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Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb. And I am Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday. We are heading into the vault for an older episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. This is part two of our series on Osiris. This episode originally published April 4th, 2024. All right, let's jump right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.
And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part two of our discussion of Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of fertility, an embodiment of kingship, especially dead kingship, and the lord and judge of the dead. Yeah, also an agricultural god. There's a lot of complexity to Osiris. And so in the last episode, we basically talked about who this figure of Osiris is,
Where and when he emerges from, as much as we can answer that question, and the basic canon of myth surrounding him.
And the fact that you were inspired to do this topic because we covered the movie Dr. Fives Rises Again. Yeah, yeah. Like 75% Dr. Fives, maybe 25% Easter. So props to Dr. Fives and Jesus for inspiring this episode. Now, before we get into some, we are going to get into some additional questions that we teased last time about comparisons to be made between the figure of Osiris and other deities.
in other religions. But before we do that, I want to come back to a deity that I mentioned in the last episode, towards the end of it, and that is the Greco-Egyptian syncretic deity Serapis. This is the deity that is established under the rule of the Ptolemies,
in Egypt, a god that combines elements of Osiris and Apis, the sacred bull. These are both, again, Egyptian deities, along with various Greek deities like Zeus and Hades.
So I just wanted to add a little more context on this because I don't think I explained the scenario as well as I could have or didn't go into as much detail as I could have in a way that I think benefits our understanding. Because we get into this idea, again, of kind of like an amalgam God that is to a certain degree kind of built by committee with a certain purpose in mind. And that purpose is not just like, oh, I have to figure out what God is real and I must convene with it and get its blessings. Right.
Rob, in our outline, you have attached a photo of a sculpture of Serapis seated on a throne or at least on a chair, sort of dressed in a robe and holding up some kind of wand or maybe a scroll, a baton of some sort of cylindrical object. But under his other hand, there's a very good boy. It is the three-headed Hound of Hades, Cerberus. That's right. Looking very loyal, very domesticated right there by his side.
There are various, you can easily do a Google search on Serapis, that's S-E-R-A-P-I-S, and you'll find various images that basically fit this, sometimes it's just the head, sometimes you see the full body, sometimes Cerberus is there, sometimes not.
But I do have to drive home like the utter Greekness of this image, because this will be important to bring come back to later. Like this is a very Greek looking God. If you didn't know exactly what deity this is or what figure this is, you you wouldn't have to know much at all about iconography and sculpture and depictions of the divine to say, oh, this this looks very Greek to me. Yeah, it's certainly a Greek art style.
Yeah. And of course, yeah. And then the three-headed dog right out of Greek mythology. So I'll come back to Serapis here in a second. But just to back up a little bit, I do want to drive home that Egypt experienced foreign rule at various points throughout its long history.
There were the Hyksos, which I believe we've talked about a little bit on the show before. This is a term that means rulers of foreign lands, and they controlled the delta region of Egypt during the 17th century BCE. These were the first foreigners to rule over part of Egypt, and there's much that's not known about them, with various theories about their exact origin, though it seems that some sort of Canaanite origin is possible, and there has also been some evidence to suggest that it was perhaps
not an outward invasion, but an uprising of peoples who had previously immigrated to the region. So there's a lot of scholarly dispute on exactly who these people were and what this time period consisted of. Now, subsequent invasions by the Nubians, the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks also occurred. But pertinent to our discussion here is that in 332 BCE, Macedonian king Alexander the Great
conquered Egypt from the Persians. And after his death, after Alexander's death in 323 BCE, likely by either poison or disease—he was only 32 at the time, so there's a lot of arguments for the poison theory here—but after he dies, a Macedonian general that had served under Alexander by the name of Ptolemy declared himself ruler of Egypt, and the Ptolemy family would rule Egypt for three centuries.
So in her book Egyptian mythology that I cited in the last episode Geraldine pinch writes a little bit about this and points out that the Ptolemies ruled from Alexandria and
And that's of course where they built the great library of Alexandria. Though most of its contents, she points out, would not have concerned Egyptian culture, Egyptian history, and Egyptian mythology. You know, Greek culture was very much the focal point of the lost contents of this place. Most of the Ptolemies apparently never learned to speak Egyptian, but they did, she says, recognize the challenges of governing a multicultural society and keeping powerful Egyptian factions content.
And this is ultimately where the invention of Serapis comes into play, which she describes as, quote, a symbol of cultural fusion. So Serapis is often described as a patron deity for the Ptolemy capital of Alexandria. So, again, a unifying entity. And also in combining all these elements, Serapis becomes a god of not only fertility and the underworld, which we're already loaded in our concept of Osiris, but also he becomes the god of the sun.
in the sky, and he's sometimes credited in this role as Zeus Serapis. And it's interesting that by absorbing these various powers, he essentially becomes a god of everything, sort of a monotheism by monopoly or something like that.
One God among many increasingly absorbing more and more responsibilities. Yeah, like I was trying to think of it in terms of like what's a secular example of like have team mascots ever been merged into single mascots for, you know, like the unification of sports teams? Have the mascots of...
Oh, I don't know. I don't know. Fast food chains ever been utilized in this fashion? Like, well, you know, the Shoney's has been taken over by McDonald's and now the Shoney's boy or the Shoney's bear must be combined with elements of of, you know, the Ronald McDonald or Grimace or something, you know, like that's.
That is funny, but that does kind of imply a necessary competition, like between sports teams or between competitors within a market space, whereas that wasn't always the case for gods. I mean, like you could, you know, worship multiple gods, and that wasn't usually a problem. Yeah. But here we see this intentional attempt to
to create a deity and create a followership of this deity that has stabilizing political objectives behind it. Oh, and real quick, just because this plays into something we talked about in the last episode, is we're stressing that ISIS remains a separate entity. So it's not like they just took everything and threw it into this concept of the god. That would be too much, I imagine. But distinct gods are combined into this entity. Hmm.
Now, according to Lauren Murphy and Beware Greeks Bearing Gods, Serapis is a cross-cultural deity published in the journal Amphora in 2021. The invented God doesn't seem to have unified the people in any meaningful way, as far as we can tell. But it does stand as an example of the diversity that was present in Egypt at the time.
But it was the religion of the ruling class of foreigners and those wishing to mix with that ruling class of foreigners. And also, it seems like there were possible connections to an inspiration via a pre-Ptolemaic cult of Osiris Apis.
As one can see in images of Serapis, he's predominantly depicted as a Greek deity, but it does sound like there might have already been some fusion of Osiris and Apis previously. This would not, it would seem not be out of character with Egyptian religion prior to outside influence. Now, the Ptolemaic line would, of course, end with its last ruler, Cleopatra, in 30 BCE.
And after this point, it was absorbed by the Roman Empire. Worship of Serapis lived on under Roman rule, but experienced eventual decline with the spread of Christianity during the 4th century CE. I should say the top-down mandated spread of Christianity in particular is the death blow to the cult of Serapis. So if Serapis is a kind of monotheism by monopoly, he's eventually replaced by actual monotheism.
And I think there's some discussion of whether the worship of a figure like Serapis helped pave the way for the rise of Christianity. I've seen that discussed, but at the very least, it seems like there are other factors involved here within the Roman Empire and regions affected by the Roman Empire. Interesting. Today's episode is brought to you by GoDaddy Arrow.
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But anyway, that's enough on Serapis. Let's get back to the original deity, but then also into some of these conversations about Osiris' possible connection with other cultural traditions. Let's return to Osiris. Right. So, Rob, when we were initially looking at this topic, I was, you know, asking, is there anything you wanted me to look into? And what you suggested was a question that I had read a little bit about before, but I was quite intrigued to go deeper into. Yeah.
And this is a question that has been widely explored in the comparative study of religion. The connecting principle, or lack thereof, between Osiris and other gods from the ancient world, most controversially the Christian Jesus, who are believed to in some way die and then rise again. So resurrected gods. Yeah.
This question will take us back to our old friend, James G. Fraser, and his incredibly popular, influential, and controversial work, The Golden Bough, which this was a book published in several volumes over the course of a couple of decades, beginning in 1890. Fraser was a Scottish scholar of religion and folklore who lived 1854 to 1941, and The Golden Bough is his best-known work. In
In this book, Fraser catalogs and analyzes a huge number of myths, rituals, and magical beliefs from cultures around the world. So he sources these observations both from records of things believed in the ancient world, ancient myths and practices in the Greco-Roman world and so forth, but also he sources information
this from ethnographic observations that people have made of just beliefs and magical practices in cultures all around the globe.
Using these observations ultimately to support his broader theses, which include the idea that the ritual and mythic elements shared by most ancient religions point back to an originating cult practice that involved the ritual sacrifice of a holy king or guardian figure, often when his fertility was waning.
and the linkage of that practice to the seasonal rebirth of nature and the crops. So his framework has a core of this sacrifice of a divine figure, often a divine king, and a cycle of death and rebirth that has some implications for nature. You can see why this would be relevant to the question at hand. Now, before we get into the specifics of resurrected gods,
a couple of general notes on Fraser and the Golden Bough. I am not at all an expert in religious anthropology, but my personal take on the Golden Bough is that it is, on one hand, worth reading because it's important in understanding the history of Western scholarship on comparative religion. And it's also just a very absorbing and fascinating text. But on the other hand,
This is like a hundred to hundred and thirty year old book making the case for a sweeping theory of world religions and it should be read with the caution you might expect for that kind of work. So I would not take any of its claims specific or general at face value without checking for confirmation in other sources.
I would also be skeptical of his core theoretical framework. And I would just warn that from research we have done on this book in the past, I recall discovering that some of Fraser's presentation of ethnographic information about religious practices seems often tailored or cherry-picked to fit his theories. Now, the next general note, I don't know if what I'm about to say is completely fair because Fraser doesn't
say the following exactly, but I think one of the informal conclusions that a reader is likely to take away from The Golden Bough is that when it comes down to it, all religions are basically the same, and the differences between them are incidental and superficial, which I would argue is not correct. And even if that's just an unintended takeaway that people would get from this book, I think that's a conclusion that I would really stress people should resist. And I think that's
I do think there are common themes that you will find popping up again and again in many religions, but not all.
And I also think that the differences between religious beliefs and practices around the world and throughout history do go quite deep. Those differences are significant. They're not just superficial variations on the same thing. And some religions end up serving profoundly different purposes. So personally, I wonder if the desire to locate so much sameness or commonality between different religions is
is something that really is not something that comes out of the religions themselves, but more emerges from the need of scholars to have a theory that explains how religions work and where they come from, when in fact it's a very just like messy, complicated, variegated phenomenon that, you know, lots of different factors are at work. And so it's hard to have a very simple theory that explains where they come from.
Yeah, I mean, even like the discussion we just had about Serapis and Serapis' origins and all, I mean, that doesn't fully capture what this entity may have meant and the various additional complexities that may have been involved in the genesis of this figure. So, yeah, when you get into religion, when you get into belief and you get into these, into a process that often, you know,
You're talking about a tradition that goes for centuries and therefore has all sorts of room for change and alteration and transformation and so forth. That's right. Exactly. Exactly. But anyway, to come back to these resurrected gods, a big part of Fraser's model was that many religions of the ancient world commonly shared a dying and reviving god, usually a male deity that
associated with fertility, who undergoes a divine marriage to a fertility goddess, who is then killed or sacrificed, sometimes when his fertility wanes in some way, and then rises from death to live again. And this resurrection is linked to cycles of loss and return in the natural and political world, such as the seasons,
The death of plants in winter and the rebirth in spring and summer, the seasonal inundation of the Nile and other natural cycles and political cycles like the death of kings and the coronation of their heirs. So the question is, do we really find these dying and rising gods all throughout the ancient religions?
Unfortunately, if you look into this question, I think you find the topic horribly polluted by a lot of motivated argumentation, primarily tracing back to the question of whether Jesus of Nazareth should be thought of as one of these dying and rising deities. So this topic is infected by both Christian apologetics and anti-Christian polemics. So you've got, you
You know, people who don't like Christianity, anti-Christian polemicists arguing, look, see how stupid Christianity is. Jesus is just a copy of these other dying and rising deities. And then you've got Christian apologists arguing that, no, Christianity is totally unique. It is unlike any other religion on Earth because it is the one true religion. And all such comparisons are spurious.
So caveat that there is a lot of that kind of garbage floating around in both directions. I'm trying to do my best to put together a clear and what seems to me relatively unbiased answer to the question of what similarities exist between these alleged dying and rising gods and to what extent Osiris and Jesus fit into that mold. Yeah, the real tragedy is that it just makes it almost impossible for these two to ever hang out.
Yeah. Well, all of Jesus's friends are saying Osiris is just trying to be like Jesus and all of Osiris's friends are saying Jesus is just trying to be like him. Yeah. Will the accusations of copying never stop? But anyway, so of course, the dying and reviving deities framework was popular with Fraser and his allies, who I think in the early 20th century were sort of associated with Cambridge University.
So I want to go through a couple of the examples that Fraser cites, and then we'll get into critiques of them. So one example is the god Adonis, a figure in Greek myth thought to have been derived from other ancient Near Eastern deities, such as the Mesopotamian god of agriculture, Temus or Demusii.
Adonis, in many tellings, began as a mortal man famed for his beauty. He was sort of the pinnacle of hotness. And he was so handsome that when he was young, the goddesses Aphrodite and Persephone fought bitterly over whether he would live with one of them or the other. More on that myth in a minute.
But then another story is that later in his life, Adonis was the lover of Aphrodite until he was tragically impaled by a wild boar while hunting. So it gets the tusk right in the guts. Yeah.
And so he's out there dying in the wilderness on the hunt. And the goddess Aphrodite comes and weeps over his body. And as her tears fall and Adonis' blood runs down into the earth, the ground produces delicate flowers. Sometimes a specific type of flower is named. So like, you know, you've got in some understandings of the story, the body fluids of these divine lovers combine upon the young man's death and bring forth the fruits of the earth. Yeah.
And to try to understand the significance of this figure, Fraser starts looking at celebrations of the death of Adonis. There was a festival or a sort of commemoration of the death of Adonis that was celebrated in the summertime.
And Fraser looks at accounts of this ritual. So Fraser says, quote, At Alexandria, images of Aphrodite and Adonis were displayed on two couches. Beside them were set ripe fruits of all kinds, cakes, plants growing in flowerpots, and green bowers twined with anise. The marriage of the lovers was celebrated one day, and then, on the morrow, women attired as mourners with streaming hair and bared breasts were
And after describing more of these rituals, Fraser says, summarizing,
"...we may therefore accept as probable an explanation of the Adonis worship which accords so well with the facts of nature and with the analogy of similar rites in other lands. Moreover, the explanation is countenanced by a considerable body of opinion amongst the ancients themselves, who again and again interpreted the dying and reviving God as the reaped and sprouting grain."
Fraser also cites Tammuz, the Mesopotamian god from which Adonis is probably derived. Tammuz was the consort of the goddess Inanna and was also linked to crop cycles and apparently images of death and rebirth.
Among many gods Fraser offers as displaying death and resurrection, he also cites the Egyptian god Osiris. Now, of course, we already went over the basic myth of Osiris, but what does Fraser have to say about the meaning of Osiris here? So I'm going to read a couple of lengthier quotes from Fraser here on Osiris. Quote, "...in the resurrection of Osiris, the Egyptians saw the pledge of a life everlasting for themselves beyond the grave."
They believed that every man would live eternally in the other world if only his surviving friends did for his body what the gods had done for the body of Osiris. Hence, the ceremonies observed by the Egyptians over the human dead were an exact copy of those which Anubis, Horus, and the rest had performed over the dead god.
And then he goes on.
The mummy of the deceased was Osiris. The professional female mourners were his two sisters, Isis and Nephthys. Anubis, Horus, all the gods of the Osirian legend, gathered about the corpse. In this way, every dead Egyptian was identified with Osiris and bore his name.
From the Middle Kingdom onwards, it was the regular practice to address the deceased as Osiris so-and-so, as if he were the god himself, and to add the standing epithet true of speech, because true speech was characteristic of Osiris.
The thousands of inscribed and pictured tombs that have been opened in the Valley of the Nile prove that the mystery of the resurrection was performed for the benefit of every dead Egyptian. As Osiris died and rose again from the dead, so all men hope to arise like him from death to life eternal. So there's a kind of, in what Fraser is implying here, there's a kind of special role for Osiris, especially when compared to some of these other examples of
Yeah.
So one thing that, of course, causes controversy is that among many of these examples, Fraser also brings up the example of Christ, the Christian Jesus, drawing direct connection between the Easter resurrection of Christ and, say, the rituals of Adonis. This drew scorn from conservative Christians, of course, but you might expect that. But the question would remain, were these comparisons sound, comparisons between all these different figures?
And I think after doing some additional reading, I think the answer is a little bit, but mostly no. So later in the 20th century, Fraser's category of dying and reviving gods came under what seems to me like quite legitimate criticism by other major scholars. One notable name here is the American historian of religions, Jonathan Z. Smith, who was affiliated with the University of Chicago and
And directly addressing this question of dying and reviving gods, Smith wrote a highly cited entry in the Encyclopedia of Religion edited by Eliade. The entry was called Dying and Rising Gods. And in this chapter, Smith showed that really the category of dying and rising gods is
is not much of a category in that most of the items Fraser and others place within the class are, quote, based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts. In other words, this category emerges from reliance on questionable sources and on tortured readings of legitimate source materials to try to fit them into the resurrected God box.
So how would that be given what we just looked at? It seemed like Fraser presented some good examples. Well, Smith says that actually, if you look at the examples Fraser cites, there aren't any fully dying and rising gods. Instead, you have two distinct categories. One is dying gods. These are gods that die but are not said to rise again from death.
Okay, we may have to have some examples of this. Okay, well, Adonis has got you covered here. So I'm going to look in detail at the example of Adonis.
Smith says there are two main myths of Adonis that we know from our sources. One is the one I mentioned earlier, where Adonis is killed by a boar and his lover Aphrodite weeps over his body and creates a fragile flower.
So in this myth, Adonis dies, but he does not rise. Fraser sort of elides this by connecting the story to the morning celebration of Adonis's death with sort of the involvement of summer crops and plants and stuff like that.
But in the story, Adonis just dies. We'll get to the rituals in a second. But in the story, there's no resurrection. And the festival created by Aphrodite to commemorate his death is a festival of mourning. The other Adonis myth, to quote Smith here, tells of, quote, a quarrel between two goddesses, Aphrodite and Persephone, for the affections of the infant Adonis.
Zeus or Calliope decrees that Adonis should spend part of the year in the upper world with one, I assume with Aphrodite, and part of the year in the lower world with the other, I assume that would be Persephone. This tradition of bilocation, similar to that connected with Persephone and perhaps Demusae, has no suggestion of death and rebirth.
So you could argue maybe that going into the Underworld and then coming back to the Upper World has like resonance with the idea of resurrection. There's some kind of symbolic linkage. It's thematically similar, but it is not literally the same thing. Right. And I think that that becomes obvious when you look at any number of stories about characters venturing into the Underworld.
It generally has the flavor of a physical journey. And we see that even carried on into literary traditions, like even in Dante's Inferno. Like Dante does not die and descend into the Inferno. No, he travels there. Yeah. In some important senses, he is changed, but he doesn't he doesn't like have to go through bodily death. Right. Today's episode is brought to you by GoDaddy Arrow.
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But OK, so Fraser was also looking not just at like written versions of the Adonis myth, but also at rituals to see what people believed about him. So what about evidence for the resurrection of Adonis in ritual? In terms of ritual, there are later sources possibly linking Adonis to resurrection, but these sources are problematic, according to Jonathan Smith.
There is one allegedly second century source by Lucian that in a pretty sketchy and ambiguous way describes rituals, which could be interpreted as celebrating the resurrection of Adonis. But it's not clear at all that this is what Lucian is describing.
To quote from Smith's summary, Lucian says, quote, on the third day of the ritual, a statue of Adonis is, quote, brought out into the light and, quote, addressed as if alive.
And I was thinking, wait a minute, but aren't many cult statues addressed as if alive? Yeah, yeah. And you get into a complex area of interpretation when you figure out, like, what does it mean for someone to address a statue of a deity? Right. So a cult statue may have some kind of
eternal existence that it is connected to even if it is an image of a God who has died but that doesn't necessarily mean if you're like talking to the statue that the you believe that the God was was resurrected again from death yeah
And then Smith says that there are other descriptions of these rituals which do make unambiguous reference to the resurrection of Adonis, but they only show up later in the Roman period after the spread of Christianity. And they are written by Christians in a way that raises questions about them. Like, so if Christians are saying that worshipers of Adonis are saying Adonis was raised from the dead, then
Is the resurrected God theme of Christianity perhaps having some influence on the myth of Adonis by this point? Or is the resurrected God theme of Christianity influencing the way Christian observers interpret the rituals of Roman pagans? That's a very good point.
So Smith says, "...this pattern will recur for many of the figures considered, an indigenous mythology and ritual focusing on the deity's death and rituals of lamentation, followed by a later Christian report adding the element nowhere found in the earlier native sources that the god was resurrected."
I think that is a very interesting pattern. So like Christian observers look at other religions and they see a dead God and it's quite possible they just assume that a dead God is supposed to rise again and kind of read that into the ritual.
Yeah, yeah. I think then there's probably a case to be made even with like the spread of Christianity and like the reinterpretation often with, you know, an agenda of of tradition, local traditions, taking existing religious traditions and sort of reframing them in the light of the Christian religion.
Exactly. So what about the thing about symbolic rebirth? What about the ritual and mythic association that Fraser seems to allege between Adonis and plant life, which, you know, dies in the winter and is, quote, resurrected in spring?
Well, Smith says if you look at ancient sources, even these symbolic associations are not present in the worship of Adonis. Smith writes, quote, The frequently cited gardens of Adonis, the Kepoi, were proverbial illustrations of the brief, transitory nature of life and contain no hint of rebirth. The point is that the young plant shoots rapidly wither and die, not that the seeds have been reborn when they sprout.
So I thought that was also really interesting because I would just so easily and so naturally look at a sort of plant based ritual celebration and assume it had something to do with cycles of death and rebirth.
But that's an assumption that might not be what the people doing that practice think it means. So Smith is saying what ancient people said about these gardens was not that they were to emphasize the theme of resurrection, but to emphasize the theme once again of mourning and loss of the beautiful youth who died too soon, just like these young plant shoots that come up and then wither rapidly. Yeah.
I feel like this kind of thing makes me a little more cautious about my myth interpretation goggles. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. It even goes back to some of the ways that we discussed and cited discussions of Osiris in the first episode, you know, thinking about how this basic myth matches up with cyclical life and death and agricultural cycles as well. But OK, that's Adonis. What about Osiris?
It seems to me that of all the examples that Smith looks at, Osiris comes the closest to being genuinely killed and resurrected on a plain reading of the myth. But is he really resurrected?
Smith argues, no, Osiris is not actually resurrected because remember, of course, Osiris in the story is killed and dismembered by Seth or set. And then the pieces of his body are put back together again and he is rejuvenated, but not in this world. Instead, he goes on living in the other place in the underworld, the realm of the dead, where he is empowered to become the master and judge of the wandering dead. Smith argues, no, Osiris is not actually resurrected because remember, of course, Osiris is not actually resurrected.
So he does not rise from the dead. He goes on living in the afterlife. So it almost seems to me that his resurrection in the afterlife could be seen as kind of synonymous with his enthronement as the Lord of the dead and his empowerment to serve the role of judgment. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. And regarding the ritual reenactment of this story in Osiris worship practices, Smith says, quote, the repeated formula, rise up, you have not died, whether applied to Osiris or a citizen of Egypt, signaled a new permanent life in the realm of the dead.
That's right. Going back to what we said about the idea that Osiris is ultimately kind of the opener of the way that democratizes or helps propel the already existing democratization of the afterlife. It's no longer just for kings. It is now something that everyone has access to provided you can have the right mummification procedures performed on your body. Exactly. And so this is something that Fraser was saying where I think he was sort of on the right track in the case of Osiris.
Smith argues that in the case of Osiris, there is a clear link between myth and ritual. There's this strong connection, which is something that Fraser is always trying to emphasize, is the link between myth and ritual and myth sort of being the story, like that the ritual reenacts the myth and the myth in Fraser's telling is often derived from the ritual. It's like a narrativizing of the ritual. But whatever the actual chain of events there is,
Uh, in this case, there is clearly a strong link between the myth and the ritual, uh, in that the mythical description of the recovery and reassembly of the pieces of the body of Osiris. I believe this is by ISIS and his allies, uh,
This is a clear parallel of the funeral rites of Egypt. Smith lists these funeral rites, quote,
So in a way, the dead Egyptian would, in a sense, through having the funeral rites performed upon their body, become Osiris. And just like Osiris, though dead to this world, they would awake to a new life in another world. Smith writes, quote, "...the myth and ritual of Osiris emphasizes the message that there is life for the dead, although it is of a different character than that of the living."
What is to be feared is, in a quote from the Book of Going Forth by Day, I think this is another name for what is sometimes called the Book of the Dead, quote, dying for a second time in the realm of the dead. And there are ways that, according to the story, this can happen to you. For example, being devoured by the lion hippopotamus crocodile monster Ammit in the underworld. Yeah.
Yeah, I know we've talked a little bit about the complexity of the ancient Egyptian afterlife before, where it's not something you could compare, just sort of like the
sort of mainstream vision of a Christian heaven. It is a place where you're probably going to need your spells. You're going to need your followers. You're going to need tools and a plan in order to make the best go of it. Exactly right. You have to prepare. It's not just that you have to be worthy of the good afterlife, but like in some visions, it takes like work to get there.
Yeah, and this is, of course, this is not just an ancient Egyptian religion. There are various examples we can turn to where like that journey between this life and the next is one that is
perilous and has to go just right in order to work. Right. So it seems to me that of the examples Fraser brings up, Osiris maybe comes the closest or is one of the closer ones to being a true dying and reviving God. But even in his case, there's a pretty strong conceptual distinction of what the new life is that makes calling this a resurrection somewhat strained. Right.
So after analyzing all of the most prominent cases of alleged dying and reviving gods, Smith concludes as follows, quote,
And, you know, so that might kind of make you think like, ah, well, then who cares? But I think it is actually very illustrative that you can see this category sort of emerge with scholars trying to make sense of all these different stories and rituals and stuff and putting all these gods and figures from myths into the category of.
And ultimately, if you look really close, it's not a super cohesive category. And a lot of the things, maybe all the things put into it don't really fit and don't have as much in common as the scholar is claiming they do.
And if Smith is correct here, I find his case pretty convincing. If he's correct about this being largely based on Christian interest by scholars from Christian cultures, I think that's also illuminating that like dominant sort of story themes within your culture that seem very familiar to you just kind of naturally manifest when looking at ambiguously similar things in other cultural contexts. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, at times this can be a very useful exercise in either helping us to get a leg up on understanding another culture or another system of beliefs. It can also be a frame of commonality. It can be very positive in terms of like seeing the similarities rather than differences. But yeah, when you get into like this deeper attempt to understand the religion, you could see where some of it could cast too much of a shadow on your interpretation of this other way of looking at the cosmos.
I think that's right. But then on the other hand, I want to come back and say we shouldn't stop looking at similarities between religions because there are similarities. Like Smith says, yeah, this dying and reviving God category doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But there are these other patterns you can see, like dying gods. There are a bunch of dying God myths.
that have interesting things in common. And you could kind of look at like, why do they have these things in common? That's worth studying. You also have this pattern of the disappearing and sometimes reappearing God myth. What does that tell us about religions? You can look at these similarities. And so it's also not unreasonable to look at similarities between Christianity, a religion that certainly does have a dying and reviving God myth,
with some of these other religions. And so one source I came across that I thought made a very interesting point was a chapter called Resurrection in Ancient Egypt by the German Egyptologist Jan Osman, who has plenty of his own ideas. He's pushing about the lineage of certain types of resurrection beliefs. I think ultimately he thinks that a lot of these beliefs
have an original source in Egyptian religion and then spread out to other places. But regardless of whether he's correct about that, I think he makes a very good point about a similarity between belief in Christ and the earlier belief in Osiris.
which on one hand, you have plenty of differences. Like the death of Jesus is a one-time event that is situated within history. It said like, well, he's a man who existed at a certain time and place in history. And so it's like his death is a historical event, not something that takes place within a kind of mythic time or within a mythic landscape. But on the other hand, you could look at the deaths and revivals of
of these two God figures is having a lot in common in that, as Osman says, "...through his death and resurrection, Christ has paved the way to paradise or Elysium in a way not altogether dissimilar from that of Osiris, who also, through his victory over Seth, opened a realm beyond the realm of death."
The decisive common denominator of Christianity and ancient Egyptian religion is the idea of redemption from death, that beyond the realm of death there is an Elysian realm of eternal life in the presence of the divine.
So in both cases, you can look at these gods as gods who were killed and then in some sense revived. Christ is said to be revived onto earth and then ascends into heaven. Osiris is revived and made lord of the underworld and judge of the dead. But in both cases, they open the way for people to have a sort of heaven.
Again, want to put the star on heaven there and say it means different things in the two different concepts, but it is a positive afterlife that is now available to the people. Yeah, absolutely. In both cases, the individual is the opener of the way.
You know, and the Ptolemies might come along and say, you know, we have this guy named Serapis and he does all of this as well. Perfect. Give me all three. Yeah. Well, he's got a dog. Wait, now, was he often depicted as having Cerberus by his side, like having a three-headed pup? Or is that just a unique feature of that sculpture? I mean, based on the remaining images of Serapis, it does seem like he is sometimes depicted with Cerberus on.
And I believe that that is simply because, yeah, if you are going to take this character of Osiris, who is a god of the underworld, and you're going to spin him into this world
This very Greek themed model. Well, then you're going to drag in Hades and you're going to drag in like this key example of sort of in a way, summing up this idea of the taming of death. Right. So that's my understanding of it. But I certainly have seen other depictions of him that don't have the dog present.
All right. Well, on that note, I believe we're going to go ahead and close the book on Osiris here with the caveat that I'm not sure what the next core episode is going to be. But we were throwing around the idea of doing something that was still kind of Osiris, but is not Osiris part three. So just I don't know. You'll have to see what happens and we shall see what happens as well. OK.
In the meantime, we'd love to hear from everyone out there. If you have thoughts on this two-parter, if you have thoughts on past episodes or potential future episodes, write in. We would love to hear from you. Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. But on Mondays, we do listener mail. On Wednesdays, we do a short-form episode. And on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird movie on Weird House Cinema. Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J. Posway.
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