Osiris, Lord of the Dead

This is the form of Osiris as lord of the Duat, the Egyptian underworld, into which he transformed after his death and resurrection. According to the myth, whose most complete account is transmitted by Plutarch, Osiris was the civilizing king of Egypt until his brother Set murdered and dismembered him; his wife Isis gathered the fragments of his body and, with funerary magic and the first mummification (work of Anubis), restored a form of life to him. But Osiris did not return to the world of the living: resurrected, he became sovereign of the kingdom of the dead and supreme judge of souls. Mummified, enthroned and bearing the insignia of royalty (the heka scepter and the nejej flail), he embodies victory over death and the promise of an eternal life that every Egyptian deceased aspired to share.

As lord of the Duat, Osiris presides over the Hall of the Two Truths, where the fate of each soul is decided in the ceremony 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; Anubis handles the plumb line and Thoth records the verdict before a tribunal of forty-two judges. The deceased pronounces the «negative confession», declaring the faults he has not committed. If the heart turns out light, he is declared «just of voice» (maa-jeru) and accesses the Fields of Iaru, a paradise of abundance; if it weighs due to his faults, Ammit, the Devourer, devours it, and the soul suffers the second death, definitive annihilation. In the funerary texts, the deceased identifies with the god and is called «Osiris N.», placing his name before that of the sovereign of the dead.

The funerary cult of Osiris was one of the most important and lasting of ancient Egypt, with its main center in Abydos, where mysteries were celebrated that recalled his passion, death and triumph over the tomb. His iconography (the body wrapped like a mummy, the green or black skin that refers to regeneration and the fertile silt of the Nile, and the atef crown) identifies him immediately as lord of the afterlife. The hope in the Osirian resurrection, previously reserved for kings and later «democratized» to all the deceased, shaped for millennia the mummification rites and the Egyptian funerary texts. In Hellenistic and Roman times, his figure spread throughout the Mediterranean associated with the mysteries of Isis, and his myth of the god who overcomes death has continued to fascinate the study of ancient religions as one of the great archetypes of death and rebirth.