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Chapter 31
The Osiris Numbers
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
Archaeo-astronomer Jane B. Sellers, who studied Egyptology at the
University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, spends her winters in Portland,
Maine, and summers at Ripley Neck, a nineteenth-century enclave
‘downcast’ on Maine’s rocky coast. ‘There,’ she says, ‘the night skies can
be as clear as the desert, and no one minds if you read the Pyramid Texts
out loud to the seagulls ... 1
One of the few serious scholars to have tested the theory advanced by
Santillana and von Dechend in Hamlet’s Mill, Sellers has been hailed for
having drawn attention to the need to use astronomy, and more
particularly precession, for the proper study of ancient Egypt and its
religion. 2 In her words: ‘Archaeologists by and large lack an
understanding of precession, and this affects their conclusions
concerning ancient myths, ancient gods and ancient temple alignments ...
For astronomers precession is a well-established fact; those working in
the field of ancient man have a responsibility to attain an understanding
of it.’ 3
It is Sellers’s contention, eloquently expressed in her recent book, The
Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, that the Osiris myth may have been
deliberately encoded with a group of key numbers that are ‘excess
baggage’ as far as the narrative is concerned but that offer an eternal
calculus by which surprisingly exact values can be derived for the
following:
1 The time required for the earth’s slow precessional wobble to cause
the position of sunrise on the vernal equinox to complete a shift of
one degree along the ecliptic (in relation to the stellar background);
2 The time required for the sun to pass through one full zodiacal
segment of thirty degrees;
3 The time required for the sun to pass through two full zodiacal
segments (totalling sixty degrees);
4 The time required to bring about the ‘Great Return’ 4 , i.e., for the sun
to shift three hundred and sixty degrees along the ecliptic, thus
fulfilling one complete precessional cycle or ‘Great Year’.
1 The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, author biography.
2 For example by Robert Bauval in The Orion Mystery, pp. 144-5.
3 The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 174.
4 This phrase was coined by Jane Sellers, whom also detected the precessional
calculations embedded in the Osiris myth.
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