United States or French Southern Territories ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I have come and have advanced to declare the truth and to set up the Balance on its stand in Aukert." Then addressing the god Osiris the deceased says: "Hail, thou who art exalted upon thy standard, thou lord of the Atef crown, whose name is 'Lord of the Winds, deliver me from thine envoys who inflict evils, who do harm, whose faces are uncovered, for I have done the right for the Lord of Truth.
Let him see, hear, stand, and sit as ye do in the home of Osiris. O ye who give cakes and ale to perfected souls, give ye at morn and at eve cakes and ale to the soul of Ani the Scribe. May he not be turned back, may he enter and come forth; for he has been weighed in the scale and is "not lacking." The chapter about coming forth by day and living after death.
The old deities of Isis and Osiris gave place to the worship of Jupiter, Minerva, and Venus. The wonders of pristine Egypt were confined to Memphis and Thebes and the dilapidated cities of the Nile. The mysteries of the antique Egyptian temples were no more known to the learned and mercantile citizen of Alexandria than they are to us. The pyramids were as much a wonder then as now.
What hedge-schoolmaster has scattered them so loosely and profusely over this lovely land? Whip the wretch with rattlesnakes! Memphis indeed! as if Memphis with its monolithic statues needed commemoration on the banks of the Mississippi! A new Osiris a new Sphinx, "half horse, half alligator, with a sprinkling of the snapping turtle."
"And she went her way, and took her needles and her chair, and on the roof of the silver palace sat watching and knitting. "And the will of Osiris, at labor in his mighty breast, was as the sound of the mills of all the other gods grinding at once, so loud that the near stars rattled like seeds in a parched pod; and some dropped out and were lost.
Thus, the annual sacrifice of a pig to Osiris might naturally be interpreted as vengeance inflicted on the hostile animal that had slain or mangled the god.
From the mundane egg the triplicated Deity sprang. There can be little doubt at the present time that Adam, Noah, Menu, Osiris, and Dionysos all represent the fructifying power of the sun. In process of time they each came to figure as male reproductive energy, and during certain periods of the earth's history they have each in turn been worshipped as the Deity.
By and by I went to him, which knew well enough all the matter, as being monished by like precept in the night: for the night before as he dressed the flowers and garlands about the head of the god Osiris, he understood by the mouth of the image which told the predestinations of all men, how he had sent a poore man of Madura, to whom he should minister his sacraments, to the end hee should receive a reward by divine providence, and the other glory, for his vertuous studies.
Therefore, those who explain Osiris as the sun are driven to the alternative of either dismissing as mistaken the testimony of antiquity to the similarity of the rites of Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, and Demeter, or of interpreting all these rites as sun-worship. No modern scholar has fairly faced and accepted either side of this alternative.
No, my friend, in this point at least I have remained an Egyptian, in believing, like the rest of my countrymen, that the happiness of a future life in the kingdom of Osiris, depends on the preservation of my body, the habitation of the soul. The Egyptian Cosmos consisted of the three great realms, the Heavens, the Earth and the Depths.
Word Of The Day