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Ancient Egypt Human Gods

"Osiris, Isis and Horus"




Osiris, Isis and Horus



Ancient Egypt Human gods

At last the gods became human or rather, men became gods.

Like the deities of Greece, the personal human gods of Egypt were merely superior men and women, made in heroic mould, but composed of bone and muscle, flesh and blood.

They hungered and ate, thirsted and drank, loved and mated, hated and killed, grew old and died.

There was Osiris, for example, god of the beneficent Nile, whose death and resurrection were celebrated yearly as symbolizing the fall and rise of the river, and perhaps the decay and growth of the soil.

Every Egyptian of the later dynasties could tell the story of how Set (or Sit), the wicked god of desiccation, who shriveled up harvests with his burning breath, was angered at Osiris (the Nile) for extending (with his overflow) the fertility of the earth, slew him, and reigned in dry majesty over Osiris' kingdom.

The river once failed to rise, until Horus, brave son of Isis, overcame Set and banished him.

Whereafter Osiris, brought back to life by the warmth of Isis' love, ruled benevolently over Egypt, suppressed cannibalism, established civilization, and then ascended to heaven to reign there endlessly as a god.

It was a profound myth; for history, like Oriental religion, is dualistica record of the conflict between creation and destruction, fertility and desiccation, rejuvenation and exhaustion, good and evil, life and Death.






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