The Egyptian saviour: the chief deity of death, and the only god to rival the solar cult of Ra.

Osiris (Ausar) represents the Divine Masculine-manifester of good and truth. Osiris is the masculine archetype for Spirit.

Husband of Isis, father of Horus and Anubis, brother of Set and Nephthys, son of Nuit and Geb. Osiris manifests the divine in mortal form.

Osiris was depicted as a bearded man, either green or black in colour, wearing the Crown of Upper Egypt, and swathed like a mummy. In his hands were a flail and a crook, insignia of the chthonic power vested in this dying and rising god. Credited with the introduction of agriculture and several crafts, Osiris was also the initiator of religious rituals, especially the mysteries surrounding the process of embalmment and mummification. At Zedu the mummy of Osiris himself was to be seen. The preservation of the body was regarded as essential for eternal life. Without a body there could be no survival after death. In addition to the body the Egyptians acknowledged the existence of a ba and a ka. While the ba was the soul, and pictured as a bird with a human head, the ka acted as a kind of guardian double of the body which was born with it and stayed on as a companion in the world of the dead.

Osiris represented the physical creation and its cycles of death and renewal / cyclic regeneration; and is connected to the cyclical number of 7 and its multiples-7 days of the week, 7 colours of the spectrum etc. Osiris’ sacred symbol is the Tet (Djed) pillar, which consists of seven steps. This is reminiscent of the doctrine of chakras in the Indian kundalini system of yoga, which is much younger than the Ancient Egyptian traditions.

The seven centres of the Tet (Djed) pillar represent the seven metaphorical rungs of the ladder leading from matter to spirit. Since humanity is a microcosm of the cosmic pattern, the Tet pillar represents a microcosm of the universe. Despite his mythical death and dismemberment, Ausar (Osiris) represents The Holy Spirit-mortal humanity carrying within itself the capacity and power of spiritual salvation.

At first only the pharaohs became Osirises on death, being identified with the god of the dead as their successors were with Horus, the son of Osiris. From the third millennium BC onwards all men able to pass the judgement of good and evil might achieve such salvation. Before Osiris and his forty-two assessors stood the scales of judgement, attended by Anubis, who placed the soul in the balance against the feather of truth, (Maat) while the record-keeper Thoth inscribed on his palette the result of the weighing. For the unfortunate waited a monster, part crocodile, part lion, and part hippopotamus: it was Am-mut, ‘eater of the dead’. In Egyptian cosmology the ‘other land’ of the departed was situated on the western horizon, where daily the sun disappeared with its light and life-giving warmth, and from which point descended on the Nile valley not only darkness but the chill winds of the rapidly cooling deserts.

In myth Osiris is drowned, dismembered, and scattered over land and water. He was shut in a chest or sarcophagus and dumped in the Nile by his brother Seth. ‘The drowned one’ floated down the river through one of the mouths of the delta into the Mediterranean Sea, and was carried to the port of Byblos. There he was discovered by Isis, his wife and sister, and daughter of the earth god Geb. Out of envy for the happiness of Osiris and Isis arose the undying enmity of Seth, who soon seized the coffin containing the dead god, cut the corpse into more than fourteen pieces, and scattered them throughout the land of Egypt. Again Isis sought her husband and with the assistance of Nut, the mother of Osiris, she resurrected the body, all except his genitals; these had been consumed by fishes. The reborn god, however, did not stay on earth, but became the lord of the departed in the infertile ‘other land’. Another legend suggests Isis buried each piece of Osiris where she found it, thus spreading the potency of the god everywhere. Horus, the son Isis miraculously conceived of the dead god, was to be the avenger.

As a prototype of the resurrected dead man, Osiris and his cult spread widely, and during the Roman Empire assumed the form of a major religious sect in many provinces. One view of the origin of the myth is that the god was an historical king who at a remote period reigned over Egypt from his capital in the delta. His violent death could have been the result of an insurrection by Ombos, the city sacred to Seth in Upper Egypt. The divided kingdom according to this version was reunited by the king's son, deified as Horus, who slew the rebellious Seth. An alternative explanation places emphasis on the death and resurrection of Osiris, the vegetation god reborn through the annual inundation of the Nile.