Had we only Greek ritual and art we might well despair.  The Greeks are a people of such swift 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.

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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.”