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The Mysteries of Osiris

The Mysteries of Osiris was the most important religious event of the year in ancient Egypt. It was celebrated in all major cities, including Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus, where even the Greeks who lived in those cities took part.

It reenacted the murder and revival of Osiris, Egyptian god of the underworld. Osiris was one of the most important and popular gods in ancient Egypt. All pharaohs were believed to descend from him, as living incarnations of Osiris’ son, Horus. Osiris presided over the tribunal of the underworld, offering the promise of life after death for the deceased who were ‘justified’ in the eyes of the gods. He was also associated with fertility and the annual regeneration of nature.

Osiris, his sister-wife Isis, and their son Horus formed a sacred family, worshipped across Egypt and beyond. They became increasingly popular during the first millennium BC. Annually, in every temple-city in Egypt, the god was celebrated in this most important religious festival.

The Mysteries of Osiris took place between the 12th and 30th of the month of Khoiak (mid-October to mid-November), when the Nile retreated, depositing fertile soil ready to be sown. Every year, two figures of Osiris were prepared by priests in the secrecy of the temple. One was made of soil and barley grains, and the other was made of expensive ingredients including ground semi-precious stones. These sacred figures were carried in procession to their final resting place at the end of the ritual celebrations.

For a long time, the Mysteries were known only from depictions in temples and ancient texts. However, recent astonishing underwater finds allow us to see ritual equipment and offerings associated with the Mysteries for the first time.

Discovered behind the shrine of Amun-Gereb in his temple at Thonis-Heracleion, this vat was used during the Mysteries of Osiris. On the first day of the Mysteries, the mummy-shaped figure of Osiris – made with a gold mould of two halves using soil, barley grains and water from the Nile – was deposited in a garden tank where it was carefully watered for eight days in a row, until it germinated.

This image shows a priest watering the germinating Osiris figure, in a depiction from the Temple of Philae. 

Find out more about the Mysteries of Osiris in the BP exhibition Sunken cities: Egypt’s lost worlds (until 27 Nov 2016).

Experience the Festival of Osiris in our free late event on Friday 28 October. Enjoy themed food and drink, workshops and performances!

A statuette of Osiris and a model of a processional barge for the god, shown in their place of excavation at Thonis-Heracleion. Photo: Christoph Gerigk. © Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation.

Standing statue of Osiris. Medinet Habu (modern Luxor), 664–610 BC. On loan from Egyptian Museum, Cairo. Photo: Christoph Gerigk. © Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation.

Pink granite garden vat. Thonis-Heracleion, Egypt, Ptolemaic Period, 4th–2nd century BC. Maritime Museum of Alexandria. Photo: Christoph Gerigk. © Franck Goddio/Hilti Foundation.

Reproduced from George Bénédicte’s Temple de Philae, 1893.

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“Talent is extremely common. What is rare is the willingness to endure the life of the writer.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

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One can study UFO reports and abduction tales for decades and remain more or less convinced these are physical beings from elsewhere who must possess advanced technology that is indistinguishable, to us, from magic.

But what kind of magic? Of the ritual…or of the stage?

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Part 2 of my essay “New Wine in Old Skins”

If things like this are going to happen, the ladies will be afraid to sleep alone in the house if so much as a sewing-machine or apple-corer be about.

—P.T. Barnum, 1855, referring to John Murray Spear’s Machine

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Imagine a 2000 year-old nightclub that holds an annual rave. At this rave, the people must abide by rules set by the MCs and bouncers. After, the ravers swear that they’ve lost their fear of death when they witnessed something inside a place called the ‘White Cave.’ It is only something a person can experience for oneself; it can’t be explained in words. And anyway, once you’ve experienced it you’re not supposed to talk about what happens in this White Cave. Discussing what occurs in the White Cave could even bring exile or prison.

A festival like this occurred, between 1600 BCE and about 400 ACE, in a small town called Eleusis fourteen miles outside Athens, Greece. That’s roughly 2 millennia of yearly events. Some scholars date it even earlier, and its first performances as far back as 2500 BCE, giving it another millennia of life. Some trace its roots to the Minoan culture.

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A satyr plays the double reed instrument known as an aulos to entertain Dionysus, who is crowned with ivy and holds his characteristic thyrsus (staff topped with a pinecone). Interior of an Attic red-figure kylix (drinking cup) by the potter Hieron and the painter Makron; 480s BCE. Found at Vulci, Italy; now in the Altes Museum, Berlin. Photo credit: ArchaiOptix/Wikimedia Commons.

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Purple nights 2.

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Laetitia Casta

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Anybody else got that Evergiven sized writers block

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Ejecting the intruder

The realm of reason is so narrowly restricted to man and his world, that to arrogate its extension beyond that world were absurd. Magick is the apotheosis of the Irrational. He is a Mage, a truly “kingly” man, who can create from the cosmic dust the supreme image of his Will, and, projecting it upon the mirror-world through the lens of consciousness, can awaken other minds to a sense of its dynamic existence. Such is the mechanism at work behind the universe of the artist who succeeds in creating a universe that ‘others,’ so called, may enter, and in which they can play their part; for these ‘others’ are themselves but a part of the artist’s creation. Arthur Machen drew attention to a profound magical fact when he observed that an entity such as Mrs. Gamp—the inimitable creation of Dickens—is known to almost all literate inhabitants of this planet, whereas Mrs. X, Y, or Z—our next-door neighbour—is known only to the few that constitute her immediate circle of acquaintances. Yet Mrs. X is ‘real,’ and Mrs. Gamp ‘unreal,’ the figment of a human mind. But that mind, being truly creative, was potent to imbue its images with some of its vital and enduring energy so that the images came alive and haunted the minds of countless individuals.

This form of creation is truly magical; it is channelled by a mysterious faculty amenable only to the artist, the poet, the magician, to those beings who are sensitive to the slightest stress in the cosmic aether, and able to draw upon the boundless energies of the cosmic mind.

In order for such a faculty to function, the intruder, the ‘squatter’ in the form of the ego that inhabits the house of flesh, has to be ejected; for the artist creates ‘reality’ only to the degree of his own absence. All magical creation is therefore the product of absence, of le néant. They alone may attract and mould the mysterious waves of energy that swirl beyond the Abyss, that have tempered their senses to such an exquisite degree of sensitivity, that their minds are rendered perfectly subtle, and able to mirror the movements of the soul’s most fluid fantasies.

[Kenneth Grant, Outside the Circles of Time]

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Images of Hubble Ultra Deep Field (the farthest we’ve ever seen into the universe) and it’s close-ups. Astronomers, in 1996, attempted something extraordinary. They pointed the Hubble Space Telescope into a part of the sky that seemed utterly empty, a patch devoid of any planets, stars and galaxies. This area was close to the Big Dipper, a very familiar constellation. The patch of sky was no bigger than a grain of sand held out at arms length. There was a real risk that the images returned would be as black as the space at which it was being pointed. Nevertheless, they opened the telescope and slowly, over the course of 10 full days, photons that had been travelling for over 13 billion years finally ended their journey on the detector of humanity’s most powerful telescope. When the telescope was finally closed, the light from over 3,000 galaxies had covered the detector, producing one of the most profound and humbling images in all of human history - every single spot, smear, and dot was an entire galaxy, each one containing hundreds of billions of stars. 

Later, in 2004, they did it again, this time pointing the telescope toward an area near the constellation Orion. They opened the shutter for over 11 days and 400 complete orbits around the Earth. Detectors with increased sensitivity and filters that allowed more light through than ever before allowed over 10,000 galaxies to appear in what became known as the Ultra Deep Field, an image that represented the farthest we’ve ever seen into the universe.The photons from these galaxies left when the universe was only 500 million years old, and 13 billion years later, they end their long journey as a small blip on a telescope’s CCD. 

There are over 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Simply saying that number doesn’t really mean much to us because it doesn’t provide any context. Our brains have no way to accurately put that in any meaningful perspective. When we look at this image, however, and think about the context of how it was made, and really understand what it means, we instantly gain the perspective and cannot help but be forever changed by it. We pointed the most powerful telescope ever built by human beings at absolutely nothing, for no other reason than because we were curious, and discovered that we occupy a very tiny place in the heavens.

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Edith von Schrenck in unidentified dance  by Grete Kolliner

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Atelier Manasse, 1930s

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She went away accompanied by the Lions, Arthur Rackham

https://www.wikiart.org/en/arthur-rackham/she-went-away-accompanied-by-the-lions

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Khuwy’s Tomb, Saqqara, Egypt,

Khuwy, a dignitary from the Fifth Dynasty, which spanned the 25th to the 24th centuries BCE lived at the end of the 5th Dynasty of the Old Kingdom under the King Djedkare.

Almost every inch of the walls inside the tomb are covered in amazing paintings. The paints are still remarkably vivid, and experts say that the colours were royal hues back in the day.

The tomb of Khuwy is built in an L-shape with a tunnelled entrance, a design that was usually reserved for pyramids. It was also found close to the pharaoh  Djedkare Isesi’s pyramid.

Congratulations to Dr. Mohamed Megahed who discovered the tomb.

Photo by Mohamed el-Shahed / AFP / Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities