How many pieces was osiris cut into

The Nile flows northward to the Mediterranean, and the chest washes ashore at Byblos modern Lebanon. According to the myth, there is a huge storm that blows the chest into the branches of a tree, which grows to tremendous proportions, encompassing the chest in its trunk. The king of Byblos wants to build a palace, and he needs large trees—cedars of Lebanon—for pillars. This particular tree is cut down and incorporated into the palace as a pillar, where Osiris is hidden.

Isis, the devoted wife, sets out on a journey to recover the body of her husband. Eventually, she finds out where Osiris is, talks to the queen of Byblos, is given a job as her handmaiden and explains that her husband is in a pillar in the palace. The queen is sympathetic, and the pillar is cut down. The chest is taken out and Osiris is indeed dead. Isis then brings the body back to Egypt for proper burial.

Seth, always scheming, finds the body and hacks it into 14 pieces, which he scatters up and down the Nile. Isis, wanting to give her husband a proper burial, finds the pieces, aided by her sister Nebthet. They find almost all of the pieces of Osiris, but the phallus is missing. It was thrown into the Nile and devoured by fish. Isis reassembles Osiris, fashions an artificial phallus to complete him, says magical words, and breathes life into him. Osiris resurrects and he becomes the God of the Dead.

In this sense, Osiris is the first mummy. Learn more about the elements of ancient Egyptian magic. Almost every funerary belief that the Egyptians had can be traced from this story. There is something special about Egypt and Egyptian soil. This belief is why the Egyptians never colonized, as no one wanted to die away from Egypt. Another funerary practice follows from Osiris missing one part, the phallus, and Isis creating an artificial one.

Thoth , the god of wisdom, advised her to flee because Seth would try to kill her child. She went to the marshes, where she gave birth to her son, Horus.

Isis hid the child in the marshes, where she cured him from scorpion, snake and crocodile bites. One day, she left her son to search for food, and upon her return, she found him half dead. Seth had entered the marsh, transformed himself into a poisonous snake and bit the child.

Isis called for help from the high gods. Her pleas were heard by the gods in the Bark of Millions of Years the solar bark. Thoth descended to talk to her. He told her that the powers of Re would set things right and that good would triumph over evil.

Then the solar bark stopped and the earth fell into darkness. Thoth assured Isis that the earth would remain in darkness, that wells would dry up and that crops would fail until Horus was cured. Then, in the name of the sun, he exorcised the poison from Horus's body and cured the child.

The sun god travels through the darkness of night in his solar bark. Drawing: Nancy Ruddell. The people of the marshland rejoiced with Isis at the recovery of her son. Horus became the archetype of the pharaohs, the sun god's representative on earth. It was now the duty of the people to protect the pharaohs from harm, to love and respect them.

If they did not, world order would collapse and the people would perish. Isis kept her young son hidden until he became an adolescent and could face Seth to claim his rightful inheritance, the throne of Egypt.

While Horus was growing up, the sun god, Re, grew old and started drooling. Isis took the saliva that fell to the ground and modelled it into a serpent. She placed the serpent across Re's daily path in the sky, and it bit the sun. Since the sun had not made the serpent, he could not cure himself. Most of the time, the collection of the dispersed members of Osiris is made by Horus:. It is I, your son; I am Horus. I came toward you to wash you, to purify you, to revive you, to collect for you the pieces which remain [12] lit.

Two terms designate here the members of the body of Osiris: the "pieces which remain", a precise reference to the members thrown in the Nile, and the "parts of the body", with the determinative of the knife, are cut. One could not evoke more clearly the membra disjecta, which the Jumilhac Papyrus many centuries later offers more clearly a more extensive metaphorical representation. The pieces are gathered jnq , amassed s3q , united dmdj , drawn together shn before being joined m'b and connected tjs to each other.

Most of the time, it is Horus who gathers the pieces, while Nut reconstitutes the body. Your mother Nut has given birth to you, your father Geb wiped lit. But as they also appear like this when they discover the body of Osiris, in Nedit 8 , one can ask at which moment is their action. In fact, the Pyramid Texts present us with two possible scenarios for the death of Osiris. Firstly, Osiris is brought down by Seth in Nedit. The two sisters discover the body there.

They resuscitate him. Then Isis conceives hiss son Horus. Seth, on finding the corpse, cuts it in pieces which he throws into the Nile. Horus leaves to search for them, collects them. Entrusted to Nut they are buried inside the sarcophagus. The dismembered body is reconstituted, recomposed like that of an embryo, before being put back into the world of the beyond. The Pyramid Texts, in addition, develop the nursing and feeding of the newborn.

Secondly, Osiris is brought down by Seth and cut in pieces. Isis and Nephthys recover them in Nedit. The body is reconstituted, buried, resuscitated. The conception of Horus takes place at that moment. A variant of the second scenarios: Osiris is put to death two times brought down, then cut up , the corpse having been discovered a first time by Isis and Nephthys, then reconstituted and buried before being resuscitated.

The second scenario and its variant come up against the tradition making of Horus, the one who collects the pieces of his father's corpse we also find him in the same way in the sides of Isis and Nephthys in the Jumilhac Papyrus, at the bottom, V [13]. However, one could consider this quest as a sort of abridgement, a metaphor: Horus would not literally collect the parts of his father's body but his inheritance. In any case, it seems preferable to conceive a death in two stages, as passed on to us by Plutarch.

Indeed, in the Old Kingdom, one repeatedly finds traces of such a practice within the framework of funeral rites. In necropolises such as the one of Deshasheh [14] - but the examples do not limit themselves to this one -, we possess several examples of corpses whose bones have been arranged in disorder, which supposes a first burial or, more probably, to allow the corpse to dry up and to decompose by itself and a secondary burial permitting a different arrangement of the body.

Such a burial in two stages is even present in the rituals of the month of khoiak, when the mummy of Osiris was buried before being committed to the earth [15]. It would be necessary, of course, to recover all the archaeological files.

However be that as it may, the death of Osiris, as one can restore it according to the Pyramid Texts, is a very real death. Contrary to very widespread opinion [16] , it is not concealed, nor toned down. It is even mentioned with a certain brutality. Besides, the Pyramid Texts make allusion repeatedly to mummification and make it possible to define in a very precise way the ritual of the funeral.

All this shows, if it was necessary, that it is about an ancient and well established tradition, where it is possible to discover hidden layers, but revealing the very ancient existence of the myth of Osiris, who is probably not a newcomer to the Egyptian pantheon, as was often written.

Compared to the recension of Plutarch, all the anecdotal elements are missing the scene of the banquet, episodes of the quest of Isis, primarily in Byblos. Only the essential events have been retained. This choice is quite logical and answers the fundamental value of the compilation which constitute the Pyramid Texts: having as its function to ensure the passage of the demise of life, the death of Osiris and his resurrection, it acts as a model and a myth of reference.

Thus the actual death is accentuated, by the reference to the decomposition of the corpse; the destruction of the body, by dismemberment which refers maybe to very precise practices in use during the prehistoric period and again in the Old Kingdom, as we have seen ; then the re-constitution of the body and the birth, as well as the institution of the funeral ritual coming with these different stages.

Beyond its setting in words and in pictures, the double death of Osiris is rich with several teachings: Firstly, to return to the point of departure, to start, it is necessary to give back life. Osiris is Atum, the one who accomplished the cycle, whose other face is Re, one being the nocturnal part, the vital strengths, the other the diurnal part, the luminous strengths, according to the famous formula of the tomb of Nefertari.

In other words, the death is generative of life: Horus, the descendant, symbol of the continuity, is born of his dead father. In the same way, vegetation is born of the decomposition the humours , both sperm and humours being two generating liquids of life. Dismemberment is necessary to the being's future re-conctruction, who, however, is not going to be born again in the land of the living but in the celestial and nocturnal beyond, which means either individually, as at the time of his first birth, or as a component of the universe, thus built into the eternal cycle of the living one.

It is the very teaching of the Pyramid Texts, where the Pharaoh dies like Osiris. His dismembered body is reconstituted like the one of a newborn, and who will himself become a source of life, having acquired in turn the elements strength, mobility, light which are necessary to him, and having drawn to Osiris, in the night of the serdab, the "Cave of Nouou", the creative power.

Notes: [1] Quoted translation in the article by B. Heermavan Voss, Kampen, , p.