fore, have belonged to that class of divine kings or popes whose duty it was to die each year for their people and the world. As a god of vegetation, annually slain, the representative of Attis would be parallel to the Wild Man, the King, etc., of north European folk-custom, and to the Italian priest of Nemi.
§ 6.—Osiris
There seem to be some grounds for believing that Osiris, the great god of ancient Egypt, was one of those personifications of vegetation, whose annual death and resurrection have been celebrated in so many lands. But as the chief of the gods he appears to have absorbed the attributes of other deities, so that his character and rites present a complex of heterogeneous elements which, with the scanty evidence at our disposal, it is hardly possible to sort out. It may be worth while, however, to put together some of the facts which lend support to the view that Osiris or at least one of the deities out of whom he was compounded was a god of vegetation, analogous to Adonis and Attis.
The outline of his myth is as follows.[1] Osiris was the son of the earth-god Qeb (or Seb, as the name is sometimes transliterated).[2] Reigning as a king on earth, he reclaimed the Egyptians from savagery, gave them
- ↑ The myth, in a connected form, is only known from Plutarch, Isis et Osiris, cc. 13-19. Some additional details, recovered from Egyptian sources, will be found in the work of Adolf Erman, Aegypten und aegyptisches Leben im Altertum, p. 365 sqq.
- ↑ Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 1879, p. 110; Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter, p. 614; Ad. Erman, l.c.; Ed. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, i. § 56 sq.
