IN writing this treatise my object has been to give a clear exposition of the most important shape which the doctrine of immortality assumed in Egypt. This particular form of the doctrine was only one of many different ones that were held. The latter, however, were but occasional manifestations, whereas the system here treated of was the popular belief among all classes of the Egyptian people, from early to Coptic times. By far the greater part of the religious papyri and tomb texts and of the inscriptions of funerary stelÆ are devoted to it; the symbolism of nearly all the amulets is connected with it; it was bound up with the practice of mummifying the dead; and it centred in the person of Osiris, the most popular of all the gods of Egypt.

Even in Pyramid times Osiris had already attained pre-eminence; he maintained this position throughout the whole duration of Egyptian national life, and even survived its fall. From the fourth century B.C. he, together with his companion deities, entered into the religious life of the Greeks; and homage was paid to him by imperial Rome. Throughout the length and breadth of the Roman Empire, even to the remotest provinces of the Danube and the Rhine, altars were raised to him, to his wife Isis, and to his son Harpocrates; and wherever his worship spread, it carried with it that doctrine of immortality which was associated with his name. This Osirian doctrine influenced the systems of Greek philosophers; it made itself felt in the teachings of the Gnostics; we find traces of it in the writings of Christian apologists and the older fathers of the Church, and through their agency it has affected the thoughts and opinions of our own time.

The cause of this far-reaching influence lies both in the doctrine itself, which was at once the most profound and the most attractive of all the teachings of the Egyptian religion; and also in the comfort and consolation to be derived from the pathetically human story of its founder, Osiris. He, the son of the gods, had sojourned upon earth and bestowed upon men the blessings of civilisation. At length he fell a prey to the devices of the Wicked One, and was slain. But the triumph of evil and of death was only apparent: the work of Osiris endured, and his son followed in his footsteps and broke the power of evil. Neither had his being ended with death, for on dying he had passed into the world to come, henceforth to reign over the dead as “The Good Being.” Even as Osiris, so must each man die, no matter how noble and how godly his life; nevertheless his deeds should be established for ever, his name should endure, and the life which is eternal awaited him beyond the tomb. To the Egyptian, nature on every hand presented images of the life of Osiris. To him that life was reflected in the struggle between good and evil, in the contest between the fertilising Nile and the encroaching desert, no less than in the daily and yearly courses of the sun. In earlier times Osiris was occasionally confounded with the Sun god; later, the two deities were habitually merged in one another. The death and resurrection of Osiris occurred at the end of the month Khoiak--that is to say, at the winter solstice, concurrently with the dying of the Sun of the Old Year and the rising of the Sun of the New. The new phoenix was supposed to make his appearance in March; and this bird, although usually associated with the Sun, was often representative of Osiris. And the epithets and titles of the Sun god were similarly bestowed upon Osiris.

All the Osirian doctrines were readily apprehended in spite of their deep import, and they steadily tended towards the evolution of a high form of monotheistic belief. To no close student of these doctrines can the fact seem strange that Egypt should have been the first country in which Christianity permeated the whole body of the people. The Egyptian could recognise his old beliefs in many a Christian theme, and so much did the figure of Christ remind him of Osiris and his son Horus, that to him Christ became a hero who traversed the Nile valley even as Horus had done, overcoming His enemies, the evil demons and the wicked. In Egypt the Osirian faith and dogma were the precursors of Christianity, the foundations upon which it was able to build; and, altogether apart from their intrinsic worth and far-reaching influence, it is this which constitutes their significance in the history of the world.

For the choice of the illustrations, as well as for the English version, I am gratefully indebted to my translator.

ALFRED WIEDEMANN.

Bonn, March 1895.