I may add that a gradual growth of Osiris-worship is clearly marked on the monuments themselves. The simpler { 170}stelæ and memorials of the earliest age seldom contain the names of any god, but display votaries making offerings at the shrine of ancestors. Similarly, the scenes represented on the walls of tombs of early date bear no reference to the great gods of later ages, but are merely domestic and agricultural in character, as may be observed at Sakkarah and even to some extent also at Beni-Hassan. Under the Sixth Dynasty, the monuments begin to make more and more frequent mention of Osiris, who now comes to be regarded as Judge of the Dead and Lord of the Lower World; and on a tablet of this age in the Boulak Museum occurs for the first time the expression afterwards so common, “justified by Osiris.” Under the Twelfth Dynasty, legend becomes more prominent; a solar and lunar character seems to be given by reflex to Osiris and Isis: and the name of Ra, the sun, is added to that of many previously distinct and independent deities. Khem, the ithyphallic god of the Thebaid, now also assumes greater importance, as is quite natural under a line of Theban princes: and Khem, a local mummy-god, is always represented in his swathing-clothes, and afterwards confounded, certainly with Amen, and probably also with the mummy-god of Abydos. But Osiris from this time forward rises distinctly into the front rank as a deity. “To him, rather than to the dead, the friends and family offer their sacrifices. A court is formed for him. Thoth, the recorder [totem-god of Abydos], Anubis the watcher, Ra the impersonation of truth, and others, assist in judgment on the soul.” The name of the deceased is henceforth constantly accompanied by the formula “justified by Osiris.” About the same time the Book of the Dead in its full form came into existence, with its developed conception of the lower world, and its complicated arrangement of planes of purgatorial progress.
Under the Eighteenth Dynasty, the legend thickens; the identifications of the gods become more and more intricate; Amen and Ra are sought and found under innumerable { 171}forms of other deities; and a foundation is laid for the esoteric Monotheism or pantheistic nature-worship of the later philosophising priesthood. It was under the Nineteenth Dynasty that the cult of local Triads or Trinities took fullest shape, and that the mystical interpretation of the religion of Egypt came well into the foreground. The great Osirian myth was then more and more minutely and mystically elaborated; and even the bull Apis, the totem-god of Memphis, was recognised as a special incarnation of Osiris, who thus becomes, with Amen, the mysterious summing-up of almost all the national pantheon. At last we find the myth going off into pure mysticism, Osiris being at once the father, brother, husband, and son of Isis, and also the son of his own child Horus. * Sentences with an almost Athanasian mixture of vagueness and definiteness inform us how “the son proceeds from the father, and the father proceeds from his son”; how “Ra is the soul of Osiris, and Osiris the soul of Ra and how Horus his child, awakened by magical rites from his dead body, is victorious over Set, the prince of darkness, and sits as Osiris upon the throne of the father whom he has revived and avenged. Here as elsewhere the myth, instead of being the explanation of the god, does nothing more than darken counsel.”