The Cult of Osiris in Relation to Primitive Initiation Rites

It is remarkable that the divine drama of Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god of the dead, has escaped comparison with the ordeal of primitive initiation rites. Certainly, Osiris was more than a played-out fertility god whose Djed fetish symbolized that renewal of creation through the ‘risen’ Listless One, as he was called. The many tears shed on his behalf by his mourners attest to his human essence, and make it impossible to think of Osiris either as nature-god or as cavern-dwelling chthonian deity, judging the dead by their tell-tale hearts.3 As for Osiris the king, now dead but embodied in his successor, the new king, Horus—where is the human tragedy in this bit of courtly mystification? The slain Osiris, whose annual resurrection was ever awaited tearfully upon the banks of the Nile, was no less than a member of the family. I refer not to the phenomenon of the dead-commoner-as-Osiris, whose loss was naturally a cause for mourning by the members of his family, but to that other death, symbolic rather than real, which has been celebrated widely in recollection of a major spiritual crisis in the growth-cycle of the individual.

That Osiris who was neither entirely dead, nor yet alive, who is death as in life was menaced by relentless Seth, being torn to pieces and but incompletely reassembled afterward, might well have been the historical descendant and lasting symbol of multitudes of youths who has been initiated into the tribal mysteries at puberty. As the propped-up Osiris, inert and drugged with sorrow, lost the