Osīris

, a great deity of the Egyptians, son of Jupiter and Niobe. All the ancients greatly differ in their opinions concerning this celebrated god, but they all agree that, as king of Egypt, he took particular care to civilize his subjects, to polish their morals, to give them good and salutary laws, and to teach them agriculture. After he had accomplished a reform at home, Osiris resolved to go and spread cultivation in the other parts of the earth. He left his kingdom to the care of his wife Isis, and of her faithful minister Hermes or Mercury. The command of his troops at home was left to the trust of Hercules, a warlike officer. In this expedition Osiris was accompanied by his brother Apollo, and by Anubis, Macedo, and Pan. His march was through Æthiopia, where his army was increased by the addition of the Satyrs, a hairy race of monsters, who made dancing and playing on musical instruments their chief study. He afterwards pa ed through Arabia, and visited the greatest part of the kingdoms of Asia and Europe, where he enlightened the minds of men by introducing among them the worship of the gods, and a reverence for the wisdom of a supreme being. At his return home Osiris found the minds of his subjects roused and agitated. His brother Typhon had raised seditions, and endeavoured to make himself popular. Osiris, whose sentiments were always of the most pacific nature, endeavoured to convince his brother of his ill conduct, but he fell a sacrifice to the attempt. Typhon murdered him in a secret apartment and cut his body to pieces, which were divided among the a ociates of his guilt. Typhon, according to Plutarch, shut up his brother in a coffer and threw him into the Nile. The inquiries of Isis discovered the body of her husband on the coast of Phœnicia, where it had been conveyed by the waves, but Typhon stole it as it was being carried into Memphis, and he divided it amongst his companions, as was before observed. This cruelty incensed Isis; she revenged her husband’s death, and, with her son Orus, she defeated Typhon and the partisans of his conspiracy. She recovered the mangled pieces of her husband’s body, the genitals excepted, which the murderer had thrown into the sea; and to render him all the honour which his humanity deserved, she made as many statues of wax as there were mangled pieces of his body. Each statue contained a piece of the flesh of the dead monarch; and Isis, after she had summoned in her presence, one by one, the priests of all the different deities in her dominions, gave them each a statue, intimating that in doing that she had preferred them to all the other communities of Egypt, and she bound them by a solemn oath that they would keep secret that mark of her favour, and endeavour to show their sense of it by establishing a form of worship and paying divine honours to their prince. They were further directed to choose whatever animals they pleased to represent the person and the divinity of Osiris, and they were enjoined to pay the greatest reverence to that representative of divinity, and to bury it when dead with the greatest solemnity. To render their establishment more popular, each sacerdotal body had a certain portion of land allotted to them to maintain them, and to defray the expenses which nece arily attended their sacrifices and ceremonial rites. That part of the body of Osiris which had not been recovered was treated with more particular attention by Isis, and she ordered that it should receive honours more solemn, and at the same time more mysterious, than the other members. See: Phallic a . As Osiris had particularly instructed his subjects in cultivating the ground, the priests chose the ox to represent him, and paid the most superstitious veneration to that animal. See: Apis . Osiris, according to the opinion of some mythologists, is the same as the sun, and the adoration which is paid by different nations to an Anubis, a Bacchus, a Dionysius, a Jupiter, a Pan, . , is the same as that which Osiris received in the Egyptian temples. Isis also after death received divine honours as well as her husband, and as the ox was the symbol of the sun, or Osiris, so the cow was the emblem of the moon, or of Isis. Nothing can give a clearer idea of the power and greatne of Osiris than this inscription, which has been found on some ancient monuments: Saturn, the youngest of all the gods, was my father: I am Osiris, who conducted a large and numerous army as far as the deserts of India, and travelled over the greatest part of the world, and visited the streams of the Ister, and the remote shores of the ocean, diffusing benevolence to all the inhabitants of the earth . Osiris was generally represented with a cap on his head like a mitre, with two horns; he held a stick in his left hand, and in his right a whip with three thongs. Sometimes he appears with the head of a hawk, as that bird, from its quick and piercing eyes, is a proper emblem of the sun. Plutarch , De Iside et Osiride .— Hero dot us , bk. 2 , ch. 144 .— Diodorus , bk. 1 .— Homer , Ody ey , bk. 12 , li. 323 .— Ælian , de Natura Animalium , bk. 3 .— Lucian , de Syria Dea .— Pliny , bk. 8 .――A Persian general, who lived 450 B.C.――A friend of Turnus, killed in the Rutulian war. Virgil , Æneid , bk. 12 , li. 458 .