Entrance to the Blessed Afterlife of Osiris


Osiris
God of Agriculture
God of the Dead and the Living
God of Regeneration
King of Duat

Osiris rules over Duat, the underworld, where the blessed dead who were worthy in life receive a new and more glorious life under his patronage (remind anyone of Christianity). Osiris is the law of the underworld, and only those who survive the grueling trials and are judged to have worth ever come within his domain. He is God of Fertility, Vegetation and the Harvest, his very half-resurrected existence symbolic of the constant death and resurrection of the plant life upon which humanity depends. So beloved was he by his people that the story of his death and eternal parting from the world was re-enacted again and again in festivals every year for millennia.
Osiris was the first child of Nut (Goddess of the Sky) and Geb or Ra, and therefore the brother of Seth, Nephthys, and Isis. He was married to his sister, Isis. He was also the Father of Horus and Anubis by his sisters. These traditions state that Nephthys (wife of Seth) assumed the form of Isis to seduce Seth. Osiris, happening to pass at that time, mistook her for Isis as well and, believing her to be his wife, took her to bed despite her protests. It was not long after that the god Anubis was born. One of many reason Seth wanted him dead.
The oldest religious texts refer to Osiris as the Great God of the Dead, and throughout these texts it is assumed that the reader will understand that he once possessed human form and lived on earth. As the first son of Geb, the original king of Egypt, Osiris inherited the throne when Geb abdicated. At this time the Egyptians were uncivilized. Osiris saw this and was greatly disturbed. Therefore, he went out among the people and taught them the art of agriculture, how to properly worship the gods, and gave them laws to followed. Thoth helped him in many ways by inventing the arts and sciences and giving names to things. Osiris was Egypt's greatest king who ruled through kindness and persuasion. Having civilized Egypt, Osiris traveled to other lands, leaving Isis as his regent, to teach other peoples what he taught the Egyptians.
Seth had been jealous of his brother Osiris' power and popularity for some time. When Osiris decided to travel the world to bring civilization to its people, he made Isis Regent of Egypt instead of Set. When Seth found out that Anubis was Osiris’s son and not his. This was the last straw. Set was strong and brave (he was not two-dimensionally "evil") but he had a terrible temper and he vowed to kill his brother and take the power he considered to be rightfully his.
Shortly after Osiris' return to Egypt, in the twenty-eighth year of his reign, on the seventeenth day of the month of Hathor (late September or November), Seth and 72 conspirators murdered him. Set did this by tricking Osiris into stepping into a beautiful box made of cedar, ebony and ivory that he had ordered built to fit only Osiris. Set then sealed it up to become a coffin and threw it into the river. The river carried the box out to sea; it washed up in another country, resting in the upper boughs of a tamarisk tree when the waters receded. As time passed, the branches covered the box, encapsulating the god in his coffin in the trunk of the tree.
In a state of inconsolable grief, Isis tore her robes to shreds and cut off her beautiful black hair. Her sister Nephthys grieve as well. When they finally regained their emotional balance, Isis set out to search for the body of her beloved Osiris so that she might bury him properly.
Meanwhile, he was taken in the growth of the trunk of a shrub of the family Ericaceae (probably a tree heath) the King of Byblos was used as a pillar for his palace. The search took Isis to Phoenicia where she met Queen Astarte. Astarte didn't recognize the goddess and hired her as a nursemaid to the infant prince.
Fond of the young boy, Isis decided to bestow immortality on him. As she was holding the royal infant over the fire as part of the ritual, the Queen entered the room. Seeing her son smoldering in the middle of the fire, Astarte instinctively (but naively) grabbed the child out of the flames, undoing the magic of Isis that would have made her son a god.
When the Queen demanded an explanation, Isis revealed her identity and told Astarte of her quest to recover her husband's body. As she listened to the story, Astarte realized that the body was hidden in the fragrant tree in the center of the palace and told Isis where to find it. Sheltering his broken body in her arms, the goddess Isis carried the body of Osiris back to Egypt for proper burial. There she hid it in the swamps on the delta of the Nile river.
Unfortunately, Set came across the box one night when he was out hunting. Infuriated by this turn of events and determined not to be outdone, he murdered Osiris once again . . . this time hacking his body into 14 pieces and scattering them in different directions knowing that they would be eaten by the crocodiles and other scavenger beasts.
Isis, with the help of her sister Nephthys, Anubis and Thoth, magically located Osiris' body. They found every part of his body, save his phallus (it had been eaten by the now-cursed Nile fish). Isis and Anubis magically re-assembled Osiris, created a new penis (bigger than last one) and mummified him (creating the first mummy). She resurrected him long enough to be impregnated by him so that she could give birth to the new king Horus. Assured that having the infant would now relieve Isis' grief, Osiris was free to descend to become the King of the Underworld, ruling over the dead and the sleeping. His spirit, however, frequently returned to be with Isis and the young Horus who both remained under his watchful and loving eye.
Seth of course was not willing to surrender the throne of Egypt to the youthful Horus and thus a tribunal of gods met to decide who the rightful king was.
Osiris meanwhile had become the King of the Afterlife. He was believed to be willing to admit all people to the Duat, the gentle, fertile land in which the righteous dead lived, that had lived a good and correct life upon earth, and had been buried with appropriate ceremonies under the protection of certain amulets, a personalized copy of a Book of the Dead, and with the proper recital of certain "divine words" and words of power. His realm was said to lie beneath Nun, in the northern heavens or in the west.
In order to enter his kingdom, the deceased had to undertake a perilous journey (aided by spells contain in the Book of the Dead and amulets) to the hall of judgment where their heart was balanced against the feather of Ma'at (Goddess of Justice and Balance). It is important to distinguish this from the Christian view of judgment. The ancient Egyptians were a realistic people. A person was not expected to be perfect, just balanced. An example of this is the "negative confession" (in which the deceased listed all of the evil things he had not done during his lifetime, that is to say " I have not committed adultery") which indicates that it was more a case of convincing Osiris that you deserved admission rather than passively awaiting judgment.Osiris promise us a blessed afterlife if we prove ourselves worthy.





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