IN THE PERIOD DESCRIBED BY THE MYTHS of Olympus, gods walked among humans. But the history of the last god to rule as king of the earth is recorded in its fullest version in Egyptian rather than Greek tradition. The Egyptians unquestioningly believed that their most important god had once walked among them, led them into battle and ruled them wisely and well.
Herodotus described a visit to the shrine where Osiris was said to be buried. ‘Gigantic stone obelisks stand in the courtyard and there is a circular artificial lake next to it. It is on this lake at night that the Egyptians act out the Mysteries, the Black Rite that celebrates the death and resurrection of a being whose name I dare not speak. I know what goes on but… say no more.’
Fortunately we can supplement this teasing account with the history of Osiris as told by Herodotus’s near-contemporary Plutarch, an initiate priest of the Oracle at Delphi. In the following I have used Plutarch’s account as a basis, weaving in additional material from other sources…
We have to start by imagining a world at war, ravaged by roaming monsters and wild animals. Osiris was a great hunter, a ‘Beast Master’ — remembered as Orion the Hunter in Greek mythology and Herne the Hunter in Norse mythology — and a great warrior. He cleared the land of predatory beasts and defeated invading armies.
But this great warrior’s downfall came not in combat with monsters or on the battlefield, but because of the enemy within.
Returning from another military campaign, Osiris was welcomed back by cheering crowds, by the populace who loved him. The reign of Osiris, though constantly under attack from outside the country, would be remembered as a golden age. And it was an age of domestic as well as civil bliss. His name is connected with insemination, ‘ourien’ meaning semen, and what we today call the belt of Orion is a euphemism. In ancient times it was a penis that became erect as the new year progressed. These things should alert us to the fact that there is a strong sexual current in the history that follows.
Osiris accepted an invitation from his brother Seth to a gala dinner to celebrate victory.
Some said Osiris had been sleeping with beautiful dark-skinned Nepthys, wife of Seth and sister of his own wife, Isis. Did this provide Seth with a motive for murder? He may not have needed one. The clue to Seth’s animosity is contained in his name. He was an envoy of Satan.
After dinner Seth announced a game. He had made a beautiful chest, something like a coffin but fashioned out of cedar and inlaid with gold, silver, ivory and lapis lazuli. Whoever fitted most neatly into this chest, he said, could take it away.
One by one the guests tried but they were too fat, to thin, too tall, too short. Finally Osiris stepped in and lay down. ‘It fits!’ he cried. ‘Fits me like the skin I was born in!’
But his pleasure at winning was cut short as Seth slammed down the lid. Seth hammered in nails and filled every crack with molten lead — the metal of Satan. Then Seth and his followers carried the chest down to the banks of the Nile and cast it on the waters.
Osiris was an immortal, and Seth knew he couldn’t kill him, but he could, he believed, get rid of him for good.
The chest floated down the Nile for several days and nights, eventually washing ashore on the coast of what we now call Syria. A tender young tamarisk tree growing there wrapped the chest in its branches, and eventually grew all around it, enclosing it lovingly and protectively in its trunk. In time this tree became famous for its splendour, and the king of Syria had it chopped down and fashioned into a pillar that stood in the centre of his palace.
In the meantime Isis, separated from her man and deposed from her throne, cut her hair, blackened her face with cinders and wandered the surface of the earth, searching, tearfully, for her beloved husband. After a while she took a job as a servant girl at the court of a foreign king. (Readers will readily appreciate how this story, originally a sacred drama in the temples of Egypt, has come down to us in slightly garbled form as the pantomime Cinderella.)
But Isis never gave up hoping to find her man, and one day her magic powers led her to see Osiris clairvoyantly in the chest inside the tree in the middle of the very palace where she was working, the palace of the Syrian king. Isis revealed her true identity as a queen and persuaded the king to chop down the pillar and let her take the chest away.
She left by boat and landed on the island of Chemmis in the Nile delta. There she intended to use her magic arts to revive her husband.
But Seth had magic powers too. He and his evil cohorts were hunting by moonlight, and in a vision Seth suddenly saw Isis cradling Osiris. While she lay sleeping, he swooped down upon the loving couple.
Determined to make sure this time, he attacked Osiris with savage glee, hacking him into fourteen different pieces that he then had hidden in secret in different corners of the land.
So the widowed Isis had to set out on her travels again. (Freemasonic readers will perhaps be aware that they call themselves ‘Sons of the Widow’ partly as a mark of their participation in her quest.)
Isis wore seven veils to disguise herself from Seth’s minions and was aided by Nepthys. She also loved Osiris and now turned herself into a dog to help find and dig up the parcels of Osiris’s corpse. They retrieved all of them except the penis, which had been eaten by fish in the Nile.
They arrived at an island in Abydos in southern Egypt and there at night Isis and Nepthys bandaged all the remaining parts together using a long, winding piece of white linen.
The first mummy.
Finally, Isis fashioned a penis out of gold and attached it. She was not able to bring him wholly back to life, but she revived Osiris sexually so that she was able to hover, touching him gently and delicately as she enveloped his penis in the form of a bird until he ejaculated. In this way she impregnated herself on him, and in this same way Horus, the new Master of the Universe, was conceived.
Horus grew up to avenge his father’s death by killing his Uncle Seth. Osiris meanwhile lived in the Underworld as its king and Lord of the Dead. It is in this role that he was most often depicted by the Egyptians, usually with a green face, heavily swathed and apparently immobile, but emanating a power that is symbolized in his royal regalia, and carrying the crook and flail.
WHAT THE HELL DOES ALL THIS MEAN? How can we decode it?
On one level it seems to represent the succeeding of one constellation by another in the precession of the equinoxes. Horus deposes Seth and supplants him.
On another level, perhaps the most obvious one, it is a fertility myth about the yearly cycle of the seasons. The appearance of the star Sirius on the horizon after months of being hidden was a sign to the ancient Egyptians that Osiris would arise again shortly afterwards and that the inundation of the Nile was due. Myths of the resurrected god-king were told all around the world from Tammuz and Marduk to the Fisher King stories associated with Parsifal and the King Arthur cycle. They follow this same pattern. The king is fatally wounded in the genitals and while he lies suffering the land stays barren. Then in the spring a magical operation is performed and he rises again, both sexually and in a way that fertilizes the whole world.
This is why Osiris came to be worshipped in Egypt as a god of crops and summer fertility. The longed-for yearly appearance in the east of Orion and his consort Isis, known to us as Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens, heralded the inundation of the Nile that revived the vegetable and so also the animal and human world — literally a matter of life and death. The Egyptians made small mummies out of linen bags stuffed with corn — corn dollies. When it was watered the corn sprouted through the bag, showing that the great god was being reborn.
I am the plant of life, says the Osiris of the pyramid texts.
I WILL NOT DWELL ON THIS ASPECT OF OSIRIS because the level of meaning in myths that relates to fertility has become widely appreciated in the hundred or so years since Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.
The trouble is that it is has tended to be appreciated at the expense of everything else.
If the Egyptian populace thronging the outer courtyards of the temples understood the story of Osiris on this level of the fertility myth, there was another, higher level known only to the priests of the inner sanctum, the Black Rite whose secrets Herodotus claimed to know.
This secret was a historical secret.
To get at the truth of it, we now need to look at a similarly bizarre and disturbing story from the Greek myths. We know from Plutarch that in antiquity Osiris, the last god-king to rule the earth, was equated with Dionysus, the last of the Olympic gods.
The sources disagree on the subject of Dionysus’s parentage. Some say his father was Hermes, others Zeus. All agree that the little god’s mother was Mother Earth and that, as with Zeus, she hid the infant Dionysus in a cave.
Dionysus, like Zeus, represents the evolution of a new form of consciousness, and again the Titans were determined to nip it in the bud. Again we see that the Titans are the consciousness eaters.
They smeared their faces white with gypsum to conceal their identity as the black-faced sons of the crow god. They didn’t want to frighten him as they lured Dionysus from a cradle hidden in a niche in the back of the cave.
Suddenly the Titans fell on Dionysus, tearing him into pieces. They flung these pieces into a boiling cauldron of milk, then tore the meat from his bones with their teeth.
Meanwhile, Athena had stolen into the cave unnoticed and she snatched away the goat-boy’s heart before it was cooked and eaten. She took this to Zeus, who cut open a hole in his thigh, inserted the body part and sewed it up again. After a while, just as Athena had sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus, the reborn Dionysus sprang fully grown from Zeus’s thigh.
IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THE HISTORICAL reality behind this mysterious story and the parallel story of Osiris, it is necessary to remind ourselves that in this account of the history of the universe matter was only precipitated out of the cosmic mind over very long periods and was only very gradually developing towards the sort of solidity we are familiar with today.
It is also as well to remind ourselves again that although we may view many of the great figures of myths, both gods and human, as having an anatomy like our own, this is only how they appear in the eye of imagination.
The world looked very different to the physical eyes that were evolving at this time. This was still the world recorded in the Metamorphoses of the initiate-poet Ovid, when the anatomical forms of humans and animals were not fixed as they are now, a world of giants, hybrids and monsters. The most anatomically advanced humans were evolving the two eyes we have today, but the Lantern of Osiris still protruded from the middle of the forehead, where the bone of the skull had not yet hardened.
Gradually, though, matter became denser. And the important point to bear in mind here is that, despite the fact that matter was precipitated from mind, it was alien to mind. To the extent that matter hardened, it became a greater barrier to the free flow of the cosmic mind. What gradually happened, then, was that as matter hardened to something approaching the solid objects we know today, two parallel dimensions evolved, the spirit world and the material world, the former viewed by the Lantern of Osiris and the latter by the two eyes.
The story of Osiris/Dionysius is the next and perhaps the most decisive stage in this process, when parts of the great cosmic mind, the universal consciousness, became parcelled off and absorbed into individual bodies. The bony roof of the skull hardened, closing over the Lantern of Osiris, so filtering out the great cosmic mind above.
According to the ancient wisdom, so long as there had been no barrier to the spirits, gods and angels ranged up above them, there had been no possibility of humans enjoying the individual free thought or will that distinguishes human consciousness. If we were not cut off from the spirit worlds and from the great cosmic mind, if our bodily make-up did not filter it out, our minds would be completely dazzled and overwhelmed.
Humans would now have some space for themselves in which to think.
The archetypal image of this model of the human condition is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Prisoners are chained in cave so that they face a wall and cannot look round. Events taking place outside the mouth of the cave throw shadows on to the wall that the prisoners take for reality.
This is an exposition of the philosophy academics call idealism, which holds that the cosmic mind and the thoughts or Thought-Beings emanating from it (ideas) are the higher reality. Physical objects, on the other hand, are mere shadows or reflections of this higher reality.
Because we are remote from the time when people believed in idealism, it is difficult for us to appreciate it as a living philosophy of life, rather than just as a dry as dust theory. But people who believed in idealism experienced the world in an idealistic way and also understood idealism as a historical process.
Academics tend to miss the surprisingly literal layer of meaning in Plato’s Allegory. The cave here is the bony roof of the skull. The skull is a dark, bony room covered in flesh.
Plato was an initiate and would have been well aware of the delicate mechanism of shadowing and reflecting that takes place inside the human skull, the occult physiology and psychology of the secret doctrine.
The defining characteristic of human life, its crowning achievement, and also the crowning achievement of the cosmos, is the capacity for thought. The brain is the most complex, the most subtle, altogether the most mysterious and miraculous physical object in the known universe.
According to the secret doctrine the cosmos created the human brain in order to be able to think about itself.
IT IS VITAL, IF WE ARE TO UNDERSTAND WHAT is happening here, to snap out of a materialistic way of thinking, to look at things, as it were, through the other end of the telescope. If you are an idealist, you believe that the universe was created by Mind for minds.
More particularly, you believe that the cosmic Mind created the material universe in order to give human minds the form they have.
The idealist history of creation is the history of this process, and the great events in this history have been the putting into place of the sun, moon, the planets and the stars. Our consciousness now has the structure it has because the heavenly bodies are ranged above us in the way they are.
With the moon in place to reflect the light of the sun down to earth and with this process reproduced in microcosm within the human skull, with matter having at last become sufficiently dense that the human mind is ‘closed off’, we have reached the point where human anatomy and human consciousness have achieved a form we would recognize today. The basic conditions making it possible for humans to reflect, that is to say, to think, were now in place.
There is, however, one more issue to consider.
IN THE SECRET HISTORY THERE IS ALSO A specifically sexual dimension to this development.
The Mystery priests believed that as the Lantern of Osiris withdrew underneath the bony covering of the skull and begun to occupy the position where we know it today as the pineal gland, the fleshly penis protruded. According to the ancient wisdom, the penis was the last part of the human body to assume its present, fleshly form, which is why artists in the secret societies, such as Michelangelo and, Signorelli, Leonardo’s brother initiate, often depicted the penis of the men of mythology as plant-like.
At this great turning point in history, then, just as the penis became flesh, humans could no longer propagate themselves by the old plant-like method of parthenogenesis. Humanity gave itself entirely over to animal sexuality.
And from this opens up a third and terrible dimension.
Human bones were hardening and becoming material. A human skull became something half-living and half-dead.
This is why it is an axiom of the secret doctrine that the beginning of death was the birth of thought.
According to the secret doctrine, there is a fundamental opposition between life and thought. The life processes in humans — digestion, respiration and the processes of growing, for example — are largely unconscious. The conscious, thoughtful dimension in humans is only made possible by a partial suppression of these life processes. The human organism ‘steals’ forces which in animals are used for growth and biological structuring, and channels them to create the conditions necessary for thought. It is said that this is one of the reasons why humans are, comparatively, sickly animals.
Human thought is a deadly process, restricting both growth and longevity.
When proto-humans were vegetable creatures, they did not experience death. When they began to take on animal characteristics, they began to experience a foretaste of death. This was an experience like dream-filled sleep. After a while they would ‘awake’ again into the material world. This sleep, even when it was very deep sleep, no longer gave humans the refreshment they craved. As human bones and the body of the earth hardened and rigidified to something near to what they are today, humans moved less freely, indeed painfully. The call of death grew louder and louder until it became almost overwhelming.
Sleep deepened until it became like death, and then it became death.
Now humans were finally entangled in the savage cycles of life, death and rebirth, cycles in which creatures must die in order to make way for a new generation. They now lived in a place where fathers must die to make way for sons, where the king must die to give way to a younger, more vigorous successor. Scholars have managed to piece together textual references with carvings at the Step Pyramid complex at Saqqara near Cairo in order to understand something of what must have happened at the ‘Heb-Sed’ rituals that took place there. Having undergone a Mystery school ceremony of death and rebirth in an underground chamber, the newly regenerated pharaoh would emerge into a more public courtyard. There he had to undergo a series of trials of strength and potency, including running with a bull, to try to prove that, as he would ritually cry, ‘I am free to run through the land’. If the pharaoh failed these tests he would suffer the same bloody death as the bull. The following eyewitness account, of a bull god sacrifice in India, comes from a nineteenth-century British traveller: ‘When the stroke is given which severs the head of the victim from his body, the cymbals strike up, the tom-toms beat, the horn is blown and the whole assembly, shouting, smear their bodies with blood, they roll themselves in it, and, dancing like demons, accompany their dances with obscene songs, allusions and gestures.’
Herodotus must have witnessed something very like this if he was allowed see the Black Rite of the Egyptians. At the climax of the initiation ceremony we have been following, the candidate would also have seen something similar — the death of a great god.
THE HUMAN CONDITION WAS CHANGING on many different levels. We have reached a pivotal time in the secret history of the world when matter had precipitated out of mind and hardened to such a degree that the human skull was finally formed into a shape very like it is today. But the Third Eye was still much more active than it is today and had not become vestigial. Perceptions of the material world were equally as vivid as perceptions of the spiritual world.
A human being ushered into a throne room might look at another human being sitting in front of him, or at least what appeared to be very like a human being. Although humans no longer had unlimited access to the spirit worlds, the man might then be permitted to look at the king again with his Third Eye, and, if he did, he might see a god sitting there.
The greatest historical record of humanity’s lost ability to exercise this double mode of perception comes in the Hindu sacred text the Bhagavad Gita. A charioteer called Arjuna has been full of doubts on the eve of battle. So Krishna, the leader he is about to drive into the fray, allows Arjuna to see him as he looks to the eye of vision, in his supreme, divine form. Trembling with awe and wonder he sees Krishna’s eyes as the sun and moon, sees that Krishna fills all of heaven and earth with radiance as if with the light of a thousand suns, that he is worshipped by countless other gods and that he contains within himself all the wonders of the cosmos. Afterwards Krishna shrinks into his human form again, and shows his gentle human face to reassure terrified Arjuna.
Osiris might equally have given this experience to someone who had walked into his throne room at Thebes. Jacob Boehme described the world of cut stone, carved wood, of royal robes and flesh and blood as ‘Outworld’. He intended to be a bit disparaging. He knew that the inner world, accessible to the Third Eye, is the real one, and in the midst of the bloody, painful, death-drenched world in which the followers of Osiris now found themselves, this is what they clung on to.
THE MYTH OF OSIRIS, THEREFORE, HAS many layers of meaning, but it is above all a myth about consciousness.
It informs us that we must all die — but in order to be reborn. The key point in this story is that Osiris is reborn not into ordinary life but into a higher state of consciousness. ‘I shall not decay,’ he proclaims in the Book of the Dead, ‘I shall not rot, I shall not putrefy, I shall not turn into worms, I shall have my being, I shall live, I shall live.’ Again we come across a phrasing, an idea of being born again that may seem strangely familiar to Christians. Osiris is here discovering that he has what Christians call ‘eternal life’.
IN THE STORY OF OSIRIS WE HAVE SEEN how the forces of sex, death and thought became ever more tightly entwined in order to create the unique thing that is human consciousness. The wise men and women of antiquity understood how death and sexuality are necessary for thought to arise, and because they understood how these forces had been woven together in a historical process, they also understood how conscious thought could be used to manipulate the sexual and the death forces in order to achieve higher states. Since ancient times these techniques have been among the best kept secrets of the Mystery schools and secret societies.
We will look into these techniques in some detail later, but all this is a difficult area for us because our understanding of sexuality tends to be on a very materialistic level.
For instance, it is very difficult for us today to look at paintings and carvings of the erect phallus adorning the walls of Hindu or Egyptian temples and to imagine how they would have been intended to be ‘read’, because in the modern world spirituality has for the most part been removed from sex.
In the ancient world sperm was understood to be an expression of the cosmic will, the hidden generative power in things, the ordering principle of all life. Each particle of sperm was held to contain a particle of the prima materia out of which everything was made, a particle which could explode with incredible burning heat to form a whole new macrocosm. Adolescents in our era may catch some reverberation of the ancient feeling, when the first stirrings of sexuality bring on feelings of keen, new intensity and an aching desire, felt in the breast, to embrace the whole world.
Desire is always open to corruption, though. What we desire, we possess in our imagination. Desire hardens. When we desire someone we ‘reify’ them to borrow Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase. We want to bend them to our will, which is the influence of the Spirit of Opposition.
In the mind-before-matter view this diminishing of other people by the way we perceive them can be literally true. The way you look at people affects their internal physiological and chemical constitution.
Modern science has taught us to think of the sexual urge as something impersonal, something that has a will apart from our own, as an expression of the will to survive of the species. For the ancients, too, the sexual urge was an expression of a will beyond the individual. They saw sexuality impelling us towards the great moments of our lives, because they saw how sex controls who we are born to, as well as determining the people we are attracted to.
A man in the ancient world might see a woman he desired and be overcome by a quite frightening, overwhelming desire. He would know that the rest of life would be shaped by her response. He would also know that the roots of his desire lay very, very deep, having their origins long before his present lifetime. He would know that the sexual desire that drove him towards that woman was not merely biological — as in the modern account — but had other dimensions, spiritual and sacred. If the planet of love had been steering them towards this meeting, then so, too, had the other great gods of the sky been preparing this experience for them over many, many millennia and through many incarnations.
Today we know that when we look at a distant star we are seeing something that happened a very long time ago, because of the time it has taken for the light from that star to reach the earth. The ancients knew another truth, which is that when they contemplated their own will, they were also looking at something which they had formed long before they were born. The ancients knew that every time they felt themselves merging with another human being in the sexual act, the flight of whole constellations was involved. They knew, too, that how they made love would have an effect on the cosmos for millennia to come.
When we make love we are interreacting with great cosmic powers, and if we choose to do so consciously we may participate in this magical act. It was this magical element in the sexual act that Rilke was referring to when he wrote that ‘two people coming together in the night summon up the future’.
THERE IS ONE FURTHER TWIST TO THE STORY of Osiris, a dark shadow to an already dark story. We saw that Isis had a sister, Nepthys, and there was a suggestion of sexual impropriety with Osiris, some sexual fall from grace perhaps. But later Nepthys used her magic powers to help Isis in her search for the body parts of Osiris and helped, too, to bind them together again.
Nepthys, then, is a figure representing some dark form of wisdom, fallen but capable of redemption.
In Christian mythology this same figure, this same spiritual impulse, reappears as Mary Magdalene. We have been following the history of the Fall. We have seen that the Fall was not the fall of human spirits into a pre-existing material world — it is a very easy and common mistake to imagine it like this — but a Fall in which human bodies became denser as the material world became denser.
We live in a Fallen world. Just as myriad spirits help us to grow and evolve, so too others, just as numerous, work to destroy both us and the very fabric of our world. In Christian mythology — and in the secret doctrine of the Church — the earth suffered and was punished for having fallen by having her own spirit imprisoned deep in the underworld inside her. Sometimes called Sophia, notably in the Christian tradition, this wisdom is only reached when we travel down through the dark and demonic places of the earth and also of ourselves. It is because of Nepthys — because of Sophia — that we all have need to touch rock bottom, to experience the worst that life has to offer, to wrestle with our demons, to test our intellect to its limits and journey to the other side of madness.
We know from Plutarch that in antiquity Isis was identified with Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. Athena had a half-sister, a dark-skinned girl called Pallas, whom she loved more than anyone. Carefree, they used to play on the plains of Anatolia, running games, wrestling and mock fights with spears and shields. But one day Athena was distracted. She slipped and accidentally speared Pallas to death.
From then on she called herself Pallas Athena, to acknowledge the dark side of herself, just as in a sense Nepthys represents the dark side of Isis. She also carved a statue of Pallas out of black wood to memorialize her.
This statue, called the Palladium, carved by the hand of a goddess and washed by her tears was revered as an object of world-changing power in antiquity. When the people of Anatolia kept it in their capital, Troy was the greatest city in the world. The Greeks wanted to know what the Trojans knew. When they carried it off triumphantly, the leadership of world civilization passed to them. It was later buried beneath Rome in all its glory, until the Emperor Constantine moved it to Constantinople, when it became the centre of world spirituality. Today it is said to be hidden somewhere in Eastern Europe, which is why in recent times, the great powers, the Freemasonic ones, have sought to control this region.
The cult of Nepthys together with its Greek and Christian equivalents, forms one of the darkest and most powerful streams in occultism. Great forces like these shape the history of the world even now.