Osiris, Lord of the Afterlife

Set recovers the chest and this time tears the body apart. How many pieces depends on who is telling it: fourteen in Plutarch (18), twenty-six in Diodorus (I, 21), who also records the variant of sixteen. No Egyptian source gives a number, because none of them narrates the scene. Set scatters the pieces across Egypt so that no two are left together.

Isis, helped by her sister Nephthys, walks the country gathering them. She finds them all but one: the phallus, which the fish of the Nile had eaten, and of which she makes an image to replace it. With funerary magic and the first mummification, the work of Anubis, she gives the body a form of life back, and turned into a kite she conceives Horus by him, the heir who will claim the throne. It is worth noting that in Plutarch the posthumous son is not Horus but Harpocrates, born prematurely and weak in the legs; the kite version is the Egyptian one, that of the Pyramid Texts.

But Osiris does not come back. Half resurrected, his body incomplete and unable to tread the world of the living again, he goes down to the Duat and sits on a throne he will never leave. Everything he still is, he is sitting down. With one exception, and it is not his doing: each night, in the sixth hour of the sun's nocturnal journey, Ra descends to the depth of the Duat and unites with the body of Osiris, and out of that union the sun rises again in the morning. He does not go up; Ra comes down.

In the Hall of Two Truths, Osiris presides over the tribunal where the fate of each dead person is decided. Before forty-two judges the deceased pronounces the so-called negative confession, the list of the faults he has not committed. Then his heart is placed on one pan of the scales and the feather of Maat, which is both truth and the order of the world, on the other. If the heart proves light, the dead man is declared "true of voice" (maa-kheru) and enters the Fields of Iaru; if it weighs with his guilt, Ammit devours him and he suffers the second death, the annihilation there is no returning from.

What is remarkable is what Osiris does in that scene, which is nothing. Anubis works the tongue of the balance, Thoth records the verdict, Ammit carries out the sentence and the forty-two judges listen. Osiris sits at the back, wrapped, with the insignia crossed over his chest. His function is not to act but to be there: to guarantee that the process exists and that there is someone to answer to.

From this comes the most widespread funerary custom in Egypt. In tomb texts the deceased does not say he is appearing before Osiris: he says he is Osiris, placing the god's name before his own, "Osiris N.". He is not prayed to for mercy; his identity is borrowed so that one may cross what he crossed.

His cult had its centre at Abydos, where a royal tomb of the First Dynasty, that of Djer, was reinterpreted a thousand years later as the god's sepulchre and became a pilgrimage destination. There, in the month of Khoiak, the mysteries recalling his passion, his death and his triumph were celebrated, and there the djed pillar was raised, which tradition identifies with his backbone: to raise it was to set him upright.

The most eloquent rite is the humblest. Figures in the shape of the god were placed in tombs, filled with soil and grain and watered so that they would sprout inside the sepulchre; we call them Osiris beds or corn mummies, and they have been found in tombs as famous as Tutankhamun's. Osiris is not a promise spoken but a promise sown. And the promise widened over the centuries: what in the Old Kingdom was the pharaoh's privilege came within reach of any dead person who could pay for the rites.

One warning remains about what is usually read. Osiris is often cited as the first of a family of "dying-and-rising gods" said to explain later Mediterranean figures. That family is not ancient: James Frazer built it in The Golden Bough (1890), and present-day Egyptology does not support the genealogy, among other reasons because Osiris does not rise in the sense the scheme requires. He does not return to life: he stays below, and what he offers the dead is to accompany him, not to come out with him.