lar confirmation is given by "The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys," a papyrus found within a statue of Osiris in Thebes. The sisters wail for the dead hero, and implore him to "come to his own abode." The theory of the birth of Horus here is that he was formed out of the scattered members of Osiris, an hypothesis, of course, inconsistent with the other myths (especially with the myth that he dived for the members of Osiris in the shape of a crocodile[1]), and, therefore, all the more mythical. The "Book of Respirations," finally, contains the magical songs by which Isis was feigned to have restored breath and life to Osiris.[2] In the representations of the vengeance and triumph of Horus on the temple walls of Edfou in the Ptolemaic period, Horus, accompanied by Isis, not only chains up and pierces the red hippopotamus (or pig in some designs), who is Set, but, exercising reprisals, cuts him into pieces, as Set cut Osiris. Isis instructs Osiris as to the portion which properly falls to each of nine gods. Isis reserves his head and "saddle;" Osiris gets the thigh; the bones are given to the cats. As each god had his local habitation in a given town, there is doubtless reference to local myths. At Edfou also the animal of Set is sacrificed symbolically in his image made of paste, a common practice in ancient Mexico.[3] Many of these myths, as M. Naville remarks, are doubtless ætiological: the priests, as in the Brahmanas, told them to account for peculiar parts of the ritual, and to
- ↑ Marietta, Denderah, iv. 77, 88, 89.
- ↑ Records of Past, iv. 121.
- ↑ Herodotus, ii. 47; De Is. et Os., 90. See also Porphyry's Life of Pythagoras, who sacrificed a bull made of paste. Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 436.
