Isis and Osiris V: Eat the Path

[sdi]

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Find the right way down through the maze, to the food, then find the exit. Push the exit button. If the food tastes awful, don't eat it, go back and try another way.

They want the same thing that you do, really, they want a path, just like you. You are in a maze in a maze, but which one counts? Your maze, their maze, my maze. Or are the mazes all the same, defined by the limits of their paths? [...]

There is only one path and that is the path that you take, but you can take more than one path. Cross over the cell bars, find a new maze, make the maze from it's path, find the cell bars, cross over the bars, find a maze, make the maze from its path, eat the food, eat the path.

(Greg Kirkpatrick, Marathon Infinity XVII "Eat the Path")

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Unpacking the mysteries is like navigating a maze: you take the path you think is right, but sometimes you hit a dead end and need to double-back; usually you don't have to double-back too far, and so you can catch it before you draw your line on the page, but sometimes the dead end is very deep and you need to erase the line you already drew. But, of course, I'm posting these essays online as I go, and they're written in ink, and I can't erase them.

This is all to say that while my unpacking of the myth so far seems to be internally consistent, I ran into two things this week that caused me to doubt my analysis, and the issue is fundamental enough that I think I need to backtrack quite a bit.

The first is that I spent a good while examining the etymology of all the names mentioned in both the Isis and Demeter myths, but especially those of Isis and Osiris. These are made complicated by the fact that Egyptian linguists have been arguing over etymology for over a century and are no closer to a solution than they were when they started, due to (it seems to me) a combination of institutional inertia and overspecialization. My guesswork is speculative, and yet it led me somewhere interesting nonetheless:

• English Isis is from Greek Ἶσις, which is from Egyptian 𓊨𓏏 (Ꜣusat), which is the logogram of a throne with a feminine noun suffix: hence Isis is "the seat."

• English Osiris is from Greek Ὄσιρις, which is from Egyptian 𓊨𓁹 (Ꜣusjrj), which is the logogram of a throne with the verb "to create, to do:" hence Osiris is something approximating "the creation or action of the seat."

The second is that I found a haunting few lines in a third century BC hymn to Isis inscribed in her temple at Philae:

For she is the Lady of Heaven,
Her man is the Lord of Duat,
Her son is the Lord of the Earth.

Think about those for a moment.

Both of them point to something much more akin to Plotinus's emanationism than what I have been working with: taking the soul as "the seat" of consciousness, then Isis is a god, the prototype of the human soul; Osiris is the emanation of Isis, a daimon, and the prototype of the human imagination (Plotinus's "lower soul," Porphyry's "pneumatic vehicle"); then, finally Horus is the emanation of Isis via Osiris, a human, and the prototype of the human body. We might say that Isis is symbolised by Sirius (cf. Plutarch, Isis and Osiris XXI), which is the brightest star of Heaven and, to the Egyptian, brought the flooding of the Nile and life; Osiris is symbolized by the planet Venus (cf. Joachim Friedrich Quack, The Planets in Ancient Egypt), which is the brightest planet of Duat and lives an amphibious life as a morning star (when alive) and an evening star (when dead); Horus is symbolized by the role of Pharaoh, who is the first among humans, but is not himself a man but rather a succession of men invested with the role, some better, some worse.

If that's right, we start to see where the philosophy of the ancients comes from: every individual is a reflection of these prototypes, being composed of a single god illuminating an dual daimon illuminating an indefinite sequence of humans until philosophy fills up the god and allows them to pull their daimon back together into one piece... which is really a just sketch of what the myth is all about anyhow. I had been hesitant to read such a thing into Isis and Osiris, since I had been working on the assumption that Plotinus was doing his own weird thing and reading it all into Plato, but now it seems to me that there was at least some amount of continuity of tradition going back millennia, and it's plausible to use such a model for interpreting the myth. Unfortunately, this means that my analysis of the theogony at the beginning, and everything stemming from it, is flawed. So I am going to have to sit with it awhile, feel my way through my doubts, and see where I'm led. Clearly, I am being led somewhere, though, as in hindsight it is obvious that my angel fed me Sallustius in preparation for Plotinus, and Plotinus in preparation for Plutarch!

In the meantime, I'll leave you with something I was wondering about. Diodorus says (in the Library of History I xcvi) that the mysteries of Demeter are just the mysteries of Isis with the names changed, and having read both myths, I was inclined to agree... until I ran across that hymn. See, in Egypt, the soul (Isis) and the imagination (Osiris) were married and the body (Horus) was produced by them, together: not a thing to be reviled, but rather celebrated (though, of course, raised and educated with great care). In Eleusis, however, the soul (Demeter) stood apart and the imagination (Persephone) and body (Hades) were uneasily married, making the body something of an enemy to be fought and ultimately defeated. That difference in emphasis seems to me very significant. It crept into Greek philosophy and, from there, spread all throughout the Western worldview. I wonder whether the shift in the mythic family structure was intentional or accidental. I wonder what good it has done, weighed against what harm it has done...

I suppose apprehending such great mysteries are too much for a man. I will content myself in trying to apprehend my little, lesser mystery: it is enough. May you all have a contemplative Autumnal equinox tomorrow, as Osiris and Kore descend again.