Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [26]
The writer Diodorus Siculus gives us some further hints about the meanings of this perplexing myth, by telling us some details about how the story was institutionalized in temples and ritual. From him, as well as Plutarch and Herodotus, we learn that since Isis wishes Osiris to be honored by all the inhabitants of Egypt, she fashions over each of his cut-up fragments the figure of a human body. Then, she calls the priests of each locality together and asks them to bury the artificial body, made out of spices and wax, in the various districts and to honor Osiris as a god. At each supposed burial place, a temple or shrine was dedicated. This story also legitimates the spread of the funerary cult and the primacy of the Osiris priesthood in its performance, as well as giving each locality a specific role in the cult and hence a narrative place in a united Egypt.
Besides enacting the story of the flood of the Nile and the annual return of life of the land, Diodorus shows us that each of the local temples of Osiris became part of an organization of central religion through this myth and, in effect, the unity of the state is brought about through the combination of local cults and deities into a central religious procession. The myth, among other things, narrates this unity in story form. Such a story is not what we would call a constitution but it is certainly part of what unified the state into a conceptual whole that could apprehended by the ancient Egyptian.
Rituals of the Osiris cult associate the annual story of the god with the fertility of the land, as well as with the death of kings. The “Great Procession” at Abydos, the place where the early kings were buried, took place at the first rise of Nile (late summer) and involved bringing the statue of Osiris to a designated tomb area, where he stayed overnight, followed by his triumphal and jubillant return to the temple. Since Osiris was identified with the dead king, logic suggests the continuity of the pharaonic succession, going from the death of the old king to the birth of the new one, just at the time when the Nile was about to renew Egypt’s fertility. In Ptolemaic temples, there was often a room called the “tomb of Osiris.”
The connection between Osiris-strictly, a god of the dead-with fertility was seen in his other major festival, which took place at the end of the inundation (3ḥt), in the month of Khoiak (approximately December), known from a long Ptolemaic inscription at Denderah. In this ceremony, which resembled a funeral because it signified the end of the flood and the start of Spring (i.e., prt, “the coming out” of the seeds), Osiris was identified with the erection of the Djed pillar, a commonly occuring Egyptian symbol which somewhat resembles a modern high-tension tower. The pillar itself seems to to symbolize the power of Osiris. Two important rituals firmly associate Osiris with new vegetation. The first was the central role of “Osiris Gardens” and the second was the ritual of “the grain mummy” or Osiris effigy. The grain Osiris was an effigy made of soil and seeds, which was publicly paraded and then displayed as it germinated, which could then be placed in a trough called a garden (ḥspt). These grain effigies also represented the reunification of the body of Osiris. These aspects of the dead Osiris were depicted in temple art as a reclining mummified body of Osiris with rows of grain growing out of the length of his body.
This festival’s liturgy featured what Jan Assman calls “raise yourself litanies” (in German: Erhebe-dich Litaneien).21 These are prayers beginning with the words “Raise yourself” (ts tw), suggesting the imagery of “resurrection,” except that Osiris never returned to the world of the living.