The Death of Osiris

At a banquet, Set produces a beautiful chest measured in secret to his brother’s body, and promises it to whoever fits inside exactly. Osiris, the good king who taught the world grain and law, lies down in it. The lid closes, the lead is poured, and the Nile carries the box to the sea.

Isis, the first widow who refused to let the story be over, tracks the chest to Byblos, where a tamarisk tree has swallowed it and a king has raised it as a pillar in his hall. She brings the body home, and Set, hunting by moonlight, finds it first and carves it into fourteen pieces, scattered the length of Egypt.

Isis and her sister find thirteen; the fourteenth the river refuses to return. Anubis binds the rebuilt king in linen, the first mummy, and Isis, in falcon form, fans breath back into him and conceives his avenger. But Osiris does not return to the living: he descends, whole and royal, to be enthroned as judge of the dead, the murdered man on the bench of the one court no soul evades.

Horus, raised hidden in the marshes, fights his uncle for eighty years before the tribunal of the gods and wins his father’s throne. Every living pharaoh reigned as Horus; every dead one lay in the tomb as Osiris. And the green face of the risen king is the barley standing up out of the black flood-earth, the oldest resurrection story in the world, about what death, faithfully tended, feeds.