Osiris, the Living King

Osiris (Usir in ancient Egyptian) is, in the Heliopolitan theology, the firstborn son of Geb, god of the earth, and Nut, goddess of the sky, and therefore a member of the Ennead of Heliopolis together with his siblings Isis, Set and Nephthys. Mythical king of primeval Egypt, he is credited with having drawn humanity out of savagery: he taught them agriculture and viticulture, gave them just laws and showed them the worship of the gods, inaugurating a golden age of order and abundance. As lord of vegetation, Osiris is identified with the cycle of the grain that dies underground and is reborn, and with the annual rise of the Nile that fertilizes the fields. His green or black skin in iconography refers precisely to that regenerative force of the fertile earth and the river's silt. He took his sister Isis as his wife, with whom he formed the sovereign couple of the myth.

The core of the myth, whose most complete narration has reached us through Plutarch's treatise De Iside et Osiride, recounts the betrayal of his brother Set. Envious of the throne, Set tricks Osiris into lying down in a chest made to his measure, seals it and throws it into the Nile; later he recovers the body and dismembers it into fourteen pieces that he scatters throughout Egypt. Isis, helped by her sister Nephthys, travels the country gathering the fragments and, with the funerary magic that characterizes her and the intervention of Anubis in the first mummification, returns Osiris to a form of life. Transformed into a kite, Isis conceives Horus from him, the heir who will avenge his father. Osiris does not return, however, to the world of the living: resurrected, he becomes sovereign of the afterlife. This account made him the paradigm of victory over death, and every Egyptian deceased aspired to identify with him in order to be reborn, to the point that in funerary texts the deceased is called «Osiris N.», placing his name before that of the god.

As lord of the Duat, the Egyptian underworld, Osiris presides over the tribunal where the fate of souls is decided. In the scene of the weighing of the heart (psychostasia), described and illustrated in the Book of the Dead, the heart of the deceased is placed on one pan of the scale and the feather of Maat, symbol of truth and justice, on the other. Thoth records the verdict and Anubis watches the pointer of the scale. If the heart proves light, the deceased is declared «just of voice» and gains access to the fertile fields of Aaru; if it weighs down due to his faults, Ammit, the Devourer, devours it and the soul suffers the second death. Enthroned, wrapped like a mummy and carrying the crook (heka) and the flail (nekhekh), insignia of royalty, Osiris guarantees at once cosmic justice and the hope of personal resurrection. His cult, centered in Abydos, where mysteries commemorating his passion and his triumph were celebrated, was one of the most enduring and widespread in all of ancient Egypt.