The Seed of Life and the Mysteries

There's a very famous geometric pattern inscribed on the Temple of Osiris at Abydos, called the "Seed of Life," which looks like this:

Nobody really knows the formal significance of the shape, but I noticed something interesting about it while I was pondering the mysteries this evening.

Pythagoras was famously the first Greek to formally be initiated into the mysteries of the Osiris cult (though, of course, there must have been prior transmission since the Demeter and Dionysus mysteries are related). A generation later, Empedocles was initiated into the Pythagorean brotherhood, but later expelled for revealing the mysteries in writing. I conjecture that Empedocles' poem was derived from the Osiris cult, since it concerns the same phenomenon (the descent and reascent of the soul) and features the four gods:

τέσσαρα γὰρ πάντων ῥιζώματα πρῶτον ἄκουε·
Ζεὺς ἀργὴς Ἥρη τε φερέσβιος ἠδ' Ἀιδωνεύς,
Νῆστις θ' ἣ δακρύοις τέγγει κρούνωμα βρότειον.

First, hear of the four roots of all things:
shining Zeus and life-giving Hera and Aidoneus
and Nestis, who wets the springs of mortals with her tears.

It seems pretty reasonable to equate Osiris with Zeus, Hera with Isis, Set with Hades, and Nephthys with Nestis. Now Empedocles talks about how the roots begin united in Love, but peel off one at a time as Strife begins to intervene: first fire, then air, then water, then earth; this is the same as the first part of the Isis myth, where Osiris (fire) is killed, sealed in Set's box (air), dumped in the Nile (water), and encapsulated in a heather stalk (earth). We have a geometric symbol for the same thing: Pythagoras's tetractys, showing the progression of unity (1) into completion (10). It fits very nicely onto the Seed of Life:

Now, the second part of the myth has Osiris chopped into fourteen pieces, but his penis gets eaten by a fish and is never found, so Isis has to make do with the thirteen remaining pieces. Guess how many intersection points the Seed of Life has?

Finally, the last part of the myth has Horus (in place of Osiris) defeating Set and becoming king. This is a myth about the re-ascension of the soul back to its source: the three battles between Horus and Set are the rise from earth to water, water to air, and air to fire. (Diogenes Laertius tells us that Empedocles's Hera is earth, which makes sense to me in a roundabout way since Hera is Isis is Demeter is earth. Notice how, after the first battle, Horus deposes Isis by taking her crown, indicating the soul rising above earth.) Empedocles talks about that, too, since as Strife gives way to Love, the elements re-collapse into themselves in reverse of the way they separated. We might suppose that Pythagoras would have symbolized the regression of the cosmos from completion (10) back into unity (1) with a reverse tetractys, which, too, fits nicely onto the Seed of Life:

So if Pythagoras and Empedocles are (as I conjecture) faithful interpreters of the Isis, Osiris, and Horus mysteries (or if they aren't but my crazed speculation is at least somewhat valid anyway), then the Seed of Life is a nice little mnemonic for the exploration and contemplation of them. Hopefully that's helpful, since I continue to have a lot of contemplation ahead of me...