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Osiris

AlsoOsiris

God of Fertility, Murdered by His Brother and Resurrected as King of the Underworld

Death and Resurrection · The Osiris Cycle
UnderworldFertilityResurrection

Who they are

Osiris is the heart of Egyptian myth. He was once the first good king of the mortal world, teaching the Egyptians farming, law, and reverence for the gods, and beloved for it. His jealous brother Set contrived to kill him, dismember him, and scatter the pieces across the land; his wife Isis, through great hardship, gathered his remains, revived him briefly by magic, conceived and bore Horus, and then Osiris took up his lasting reign in the underworld as judge of the dead and lord of eternal life. His story welds three things fast together: the death and return of the grain in the Nile valley, the passing of the throne from father to son, and every mortal's hope of resurrection after death. The Egyptians believed that, so long as one passed the judgment, anyone could be reborn as Osiris was — one of the ancient world's earliest faiths that eternal life was open to all.

Primary sourcesPlutarch, On Isis and OsirisThe Pyramid TextsThe Book of the Dead

Key stories

The Coffin and the Nile

Set secretly measured Osiris's body and had a magnificent chest made, then announced at a banquet: whoever fits inside exactly may keep it. Guest after guest tried lying in it, and the moment Osiris lay down, Set's accomplices slammed the lid, nailed it shut, sealed it with lead, and cast the chest into the Nile. The coffin drifted out to sea and washed up at Byblos in Phoenicia, where a growing tree enclosed it. Isis tracked it there and recovered the coffin — the death of Osiris began as a banquet game about "who fits."

Cut Into Fourteen Pieces

Isis hid her husband's body, but Set found it while hunting by night, hacked the corpse into fourteen pieces (forty-two by one account), and scattered them across Egypt to end all hope of resurrection. Isis and her sister Nephthys took the form of two birds and traveled the whole land to recover the limbs one by one; only a single piece, eaten by a fish, could not be found. She wrapped the remains in linen — the mythic archetype of the mummy — and by magic revived Osiris for a moment, conceiving and bearing Horus. Thereafter Osiris returned no more to the mortal world but became king of the underworld: death did not cancel him, only moved him to another throne.

Version differences

The number of pieces Osiris was cut into varies by version (fourteen or forty-two); Plutarch's Hellenized account is the most complete surviving version, but already passed through translation and interpretation.

Relationships

Father
Mother
Spouse
Siblings
Children
Slain by

Echoes today

Below are how modern works borrow or reinterpret this name or story — not the original material. The two differ, so keep them apart.

The "dying-and-rising god" motifFrazer's Golden Bough ranks Osiris alongside Adonis, Tammuz, and others as a "dying god," shaping the whole of comparative mythology.

Appears in