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Texts>The Myth of the Resurrection
The Resurrection of Osiris
So, ages before Christ, a death and resurrection festival was celebrated at Babylon (and further east), Alexandria, and Athens, and in every city that lay between them. Now if you will take the map of the world, and draw a ring with your finger round those three cities, you will find that the circle embraces nearly the whole civilized world of the time. Outside it there remain only Egypt, to the south, and the civilized part of Asia Minor. We shall now see that these regions were as familiar with the death and resurrection celebration as all the other regions of the civilized world.
I began the first chapter with an account of such a celebration in Rome in the year 385 A.D.; and we have historical information that the cult was introduced into Rome in 207 B.C. It was the cult of Attis and Cybele (commonly known as "the mother of the gods"), and it was introduced from Phrygia, in Asia Minor.
North of Phoenicia or Palestine in ancient times was the somewhat obscure kingdom of the Hittites, who were at one time powerful enough to take Babylon. We have found a Hittite monument with three figures which seem to be a trinity of the sky-father, the earth-mother, and a divine son; so it is fair to assume that a more or less similar celebration flourished amongst the Hittites. How ever that may be, the Phrygians, who covered the region from the west of the Hittite kingdom to the Dardanelles, had one of the most noted cults of a slain and resurrected god.
The great deity of the Phrygians was a nameless "mother of the gods," plainly the old mother-earth goddess. It was a common trick of the priests who rose to power later to give the older gods the title of mother or father of the gods, and, so to say, pension them off. Cybele, as the Greeks named this goddess, remained the supreme deity, as in Crete; but a young male god was closely associated with her. Attis, as he was called, was said in the legend to have been originally a comely young shepherd who was loved by Cybele. He was said to have been born of a virgin. There were two versions of his death. In one he was, like Adoni, slain by a boar: in the other he castrated himself, and bled to death, under a pine tree. The latter is clearly the older legend, a natural incident in a phallic religion; and hence it was that on the great festival the priests of Cybele castrated themselves and held up the bloody organs to the heavens.
I described the modified version of the celebration which was permitted in Rome. March 17th was the day of the reed-bearing procession (Palm Sunday), March 24th was the terrible Day of Blood ("Good" Friday), when the combined din of flutes, horns, cymbals, and tambourines, and the dirges of the processionists, stirred priests and devotees to make their awful sacrifice. The statue of Attis, bound to a pine tree, was carried in procession, and then laid in a temporary sepulcher in the temple; just as the sacrament is, for exactly the same period, put away in a temporary recess or tomb in Roman Catholic churches in Holy Week today. Next day (or two days later) the tomb was opened, and the statue of Attis exhibited amidst frenzied rejoicing. Attis had risen from the dead.
Here is another most dramatic and popular annual celebration of the death and resurrection of a fair young god spreading over the world from an ancient center. Take a citizen, say, of Tarsus in Asia Minor in the days of Jesus. He could not fail to know of the annual celebration of the resurrection of Attis, which was famous all over the Greco-Roman world. He could hardly be ignorant of the festival of the resurrection of Adoni at Byblus and Paphos, both within a short distance of his city. If he were of an inquiring mind, he would know that Adoni was only the Lord Tammuz of the great kingdom of Babylonia; and if he were a Jew, he would know that the Jews themselves long mourned the death and rejoiced in the resurrection of Tammuz. Paul was a Jew of Tarsus, of an inquiring mind.
And he would, presumably, know that the Adoni worshipers of Byblus had a close connection with Egypt, to which we now turn. Many a writer of the time confuses or fuses, as even Cyril of Alexandria does, the cults of Attis, Adonis, Tammuz, and Osiris. A god had been slain and had risen from the dead; and these were merely different names given to the god in different regions. They were wrong. It is a most important feature of our story that this legend of a slain and resurrected god arose in quite different parts of the old civilized world. Tammuz, Attis, and Osiris are three separate and independent creations of the myth-making imagination.
Yet the rites of the mourning over Osiris were much the same as in the case of Adoni. I give in another book the outline of the legend of Isis, Osiris, and Horus but it may be useful to give here a more detailed account of it. The time came in the evolution of religion, as I explained, when the claims of Osiris, Horus, and Isis to the homage of men had to be adjusted. They were made co-equals in a holy family, and gods whose priests were no longer powerful enough to exact, so to say, a place in the front window, were awarded the lesser honor of having given birth to Osiris and Isis, or of being less distinguished or even disreputable members of the same family.
For some reason the old Egyptian god Set was to be discredited, and he was made the murderer of the very popular Osiris: the god who held in Egypt almost the place that Christ had in Christendom. The philosopher Plutarch wrote in the first century a treatise On Isis and Osiris, and he gives us the final version of the legend which was current in Egypt. Incidentally he gives us information about the cult of Isis which confirms what I say in another book about, not merely the virtues, but the asceticism, of the later Egyptians. The priests of Isis shaved their heads (and bodies) and wore white linen garments in token of the purity which the religion of Isis demanded. They never ate flesh meat or vegetables that had been in contact with manure; and no wine was admitted into their houses. Salt even was eschewed, since it led to an increase of the appetite for food and drink. In fine, the cult of purity was pushed so far in later Egypt that Plutarch tells us (and seems to believe) that the semen of kings was received in glass tubes and thus conveyed to its destination without the contamination of flesh.
But I am concerned only with the story of Isis and Osiris, and I must greatly abridge the long and rambling story. Nut, the sky-goddess, was the spouse of Ra, the sun-god, who begot Osiris. By a frivolous adventure with Thoth (the divine messenger) she gave birth to Isis, and by a farther intrigue with Seb, the earth-god, to Set. Isis and Osiris so instinctively loved each other that they had relations with each other-unwittingly, Plutarch later says, in the obscurity of the divine mother's womb. Osiris became ruler of Egypt, which he civilized, and he then set out to civilize the world, while Isis cultivated her virginity at home. Both these circumstances enkindled the anger of the saturnine Set (his father, Seb, is the equivalent of the Roman Saturn), the prince of darkness; as Osiris was the prince of light, virtue, and wisdom. He enticed Osiris to enter a handsome chest, fastened it down with molten lead, and had it flung into the river.
The desolated Isis sought the body of her brother and lover high and low. This search for the missing god or goddess is a common feature, and was dramatically represented in all the old "mysteries." In time she learned that the chest or coffin had been borne by the Nile out to sea, and had been stranded on the coast of Syria near Byblus. Here it became entangled in a tree, which grew to such princely proportions that the king had it cut down and converted (with the coffin inside the trunk) into a column of his palace. Thither came Isis in mortal guise. She accepted the office of nurse to the queen's child, and at night she took the form of a swallow and circled round and round the column. But as she was burning away the mortal flesh of the child, she was recognized, and she departed for Egypt with the column as a gift. Hence the connection of Byblus with Egypt to which I have referred.
Here the legends get even more mixed than the Gospel legends. One story, only briefly referred to by Plutarch, is that in the form of a hawk Isis lay upon the dead body of Osiris and thus miraculously conceived her son Horus. The other legend, which Plutarch follows, is that she left the coffin at a place in Egypt while she went to see Horus. Set found the coffin, cut the corpse into fourteen pieces, and scatted them. Isis made diligent search and found all the pieces but the penis, which the fishes had swallowed. (Frazer here suggests that the legend may recall a prehistoric custom of cutting off a dead king's organ and using it to promote fertility.) However, Isis, to confuse Set, had each of the parts buried where she found it; so that there were fourteen graves of Osiris (besides relics, duplicated and triplicated, in the temples) in Egypt. But Egyptian documents give a finish to the legend which is lacking in Plutarch. Isis and Horus put together the fragments of the dead god, and as the sacred wings of Isis fluttered over the corpse, the great god Ra restored him to life. He "descended into hell" or was appointed the Lord of the Underworld. And it was a common practice after death for an Egyptian priest to mimic this restoration of Osiris over the corpse as a pledge of a glorious resurrection in the kingdom of Osiris.
I can imagine a preacher reading these infantile details and asking what earthly relation there is between this farrago of nonsense and "the sublime story of the resurrection of Jesus." But I explain in the book on Religion and Morals in Ancient Egypt (Little Blue Book No.1077) that Osiris, the Judge of the Dead, was as stern a moral judge as Jesus himself; and, to every Egyptian, personal immortality, prefigured by the resurrection of Osiris, was the firmest of beliefs. The main point is, however, that, when we strip away late embroideries, we have here a doctrine of a beneficent god slain by the powers of darkness and rising again from the dead. The Pyramid Texts- inscriptions on the inner walls of the oldest pyramid tombs-show that this was common Egyptian doctrine three thousand years before Christ, and it must go back before the dawn of civilization.
This legend was not only familiar to every child of Egypt as one of the most sacred of his beliefs, but it was annually embodied in a sacred drama or pageant of great solemnity. In the month of November, the period of sowing the corn in Egypt, a famous celebration took place at Sais, one of the centers of the Osiris cult. There were four days of mourning and lamentation over the dead god, whose sufferings were dramatically represented on a lake-I presume, on an island in a lake-at night, while the people illuminated their houses. Three days later the priests bore to the river a golden casket into which they poured water; and at that moment the worshipers raised the cry that Osiris had been found. A gold figure of a cow with a black pall represented Isis during the sacred drama; and the shaven priests and the worshipers beat their breasts and lashed their shoulders. Some even ripped the bandages from healing wounds and let the blood flow. In other places where the passion-play was given, a boy impersonated Osiris, and was "found" by the priests.
Frazer identifies this with the general festival of Osiris which he next described, but it seems to me that the above is a description of the "mysteries" of Osiris to which Plutarch refers. The national festival of Osiris lasted no less than eighteen days and included a most elaborate ritual in the temple. Inscriptions and bas-reliefs in the temples show that the image of Osiris was buried, and in the end he was shown rising from his bier under the spreading wings of Isis. A great feature of the festival, all over Egypt, was the making of images of Osiris with grains of corn planted inside them and gradually growing out of them: a symbol of new life, of the resurrection of the corn-spirit from what was left of the dead plant. Whatever the meaning-we will discuss this later-all Egypt was from time immemorial familiar with a story of a suffering, slain, and risen god, the greatest benefactor of mankind; and, in spite of the phallic elements in the legend, the "easter" of the Egyptians came to be regarded as a time of intense fervor for purity and repentance.
But we have not yet finished with the older pagan world, if we would understand how thoroughly every part of it was saturated with the myth of a resurrected god. We have up to the present said nothing about Persia: the land which took over the supremacy of the world when Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt fell, the religion which spread over the world, from Persepolis to Britain, at the very time when Christianity was a pale growth struggling for existence in that tropical forest of religions.
Mithraism preceded Christianity with an austere belief in a savior from sin who was born of a virgin, in a cave in midwinter, and was annually represented as such before the worshipers in its ascetic temples. And Mithraism also preceded Christianity, by centuries, with an annual representation of the atoning death of Mithra and the joy of his resurrection. It is Firmicus Maternus, the Christian Father, who tells us this in his Errors of the Profane Religions (ch. XXIII):
On a certain night [in March] an image is laid upon a bier, and it is mourned with solemn chants. When they are sated with this fictitious lamentation, a light is brought in. Then the mouths of all the mourners are anointed by a priest, who murmurs slowly: "Rejoice, followers of the saved god, because there is for you a relief from your grief."
Firmicus, sublimely unconscious of the image on a bier (or cross) or the fictitious lamentations of Good Friday, of the anointings and rejoicings of Easter morn, proceeds to ridicule his Mithraist rival:
Thou dost bury an image, thou dost mourn an image, thou dost bring forth an image from the grave, and, wretched man, when thou hast done this, thou dost rejoice. . . . Thou dost arrange the members of the recumbent stone. . . . So the devil also has his Christs.
It is profound pity that the simple-minded Firmicus does not give us the full ritual. The weird and complicated ritual of the Catholic Church during Holy Week has probably borrowed scores of details from Mithraism.
Persia, and the entire sphere of influence of Persia, thus fall into line with the other nations. And here there is not the least trace of a phallic cult. The note is sin and salvation. Mithraism was as austere as Puritanism. Mithra was originally, not a fertility-god, but a sun-god. He had become the spiritual sun, the pattern of virtue, the savior from sin, the light of the world.
South of Byblus, in the great Phoenician city of Tyre, was another celebration that must not be omitted. The great god was Melcarth (commonly called Moloch), and a large effigy of him was solemnly burned every year. It is an obscure ceremony, but Josephus speaks of a festival at Tyre called "The Awakening of Hercules," and we may conclude that the burning of Melcarth was the equivalent of Hercules who, as we shall see, immolated himself on a funeral pyre, and ascended in a cloud to heaven.
From Tyre the Phoenicians, the great colonists and navigators, took their Melcarth over the seas. Carthage sent special envoys to the celebration in the mother-city every year. As far away on the coast of Spain, at Gades (Cadiz), which the Phoenicians founded, a great effigy of Melcarth was fired annually, and the god would rise again. Even in Tarsus of Cilicia-where Paul lived-there was a similar annual celebration.
Thus the old world elaborated its legends and bequeathed them to the new. The stream flowed on. But the Greek world, in which the new religion developed, had, besides temples and priests of every one of these older cults, very important myths of its own, and we must see these before we try to understand the meaning of this worldwide celebration.
