Ancient Art and Ritual | Page 3

constructive imagination that they almost
always obscure any problem of origins. So fair and magical are their

cloud-capp'd towers that they distract our minds from the task of
digging for foundations. There is scarcely a problem in the origins of
Greek mythology and religion that has been solved within the domain
of Greek thinking only. Ritual with them was, in the case of drama, so
swiftly and completely transmuted into art that, had we had Greek
material only to hand, we might never have marked the transition.
Happily, however, we are not confined within the Greek paradise.
Wider fields are open to us; our subject is not only Greek, but ancient
art and ritual. We can turn at once to the Egyptians, a people
slower-witted than the Greeks, and watch their sluggish but more
instructive operations. To one who is studying the development of the
human mind the average or even stupid child is often more illuminating
than the abnormally brilliant. Greece is often too near to us, too
advanced, too modern, to be for comparative purposes instructive.
* * * * *
Of all Egyptian, perhaps of all ancient deities, no god has lived so long
or had so wide and deep an influence as Osiris. He stands as the
prototype of the great class of resurrection-gods who die that they may
live again. His sufferings, his death, and his resurrection were enacted
year by year in a great mystery-play at Abydos. In that mystery-play
was set forth, first, what the Greeks call his agon, his contest with his
enemy Set; then his pathos, his suffering, or downfall and defeat, his
wounding, his death, and his burial; finally, his resurrection and
"recognition," his anagnorisis either as himself or as his only begotten
son Horus. Now the meaning of this thrice-told tale we shall consider
later: for the moment we are concerned only with the fact that it is set
forth both in art and ritual.
At the festival of Osiris small images of the god were made of sand and
vegetable earth, his cheek bones were painted green and his face yellow.
The images were cast in a mould of pure gold, representing the god as a
mummy. After sunset on the 24th day of the month Choiak, the effigy
of Osiris was laid in a grave and the image of the previous year was
removed. The intent of all this was made transparently clear by other
rites. At the beginning of the festival there was a ceremony of

ploughing and sowing. One end of the field was sown with barley, the
other with spelt; another part with flax. While this was going on the
chief priest recited the ritual of the "sowing of the fields." Into the
"garden" of the god, which seems to have been a large pot, were put
sand and barley, then fresh living water from the inundation of the Nile
was poured out of a golden vase over the "garden" and the barley was
allowed to grow up. It was the symbol of the resurrection of the god
after his burial, "for the growth of the garden is the growth of the divine
substance."
The death and resurrection of the gods, and pari passu of the life and
fruits of the earth, was thus set forth in ritual, but--and this is our
immediate point--it was also set forth in definite, unmistakable art. In
the great temple of Isis at Philæ there is a chamber dedicated to Osiris.
Here is represented the dead Osiris. Out of his body spring ears of corn,
and a priest waters the growing stalk from a pitcher. The inscription to
the picture reads: _This is the form of him whom one may not name,
Osiris of the mysteries, who springs from the returning waters._ It is
but another presentation of the ritual of the month Choiak, in which
effigies of the god made of earth and corn were buried. When these
effigies were taken up it would be found that the corn had sprouted
actually from the body of the god, and this sprouting of the grain would,
as Dr. Frazer says, be "hailed as an omen, or rather as the cause of the
growth of the crops."[1]
Even more vividly is the resurrection set forth in the bas-reliefs that
accompany the great Osiris inscription at Denderah. Here the god is
represented at first as a mummy swathed and lying flat on his bier. Bit
by bit he is seen raising himself up in a series of gymnastically
impossible positions, till at last he rises from a bowl--perhaps his
"garden"--all but erect, between the outspread wings of Isis, while
before him a male figure holds the crux ansata, the "cross with a
handle," the Egyptian symbol of life. In ritual, the thing