have already been some fusion of Osiris and APIs previously. This would not it would seem not be out of character with Egyptian religion prior to

outside influence. Now, the Ptolemaic line would of course end with its last ruler, Cleopatra, in thirty as it was, and after this point it was absorbed by the Roman Empire. Worship of Serapis lived on under Roman rule but experienced eventual decline with the spread of Christianity during the fourth century CE. I should say, like the top down mandated spread of Christianity in particular, is the death blow to

the cult of Serapis. So if Sirapis is a kind of monotheism by monopoly, he's eventually replaced by actual monotheism. And I think there's some discussion of whether the worship of a figure like Sirapis helped pave the way for the rise of Christianity. I've seen that discussed, but at the very least, it seems like there are other factors involved here within the Roman Empire and regions affected by the Roman Empire.

study of religion. The connecting principle or lack thereof, between Osiris and other gods from the ancient world, most controversially the Christian Jesus, who are believed to in some way die and then rise again, so resurrected gods. This question will take us back to our old friend James G. Fraser and his incredibly popular, influential and controversial work The Golden Bough, which this was a book published in several of over the course of a couple of decades, beginning

in eighteen ninety. Fraser was a Scottish scholar of religion in folklore who lived eighteen fifty four to nineteen forty one, and The Golden Bough is his best known work. In this book, Fraser catalogs and analyzes a huge number of myths, rituals,

and magical beliefs from cultures around the world. So he sources these observations both from like records of things believed in the ancient world and you know, ancient myths and practices in the Greco Roman world and so forth, but also he sources this from ethnographic observations that people have made of just beliefs and magical practices in cultures all around the globe, using these observations ultimately to support his broader thesis, which include the idea that the ritual and

mythic elements shared by most ancient religions point back to an originating cult practice that involved the ritual sacrifice of a holy king or guardian figure, often when his fertility was waning, and the linkage of that practice to the seasonal rebirth of nature and the crops. So his framework has a core of this sacrifice of a divine figure, often a divine king, and a cycle of death and rebirth that has some implications for nature. You can see

why this would be relevant to the question at hand. Now, before we get into the specifics of resurrected gods, a couple of general notes on Fraser and the Golden Bow. I am not at all an expert in religious anthropology, but my personal take on The Golden Bough is that it is on one hand worth reading because it's important in understanding the history of Western scholarship on comparative religion, and it's also just a very absorbing and fascinating text.

But on the other hand, this is like one hundred to two hundred and thirty year old book making the case for a sweeping theory of world religions. And it should be read with the caution you might expect for that kind of work, So I would not take any of its claims, specific or general, at face value without

checking for confirmation in other sources. I would also be skeptical of his core theoretical framework, and I would just warn that from research we have done on this book in the past, I recall discovering that some of Fraser's presentation of ethnographic information about religious practices seems often tailored

or cherry picked to fit his theories. Now the next general note, I don't know if what I'm about to say is completely fair, because Fraser doesn't say the following exactly, but I think one of the informal conclusions that a reader is likely to take away from The Golden Bough is that when it comes down to it, all religions are basically the same and the differences between them are incidental and superficial, which I would argue is not correct.

And even if that's just an unintended takeaway that people would get from this book, I think that's a thing that's a conclusion that I would really stress people should resist. I do think there are common themes that you will find popping up again and again in many religions, but not all. And I also think that the differences between religious beliefs and practices around the world and throughout history

do go quite deep. Those differences are significant, They're not just superficial variations on the same thing, and some religions

end up serving profoundly different purposes. So personally, I wonder if the desire to locate so much sameness or commonality between different religions is something that really is not something that comes out of the religions themselves, but more emerges from the need of scholars to have a theory that explains how religions work and where they come from, when in fact, it's a very just like messy, complicated, variegated phenomenon that you know, lots of different factors are at work,

and so it's hard to have a very simple theory that explains where they come from.

the genesis of this figure. So yeah, when you get into religion, when you get into belief, and you get into these into a process that often you know, you're talking about a tradition that goes for centuries and therefore has all sorts of room for change and alteration and transformation and so forth.

And this resurrection is linked to cycles of loss and return in the natural and political world, such as the seasons, the death of plants in winter and the rebirth in spring and summer, the seasonal inundation of the nile, and other natural cycles and political cycles like the death of

kings and the coronation of their heirs. So the question is do we really find these dying and rising gods all throughout the ancient religions Unfortunately, if you look into this question, I think you find the topic horribly polluted by a lot of motivated argumentation, primarily tracing back to the question of whether Jesus of Nazareth should be thought of of as one of these dying and rising deities. So this topic is infected by both Christian apologetics and

anti Christian polemics. So you've got, you know, people who don't like Christianity, anti Christian polemicists arguing, look, see how stupid Christianity is. Jesus is just a copy of these other dying and rising deities. And then you've got Christian apologists arguing that no, Christianity is totally unique, it is unlike any other religion on earth because it is the one true religion, and all such comparisons are spurious, so caveat that. There is a lot of that kind of

garbage floating around in both directions. I'm trying to do my best to put together a clear and what seems to me relatively unbiased answer to the question of what similarities exist between these alleged dying and rising gods and to what extent Osiris and Jesus fit into that mold.

So I want to go through a couple of the examples that Fraser cites, and then we'll get into critiques of them. So one example is the god Adonis, a figure in Greek myth thought to have been derived from other ancient Near Eastern deities, such as the Mesopotamian god of agriculture Tamuz or Dmuzi. Adonis, in many tellings, began

as a mortal man famed for his beauty. He was sort of the pinnacle of hotness, and he was so handsome that when he was young, the goddesses Aphrodite and Persephone fought bitterly over whether he would live with one of them or the There more on that myth in

a minute. But then another story is that later in his life Adonis was the lover of Aphrodite until he was tragically impaled by a wild bore wild hunting, so it gets the tusk right in the guts, and so he's out there dying in the wilderness on the hunt, and the goddess Aphrodite comes and weeps over his body, and as her tears fall and Adonis's blood runs down

into the earth, the ground produces delicate flowers. Sometimes a specific type of flower is named, so like you know, you've got in some understandings of the story, the body fluids of these divine lovers combine upon the young man's death and bring forth the fruits of the earth. And to try to understand the significance of this figure, Fraser

starts looking at celebrations of the death of Adonis. There was a festival or a sort of commemoration of the death of Adonnis that was celebrated in the summertime, and raz looks at accounts of this ritual. So Fraser says, quote at Alexandria, images of Aphrodite and Adonis were displayed on two couches. Beside them were set ripe fruits of all kinds, cakes, plants growing in flower pots, and green

bowers twined with Annis. The marriage of the lovers was celebrated one day, and then on the morrow, women attired as mourners with streaming hair and bared breasts, bore the image of the dead Adonnas to the seashore and committed it to the waves. Yet they sorrowed not without hope, for they sang that the lost one would come back again.

And after describing more of these rituals, Fraser says, summarizing quote, we may therefore accept as probable an explanation of the Adonnas worship, which accords so well with the facts of nature and with the analogy of similar rites in other lands. Moreover, the explanation is countenanced by a considerable body of opinion amongst the ancients themselves, who again and again interpreted the dying and reviving God as the reaped and sprouting grain.

Fraser also cites Tamus, the Mesopotamian god from which Adonis is probably derived. Tamus was the consort of the goddess Inana and was also linked to crop cycles, and apparently images of death and rebirth among many gods Fraser offers as displaying death and resurrection. He also cites the Egyptian god Osiris. Now, of course we already went over the basic myth of Osiris, But what does Fraser have to

say about the meaning of Osiris here? So I'm going to read a couple of lengthier quotes from Fraser here on Osiris. Quote in the Resurrection of Osiris, the Egyptians saw the pledge of a life everlasting for themselves beyond the grave. They believed that every man would live eternally in the other world if only his surviving friends did for his body what the gods had done for the

body of Osiris. Hence, the ceremonies observed by the Egyptians over the human dead were an exact copy of those which Annibis, Horus, and the rest had performed over the dead god. And then he goes on. At every burial there was enacted a representation of the divine mystery which

had been performed of old over Osiris. When his son, his sisters, his friends were gathered round his mangled remains and succeeded by their spells and manipulations in converting his broken body into the first mummy, which they afterwards reanimated and furnished with the means of entering on a new individual life beyond the grave. The mummy of the deceased was Osiris. The professional female mourners were his two sisters, Isis and Nepthis Annibis Horace, all the gods of the

Osirian legend gathered about the corpse. In this way, every dead Egyptian was identified with Osiris and bore his name. From the Middle Kingdom onwards, it was the regular practice to address the deceased as Osiris so and so, as if he were the god himself, and to add the standing epithet true of speech, because true speech was characteristic

of Osiris. The thousands of inscribed and pictured tombs that have been opened in the Valley of the Nile prove that the mystery of the resurrection was performed for the benefit of every dead Egyptian. As Osiris died and rose again from the dead, so all men hope to arise

like him from death to life eternal. So there's a kind of in what Fraser is implying here, there's a kind of special role for Osiris, especially when compared to some of these other examples of allegedly dying and reviving gods, where Osiris not only in Fraser's mind dies and then is brought to life again, but by re enacting what happens to Osiris, he shows the way that the people that regular mortals can also be revived again after death, though we will add some qualification in what sense they

should be thought of as revived. So one thing that, of course causes controversy is that among many of these examples, Fraser also brings up the example of Christ, the Christian Jesus, drawing direct connection between the Easter resurrection of Christ and say, the rituals of Adonis. This drew scorn from conservative Christians,

of course, but you might expect that. But the question would remain, were these comparisons sound comparisons between all these different figures, And I think, after doing some additional reading, I think the answer is a little bit, but mostly no.

by Eliade. The entry was called Dying and Rising Gods, and in this chapter Smith showed that really the category of dying and rising gods is not much of a category, in that most of the items Fraser and others placed within the class are quote based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts. In other words, this category emerges from reliance on questionable sources and on tortured readings of legitimate source materials to try to fit them

into the resurrected god box. So how would that be given what we just looked at, it seemed like Fraser presented some good examples. Well, Smith says that actually, if you look at the examples Fraser sites, there aren't any fully dying and rising gods. Instead, you have two distinct categories. One is dying gods, these are gods that die but are not said to rise again from death, and the other is disappearing gods. Gods that disappear and then in

some cases reappear sometimes quote with monotonous frequency. But the disappearance is not death, and the reappearance is not resurrection.

does not rise. Fraser sort of allides this by connecting the story to the morning celebration of Adonnas's death with sort of the involvement of summer crops and plants and stuff like that. But in the story, Adonnas just dies. We'll get to the rituals in a second. But in the story there's no resurrection, and the festival created by Aphrodite to commemorate his death is a festival of mourning.

The other Adonnas Smith. To quote Smith, here tells of quote a quarrel between two goddesses, Aphrodite and Persephone for the affections of the infant Adonis. Zeus or Calliope decrees that Adonnas should spend part of the year in the upper world with one I assume with Aphrodite, and part of the year in the lower world with the other.

I assume that would be Persephone. This tradition of by location similar to that connected with Persephone, and perhaps DEMUSI has no suggestion of death and rebirth, So you could argue maybe that going into the underworld and then coming back to the upper world has like resence with the idea of resurrection. There's some kind of symbolic linkage. It's thematically similar, but it is not literally the same thing.

but these sources are problematic. According to Jonathan Smith, there is one allegedly second century source by Lucien that, in a pretty sketchy and ambiguous way, describes rituals which could be interpreted as celebrating the resurrection of Adonnas, but it's not clear at all that this is what Lucian is describing. To quote from Smith's summary, Lucian says, quote, on the third day of the ritual, a statue of Adonnas is quote brought out into the light en, quote addressed as

if alive. And I was thinking, wait a minute, but aren't many cult statues addressed as if alive?

And then Smith says that there are other descriptions of these rituals which do make unambiguous reference to the resurrection of Adonnas, but they only show up later in the Roman period, after the spread of Christianity, and they are written by Christians in a way that raises questions about them, Like, so, if Christians are saying that worshippers of Adonis are saying Adonis was raised from the dead, is the resurrected God theme of Christianity perhaps having some influence on the myth

of Adonis by this point, Or is the resurrected God theme of Christianity influencing the way Christian observers interpret the rituals of Roman pagans.

that is a very interesting pattern. So, like Christian observers look at other religions and they see a dead God, and it's quite possible they just assume that a dead God is supposed to rise again and kind of read that into the ritual.

contain no hint of rebirth. The point is that the young plant shoots rapidly wither and die, not that the seeds have been reborn when they sprout. So I thought that was also really interesting, because I would just so easily and so naturally look at a sort of plant based ritual celebration and assume it had something to do with cycles of death and rebirth. But that's an assumption that might not be what the people doing that practice

think it means. So Smith is saying what ancient people said about these gardens was not that they were to emphasize the theme of resurrection, but to emphasize the theme once again of mourning and loss of the beautiful youth who died too soon, just like these young plant shoots that come up and then wither rapidly. I feel like this kind of thing makes me a little more cautious about my my myth interpretation goggles that.

but not in this world. Instead, he goes on living in the other place, in the underworld, the realm of the dead, where he is empowered to become the master and judge of the wandering dead. So he does not rise from the dead. He goes on living in the afterlife. So it almost seems to me that his resurrection in the afterlife could be seen as kind of synonymous with his enthronement as the lord of the dead and his empowerment to serve the role of judgment.

ritual it's like a narrativizing of the ritual. But whatever the actual chain of events there is in this case, there is clearly a strong link between the myth and the ritual, in that the mythical description of the recovery and reassembly of the pieces of the body of Osiris. I believe this is by Isis and his allies. This is a clear parallel of the funeral rights of Egypt.

Smith lists these funeral rights quote the vigil over his corpse, the hymns, the hymns of lamentation, the embalmment usually performed by Annibis, the washing and purification of the corpse, the undertaking of the elaborate ritual of the opening of the mouth with its one hundred and seven separate operations, as well as other procedures for reanimation, the dressing of the body,

and the pouring out of libations. So in a way, the dead Egyptian would, in a sense, through having the funeral rites performed upon their body, become Osiris, and just like Osiris, though dead to this world, they would awaken to a new life in another world. Smith writes, quote myth ritual of Osiris emphasizes the message that there is life for the dead, although it is of a different character than that of the living. What is to be feared is in a quote from the Book of Going

forth by Day. I think this is another name for what is sometimes called the Book of the Dead quote, dying for a second time in the realm of the dead. And there are ways that, according to the story, this can happen to you, for example, being devoured by the lion, hippopotamus, crocodile monster am it in the underworld.

deities is exceedingly dubious. It has been based largely on Christian interest and ten evidence. As such, the category is of more interest to the history of scholarship than to the history of religions. And so that might kind of

make you think, like, ah, well, then who cares? But I think it is actually very illustrative that you can see this category sort of emerge where with scholars trying to make sense of all these different stories and rituals and stuff and putting all these gods and figures from myths into the category, and ultimately, if you look really close, it's not a super cohesive category. And a lot of the things, maybe all the things put into it don't really fit and don't have as much in common as

the scholar is claiming they do. And if Smith is correct here, I find his case pretty convincing. If he's correct about this being largely based on Christian interest by scholars from Christian cultures, I think that's also illuminating that like dominant sort of story themes within your culture that seem very familiar to you just kind of naturally manifest when looking at ambiguously similar things in other cultural contexts.

the similarities rather than differences. But yeah, when you get into like this deeper attempt to understand the religion, you could see where some of it could cast too much of a shadow on your interpretation of this other way of looking at the cosmos.

worth studying. You also have this pattern of the disappearing and sometimes reappearing god myth. What does that tell us about religions? You can look at these similarities, and so it's also not unreasonable to look at similarities between Christianity, a religion that certainly does have a dying and reviving God,

with some of these other religions. And so one source that came across that I thought made a very interesting point A was a chapter called Resurrection in Ancient Egypt by the German egyptologist Jan Osman, who has plenty of his own ideas. He's pushing about like the lineage of certain types of resurrection beliefs. I think ultimately he thinks that a lot of these beliefs have an original source in Egyptian religion and then spread out to other places.

But regardless of whether he's correct about that, I think he makes a very good point about a similarity between belief in Christ and the earlier belief in Osiris, which, on one hand, you have plenty of differences, like the death of Jesus is a one time event that is situated within history. It said, like, you know, well, he's a man who existed at a certain time and place in history, and so it's like his death is a historical event, not something that takes place within a kind

of mythic time or a within a mythic landscape. But on the other hand, you could look at the deaths and revivals of these two god figures. Is having a lot in common in that, as Osman says, quote, through his death and resurrection, Christ has paved the way to Paradise or Elysium in a way not altogether dissimilar from that of Osiris, who also threw his victory over Seth

opened a realm beyond the realm of death. The decisive common denominator of Christianity and ancient Egyptian religion is the idea of redemption from death, that beyond the realm of death, there is an Elysian realm of eternal life in the presence of the divine. So in both cases you can look at these gods as gods who were killed and then in some sense revived. Christ is said to be revived onto earth and then ascends into heaven. Osiris has revived and made lord a lord of the underworld and

judge of the dead. But in both cases they open the way for people to have a sort of heaven again. Want to, you know, put the star on heaven there and say it means different things in the two different concepts, but it is a positive afterlife that is now available to the people.

of death right. So that's my understanding of it. But I certainly have seen other depictions of him that don't have the dog present. All right, Well, on that note, I believe we're going to go ahead and close the book on Osiris here with the caveat that. I'm not sure what the next core episode is going to be, but we were throwing around the idea of doing something that was still kind of Osiris, but is not Osiris Part three. So just I don't know. You'll have to

see what happens. You'll see what happens as well. Okay, in the meantime, we'd love to hear from everyone out there. If you have thoughts on this two parter, if you have thoughts on past episodes or potential future episodes, write in. We would love to hear from you. Just to remind us that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,

but 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 movie on Weird House Cinema.