Now if Osiris was in one of
his aspects a god of the corn, nothing could be more natural than
that he should be mourned at midsummer. For by that time the harvest
was past, the fields were bare, the river ran low, life seemed to be
suspended, the corn-god was dead. At such a moment people who saw
the handiwork of divine beings in all the operations of nature might
well trace the swelling of the sacred stream to the tears shed by
the goddess at the death of the beneficent corn-god her husband.
And the sign of the rising waters on earth was accompanied by a sign
in heaven. For in the early days of Egyptian history, some three or
four thousand years before the beginning of our era, the splendid
star of Sirius, the brightest of all the fixed stars, appeared at
dawn in the east just before sunrise about the time of the summer
solstice, when the Nile begins to rise. The Egyptians called it
Sothis, and regarded it as the star of Isis, just as the Babylonians
deemed the planet Venus the star of Astarte. To both peoples
apparently the brilliant luminary in the morning sky seemed the
goddess of life and love come to mourn her departed lover or spouse
and to wake him from the dead.
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