The ancient Egyptians were devoted to Osiris as an archetype of the ideal man and in particular the resurrected or reborn man: he who while alive has suffered a symbolic death, his material attachment to life cut off, so to speak, so that he is born again in the spirit, and after death attains to immortality. The magical phallus Isis makes for him from a staff of wood is one symbol for this.

Osiris is a vegetative deity, like Jesus and Dionysus, but as an archetype of the ideal man, he also represents the philosopher king. Upright and righteous, like a Pharaoh in the truest sense, another symbol closely associated with Osiris is the mysterious Djed, a pillar thought to be a symbol of the god’s backbone or a tree; nobody knows exactly how to interpret it. Quite possibly it was an actual implement used in fertility rituals. Drawing on my experience of yoga, I might suppose it represents the central column of the “subtle body,” the nonmaterial aspect of the human form, about which the alchemists also speak.

Osiris is wise and just, a father figure, to be sure, and the leader we would all like follow and emulate. Such a father governs his house on the basis of the loving respect he naturally evokes from his children; as G.I Gurdjieff puts it, when he looks into a roomful of children, they quiet down, not out of fear, but because they wish to be worthy of his love.

Scholars speculate that originally Osiris might have been an actual man, a culture hero who came to be venerated from the times of pre-dynastic Egypt (around 2,500 BCE) onward. Did he arrive in the Black Land from afar, literally carrying seeds to its fertile soils, and with knowledge and technology superior to that of the natives, forever alter the course of civilization in the Nile Valley? Another culture hero, Quetzalcoatl of the Mesoamerican pantheon comes to mind, whose emblem is the morning star, a symbol of enlightenment and cosmic order; termed the Plumed Serpent, he unites the spiritual power of Earth and Sky, and like Osiris, also symbolizes the recreation or resurrection of humanity in a spiritualized form.

The mythology of Osiris credits him with the invention of agriculture, the domestication of flocks, and the creation of civil law; in other words, he is a “husbandman,” a force for growth and cultivation, the epitome of what the Jungians might call Masculine consciousness working at its civilizing best.

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While I was living and working in Qatar, a small Islamic state whose monarch, or emir, seemed exemplary, I often found myself contemplating the Osiris archetype. Although the ancient Egyptian mythology might not in itself have any resonance for the contemporary Arabs and Muslims, still the inspirational presence and many progressive endeavors of the Qatari emir and his queen, or sheikha, were obvious. Born and bred as an American, I believe in the official separation of religion and state, and yet I couldn’t help but wonder if Qatar would succeed where other Middle Eastern states were failing; that is, would its traditional values as an Arab culture and its particular interpretation of sharia or Islamic law remain relevant in a wealthy, rapidly modernizing society? (Expatriates such as myself were not subject to sharia in the same ways as Muslims.) The answer to this question is not within the scope of this essay, and yet, in various ways, the issues at stake point up the persistence and importance of psychological archetypes to human beings, in particular, our desire to comprehend for both cosmic and worldly orders.

I went to work in Qatar in part because of the momentous spiritual experiences I’d had while traveling through Egypt in the 1990’s. Ancient Egypt as well as contemporary Egypt were never far from my thoughts during my Qatar years, (2005 – 2009.) Many Egyptians live and work in Qatar and other prosperous Gulf Arab countries, and the cultural signifiers of Pharaonic Eqypt are to be encountered everywhere, for example in the décor of my apartment building. Moreover, Qatar has professed that through the use of its tremendous petroleum wealth, it wants to become a knowledge-based economy: I was myself helping to manifest that by teaching writing at a branch of Weill Cornell Medical College in the capital city, Doha.

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For the ancients, Osiris is not the inventor of language and science – Thoth, his brother, whom the Greeks identified with Hermes, did that – nor is he an embodiment of the transcendental Logos, which the Christians refer to as the “Word” whose vibration as Light creates and sustains the universe. Horus, the son of Osiris (who is also paradoxically as old or older than his father) is more of a representation of that power. But like Jesus, Osiris dies and then returns and ultimately becomes the judge of souls in the afterlife. His rites of worship probably initiated devotees so that henceforth they could each become “an Osiris”: upright with integrity while alive, well prepared for death, and then fearless while traversing the Duat, the underworld, after life. At the moment of judgment, once their souls have been separated from their bodies, if their hearts weigh less on the scales of the goddess Maat than does her feather, worthy souls eventually enter a paradise envisaged to be quite similar to Egypt itself. The Black Land, ancient Kemi, was so beloved by its denizens that it seems they couldn’t think of leaving it altogether behind: “the mirror of heaven” they called it.

Osiris is fertility, and so his domain is associated with both the underworld and with the seed’s regeneration in the black earth; he is associated with “death-like” restorative sleep, and especially with the interval after the husks of the souls (nine in all) are separated from the mortal body, when he oversees their final judgment. His son, Anubis, the black canine headed god (like the other Efgyptian deities, more properly called a neter, a term not easily translatable) is the lord of embalming. Anubis also acts as a psychopomp, a guide or “soul protector,” similar to Hermes, for those who travel in their subtle bodies not only at death, but also on other occasions, such as in dreams during life.

The resurrected power of the green shoot that shatters the husk of the dormant seed: the shaft of wheat, the grain, the loaf of bread and the cup of beer, the contentment that being “civilized” intends -- prosperity, security, a way through this world and a reward in the next -- this is the Osirian Way. Green is the color naturally associated with him. He is pictured in papyrus paintings and on tomb walls wrapped in mummy bandages from which his green hands emerge like twin cotyledons, royal hands that grasp the crook and flail, indicating that he is the divine herdsman, the husker of grain, the ruler beyond the grave. A further similarity that Osiris has with Jesus, is that he seems to have been a personal god who assures salvation to his followers. Perhaps he was invoked to intercede and help expiate bad karma -- or so the esoteric Egyptologist R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz posits. Schwaller surmises further that the Osirian Way was along a path of successive reincarnations, similar to what Hinduism and Buddhism teach and to what Christianity also used to purport.

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Once Kemi had opened its books of stone to me, once I had glimpsed with opened eyes some of its architectural and sculptural wonders, and my heart had been deeply and unexpectedly touched, it was no longer possible for me to think of the Pharaonic Egyptians anything like an ancient heathen people yoked under millennia of despotic rule. Almost certainly they used slaves, but slaves don’t tend to make superlative art and architecture under the lash. To condemn or dismiss them as the captors of the ancient Hebrews misses the mark, as it does to conceive of them as superstitious stone workers and engineers, whose priestly castes and aristocracies prospered on the backs of agricultural peasants, or fellaheen. Having myself been so deeply moved emotionally by the artifacts of Pharaonic Egypt, I cannot see those works merely as monuments to animal headed gods and egoistic kings. It is similarly impossible for me to think of them only as a obsessed with sorcery, magical idols, death, mummification, and words of power to open the doors of the Duat.

Of course these stories and more run together in our collective imagination of ancient Egypt, in part, thanks to the Hollywood versions we’ve all been exposed to. I think that an important underlying reason for our mistaken perspectives is that Egypt’s secrets were handed down orally through the centuries, and so, its phenomenally long history as an intact culture -- at least three thousand years – and its monumental artifacts can seem utterly incomprehensible to us. Like other Egyptophiles, I have my own beliefs and suppositions about who they were and why and how they built their civilization, and yet, I find my greatest inspiration in the thought them being human, albeit with much knowledge that modern civilizations do not possess.

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Ideal man, perfect ruler, perfect husband, beloved of Isis, his divine sister and queen –
that Osiris is a bit much, isn’t he?

And so, according to the well known myth, their jealous brother Set sets about to disrupt things: he boxes Osiris in a fantastic sarcophagus, having previously taken his measure so the coffin would fit him perfectly (as, say, the glass slipper of another fable matched the one for whom it was intended.) This occurs at a divine party where we might also imagine the Nile beer is flowing merrily, a punch fortified by destiny, for the myth has a cosmic pattern to uncork. Once Osiris is plastered, wicked brother Set knocks the Green God into the box and then with his crew of accomplices quickly seals the casket with lead, tosses it into the Nile, and leaves Osiris for dead. We can imagine how he thought that Isis and the kingdom would now be his; we can remember another such archetypal act of betrayal from a drama that includes a certain Claudius, a queen Gertrude, and an avenging son, Hamlet.

Isis through her ceaseless searching finds the coffin, yet before she can bring her husband completely back to life, she loses him once again. Worst: Set is not deterred, and now he chops his brother’s body into pieces, scattering them far and wide throughout the Nile Valley. This presents a more difficult task to Isis, but with the help of her sister Nepthys, the one-time spouse of Set, and Anubis, whom Osiris had fathered with Nepthys once upon a dark night when he mistook her for her sister(!), at last Isis gathers and reconnects all the scattered limbs of the Green Man – all but one, the phallus that a Nile fish had swallowed. Undeterred, she works her magic once more, fashioning a wand of living wood to take the place of the missing member. Then, in the form of a fork-tailed bird, a kite perhaps, a type of hawk, Isis hovers over the corpse, bringing her husband together with herself. Their son Horus is thus conceived: the falcon headed hero who, unlike the perplexed Danish prince of that other story, is immediately ready to avenge his father.

Over the centuries, Isis would come to be loved and worshipped throughout the entire Mediterranean region, well beyond the Nile Valley. Meditating on the symbolism of her mythology, the alchemists (whose name derives from the Arabic for the Black Land, Al Kemi ) would recognize the immense importance to them of their wives and female assistants, and such a partner would come to be called a soror mystica, Latin for “mystical sister.” The implication in this for the spiritual quest is that relatedness with another person (or persons) is a means by which the archetypal Feminine part of the psyche, what Carl Jung called the anima, must be integrated with the archetypally Masculine drives toward action. Regardless of whether we ourselves are biologically male or female, it is through our relationships that we encounter certain aspects of ourselves otherwise eclipsed by egoistic self absorption. By relating to others, we come to a greater sense of wholeness within ourselves.

In the Osirian cycle it is clear how the king needs his queen, and also how necessary he is to her. Brother Set, the villain of the story, at first glance seems to be a purely Satanic figure -- Shetan, the Arabic word for Satan, probably descends from the ancient Egyptian name, Set. In the myth, he must eventually face the righteous wrath of his nephew Horus. Horus the Avenger, this shining young hero is called: Horus Bedheti. His emblem is the winged disk of the sun, the bhedheti that triumphs over darkness every morning on Earth. During their combat Horus will lose an eye, and Set a testicle. (Later, Thoth will restore that eye to Horus, and it will symbolically be reproduced as the powerful amulet against evil, the Wedjet, variations of which are still used throughout the Middle East to repel the evil eye.) At the climax of the battle royal, in the papyrus swamps of the Nile, Set transforms himself into a violent hippopotamus, and Horus, harpoon ready in his hand, standing in the prow of his sleek boat stalks him. Finally Horus traps the hippo in his net, but just as the hero prepares to execute him -- the beast at the tip of his harpoon -- the other gods intervene to halt the contest: it appears that the cosmic order requires that Set, the archetypal negating force, the necessary opponent, also has a role to play in how things go in the universe.

You can still read the story in pictures from the weather-worn relief sculptures carved about the outer walls at the Edfu temple in the Nile Valley. And at the entrance to the vestibule, flanking it right and left are two superb granite statues of the falcon Horus, one of them still wearing the double-crown of the Two Lands, Upper and Lower Egypt. The expression of these faces goes beyond considerations of naturalism and awe at the stunning craftsmanship of the ancient sculptor: here is the picture of spiritual power and authority, poised and prepared in the name of justice. Here is the evocation of a principle that transcends any commonplace idea about idolatry. Sign and symbol become secondary, for one who can, as the Sufi mystics say, see with the eyes of the heart. This is sacred art.

Edfu, like the Temple of Isis at Philae, is remarkably well preserved, partly because they are of the Ptolemaic period, a mere 2,000 years ago. At that time, Nile culture was generally in decline at the hands of the Romans, and yet Edfu still communicates through its spatial harmonics and sheer physical bulk the irresistible presence of the Horus energy. As with the other late era temples, Schwaller de Lubicz posits that the extant version stands where previous incarnations had also once “lived” in earlier centuries along the eternal Nile.
to be continued. . .

 

Peter Fortunato received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where he held the Randall Jarrell Fellowship in Poetry. His most recent book is Late Morning: New and Selected Poems. He is a Certified Hypnotherapist in private practice in Ithaca, New York. Learn more at www.peterfortunato.wordpress.com