object:1.42 - Osiris and the Sun
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
XLII. Osiris and the Sun
OSIRIS has been sometimes interpreted as the sun-god, and in modern
times this view has been held by so many distinguished writers that
it deserves a brief examination. If we enquire on what evidence
Osiris has been identified with the sun or the sun-god, it will be
found on analysis to be minute in quantity and dubious, where it is
not absolutely worthless, in quality. The diligent Jablonski, the
first modern scholar to collect and sift the testimony of classical
writers on Egyptian religion, says that it can be shown in many ways
that Osiris is the sun, and that he could produce a cloud of
witnesses to prove it, but that it is needless to do so, since no
learned man is ignorant of the fact. Of the ancient writers whom he
condescends to quote, the only two who expressly identify Osiris
with the sun are Diodorus and Macrobius. But little weight can be
attached to their evidence; for the statement of Diodorus is vague
and rhetorical, and the reasons which Macrobius, one of the fathers
of solar mythology, assigns for the identification are exceedingly
slight.
The ground upon which some modern writers seem chiefly to rely for
the identification of Osiris with the sun is that the story of his
death fits better with the solar phenomena than with any other in
nature. It may readily be admitted that the daily appearance and
disappearance of the sun might very naturally be expressed by a myth
of his death and resurrection; and writers who regard Osiris as the
sun are careful to indicate that it is the diurnal, and not the
annual, course of the sun to which they understand the myth to
apply. Thus Renouf, who identified Osiris with the sun, admitted
that the Egyptian sun could not with any show of reason be described
as dead in winter. But if his daily death was the theme of the
legend, why was it celebrated by an annual ceremony? This fact alone
seems fatal to the interpretation of the myth as descriptive of
sunset and sunrise. Again, though the sun may be said to die daily,
in what sense can he be said to be torn in pieces?
In the course of our enquiry it has, I trust, been made clear that
there is another natural phenomenon to which the conception of death
and resurrection is as applicable as to sunset and sunrise, and
which, as a matter of fact, has been so conceived and represented in
folk-custom. That phenomenon is the annual growth and decay of
vegetation. A strong reason for interpreting the death of Osiris as
the decay of vegetation rather than as the sunset is to be found in
the general, though not unanimous, voice of antiquity, which classed
together the worship and myths of Osiris, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus,
and Demeter, as religions of essentially the same type. The
consensus of ancient opinion on this subject seems too great to be
rejected as a mere fancy. So closely did the rites of Osiris
resemble those of Adonis at Byblus that some of the people of Byblus
themselves maintained that it was Osiris and not Adonis whose death
was mourned by them. Such a view could certainly not have been held
if the rituals of the two gods had not been so alike as to be almost
indistinguishable. Herodotus found the similarity between the rites
of Osiris and Dionysus so great, that he thought it impossible the
latter could have arisen independently; they must, he supposed, have
been recently borrowed, with slight alterations, by the Greeks from
the Egyptians. Again, Plutarch, a very keen student of comparative
religion, insists upon the detailed resemblance of the rites of
Osiris to those of Dionysus. We cannot reject the evidence of such
intelligent and trustworthy witnesses on plain matters of fact which
fell under their own cognizance. Their explanations of the worships
it is indeed possible to reject, for the meaning of religious cults
is often open to question; but resemblances of ritual are matters of
observation. Therefore, those who explain Osiris as the sun are
driven to the alternative of either dismissing as mistaken the
testimony of antiquity to the similarity of the rites of Osiris,
Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, and Demeter, or of interpreting all these
rites as sun-worship. No modern scholar has fairly faced and
accepted either side of this alternative. To accept the former would
be to affirm that we know the rites of these deities better than the
men who practised, or at least who witnessed them. To accept the
latter would involve a wrenching, clipping, mangling, and distorting
of myth and ritual from which even Macrobius shrank. On the other
hand, the view that the essence of all these rites was the mimic
death and revival of vegetation, explains them separately and
collectively in an easy and natural way, and harmonises with the
general testimony borne by the ancients to their substantial
similarity.
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