Isis and Osiris I: Introduction

[sdi]

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I woke up this morning with the myth of Osiris ringing in my head, trying to correlate it with other myths I've read. After breakfast, my daughters and I were out looking at various garage sales in town; one of them had a complete children's encyclopedia set, and since we home-school our daughters, I thought it might be worth investigating. I picked up and opened a volume at random, and the page fell open to a mosaic of Dionysus, riding on his leopard. Funny, I thought, since Dionysus is Osiris, and I was just thinking about that... I then picked up a second volume and opened it at random, and the page fell open to the entry for Plutarch (who wrote Isis and Osiris and whose name I was very surprised to see in a children's encyclopedia).

Well!

"They have a saying in Chicago, 'Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; the third time, it's enemy action.'" I haven't managed to make headway for a while on Proclus, and it seems that my angel would like me to try something else... so let's do it!

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I have hypothesized that the Isis and Osiris myth is the original mystery teaching, and that most (all?) of the other ancient mystery schools of which we are aware are either degenerations or imitations of it.

This is an obviously (and deliberately) grandiose claim which is quite literally unproveable, since any evidence we possess for or against it is scanty, existing as it does in the twilight realm of early recorded history, where records exist but are fragmented and sparse. However, it is at least plausible, for a few reasons:

• First, the earliest references we have to the myth are from the enigmatic Pyramid Texts, the earliest of which date to the fifth dynasty. We don't really know when this was, but even in the worst case (c. 2400 BC) would give us centuries before any foreign myths we have evidence for, for example the Inana and Dumuzid myth (Sumer, c. 2100 BC), the Gilgamesh and Enkidu myth (Sumer, c. 2100 BC), the Theseus and the Minotaur myth (Crete, c. mid-1000s BC?), and the Attis and Cybele myth (Asia Minor, c. 1250 BC).

• Second, foreign sources readily acknowledge their debt to Egypt. (I think, here, of Herodotus' Histories, Plato's Timaeus, and Pseudo-Lucian's On the Syrian Goddess.)

• Third, while it is foolish to assume Egypt was unified under a single theology at all, let alone for its entire millennia-long history, the Isis and Osiris myth demonstrates a remarkable durability (attestations exist over the span of millennia) and a remarkable degree of influence and popularity (exoteric celebrations of the myth persisted all over Egypt and even outside it, and it is attested more widely, and in a wider range of styles, than all other myths).

• Fourth, the myth seems to have penetrated very far afield at a very early time. Many Greek myths, for example, are obvious degeneracies of different parts of the Isis and Osiris myth mapped onto local deities, and date as far back as Hesiod, the very beginning of Greek mythography.

Because of all this, it seems to me that the Isis and Osiris myth is foundational to Western thought. Consider that modern materialism is a degeneration of Christianity; Christianity is a repurposing of Greek philosophy; Greek philosophy is a fusion of Mesopotamian and Egyptian mystery teachings (through various intermediaries); and, of course, the Mesopotamian mystery teachings themselves are a reimagining of those of Egypt. It is difficult not to see Hesiod's Ages of Man in all this: we were once much wiser, but we get more stupid and sickly as time goes on, and in another couple thousand years, it seems a wonder that we will be able to survive at all.

Nonetheless, we live in the age we do by the hand of Providence, and we are here to learn the lessons appropriate to our age. (At any rate, we've already survived a couple thousand years longer than Hesiod expected us to!) As Matsuo Basho tells us,

古人の跡を求めず、
古人の求めたるの所を求めよ。

Seek not the paths of the ancients—
Seek that which the ancients sought.

We cannot recover the ancient wisdom and would not be able to understand it even if we did; but this is irrelevant: we develop and grow by seeking, not by understanding. The seeking is enough: Heaven watches over Her own.

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With all this in mind, I am going to attempt a deep dive into the Isis and Osiris myth. (I've read it before, of course, but have not spent much energy contemplating it.) Such a deep dive is necessarily fraught: our Egyptian sources for the myth are cryptic and fragmentary (it was a secret teaching reserved for the elite, after all), and our Greek sources are quite late and similarly fragmentary: Herodotus keeps mum in keeping with his oaths (as was an initiate of the Eleusinian mysteries, and considered the Isaic mysteries to be "close enough" that speaking of them would be impious) and Diodorus Siculus jumps around like a grasshopper, interspersing parts of the myth with Egyptian history and unrelated anecdotes, and so his recording is both fragmentary and confused. The only comprehensive source we have for the myth is Plutarch, and while he was among the greatest sages of his time, he was not an initiate of the Isaic mysteries (or he would not have wrote about them), he was a Platonist and tended to read Plato into everything, he omits details from the myth that he perceives as superfluous, and he was writing at least two-and-a-half millennia after the fact. I will be following his version of the myth, but no matter what, we will be required to fill in gaps, ourselves.

What is worse, I myself am no interpreter of mysteries: I am a dummy compared to Plutarch, to say nothing of the Egyptian sages, and am—to my torment—befitting of the sorry age in which I live. So while I will attempt to grapple with the myth, be you certain that my interpretations are those of the Peristyle: I cannot, at present, hope to penetrate into the Naos. You will not find the True Ancient Wisdom here, only conjecture. I can barely read even basic Greek, and I have not studied Ancient Egypt in any depth: my only qualification is that peculiar badge, the love of Divinity, which renders one unfit to live among men. I can only hope that by seeking I may eventually attain, and that my attempts to explore the ancient wisdom may please those Divinities which I love.