XL. The Nature of Osiris
1. Osiris a Corn-god
THE FOREGOING survey of the myth and ritual of Osiris may suffice to
prove that in one of his aspects the god was a personification of
the corn, which may be said to die and come to life again every
year. Through all the pomp and glamour with which in later times the
priests had invested his worship, the conception of him as the
corn-god comes clearly out in the festival of his death and
resurrection, which was celebrated in the month of Khoiak and at a
later period in the month of Athyr. That festival appears to have
been essentially a festival of sowing, which properly fell at the
time when the husbandman actually committed the seed to the earth.
On that occasion an effigy of the corn-god, moulded of earth and
corn, was buried with funeral rites in the ground in order that,
dying there, he might come to life again with the new crops. The
ceremony was, in fact, a charm to ensure the growth of the corn by
sympathetic magic, and we may conjecture that as such it was
practised in a simple form by every Egyptian farmer on his fields
long before it was adopted and transfigured by the priests in the
stately ritual of the temple.
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