Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

78 Egypt
an animal or part-human/part-animal, perhaps
the residue of earlier animal worship.
Generally, Egyptians gave most prominence to
those gods associated with the Nile (Hapy, Sothis,
Sebek), the sun (Re, Re-Atum, Horus), and
helping the dead (Osiris, Anubis, Sokaris). During
the time of the Old Kingdom, the sun god Re was
the dominant god. Re served to give immortality
to the collective state through the pharaoh, his
son. The sun seemed to the Egyptians and to many
other ancients to be clearly immortal, as it “died”
every evening, traveled through the underworld,
and was “reborn” every morning. The sun was also
important to the success of Nile agriculture. Thus,
insofar as the pharaoh was identified with the sun
god, the continuity and success of the state was
assured.
One of the primary sources for understanding
Egyptian mythologies is the Book of the Dead,
now more accurately titled The Book of Going
Forth by Day. This refers to a large number of
funeral texts spanning the entire history of ancient
Egypt. From these texts and other sources scholars
have pieced together the major stories of the gods
and patterns of belief. Egyptian mythology was
not a tidy, uniform package of stories, but
contained a number of mutually exclusive, even
contradictory ideas.
Toward the end of the Old Kingdom two brothers,
Set and Osiris, and their two sisters, Nephtys
and Isis, seriously competed with the sun god for
primacy. These four gods were part of a grouping
of nine gods that formed the Ennead of Heliopolis,
an influential metropolitan center. Egyptian texts
refer only to certain episodes of the Osiris myth,
and the most complete account comes from
Plutarch in the second century C.E. According to
the story, Osiris was a good and popular god-king
who was betrayed and killed by his evil brother,
Set. Set dismembered Osiris into fourteen pieces
and scattered the pieces in various places.
From the moment of the death of Osiris,
Egypt suffered miseries hitherto unknown.
Set’s deserts encroached upon and parched
fertile farmlands, causing famine. The people
began to fight and steal for the meager
remaining food. Mothers did not sleep at
night, as the cries of their hungry children
kept them awake. With the disruption of
agriculture and irrigation, Set’s kingdom of
sand grew until it nearly reached the banks of
the Nile. The despair was so great that the
people envied the dead. (Bierlein 1994, 213)
When Nephtys and Isis discovered the deed, Isis
(his wife as well as sister, according to the tradition
of royal inbreeding) vowed to find the pieces and
put the body back together. Being a “great magician,”
she was able to do so and even to become
pregnant by him, but otherwise she could not
bring life to him and had to bury him. When
Horus, the posthumous son, grew up, he desired to
avenge his father’s death. He first tried the legal
approach, taking the murder charge against Set to
the court of deities. When the court seemed unable
to act, Horus took matters into his own hands and
killed Set in a monumental battle. Horus then went
to the land of the dead, where he was recognized as
Osiris’s legitimate successor and crowned the new
king of Egypt. At that point Horus was able to
revive Osiris, who became ruler of the underworld,
symbolic of resurrection and fertility, and judge of
the dead for the rest of eternity.
Originally, the story of Osiris seems to have
been merely the story of a vegetative cult, where
Osiris’s fate represented the flooding of the Nile in
the spring and its recession in the fall, and/or the
regular agricultural cycle of seed, growth, death,
and rebirth. The story began to gain a greater
significance when Horus became identified with
the living pharaoh, which may have happened as
early as 2800 B.C.E. That identification perhaps
occurred because the immortality of Osiris could
be functional for reinforcing the royal dynasty. If
every living pharaoh is Horus and every recently
deceased pharaoh is Osiris, the prosperity of the
orderly succession is assured. The Osiris story,
however, also grew in impact because it offered
new levels of meaning for the general populace.
This was a good story, with good and evil, familial
loyalty, tribulations, and triumphs that offered
many points of personal connection. It also
suggested that resurrection from the dead was part
of the natural order in a way that might include
them as well.