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Re-reading Enneads I v "Can Well-Being Increase With Time?" I think my previous summary is fine and I have simply edited that post with different nomenclature (e.g. changing "happiness" to "well-being," following the reasoning I outlined yesterday).

I would like to flag a few sight-seeing points that stood out to me this time around, though:

• In §4, Plotinos agrees with (and elegantly subsumes) Aristotle's definition of well-being: if one equates well-being with the ability to exercise free will, then they are simply accepting Plotinos's position, for the soul has free will according to its nature, while the body has none.

• In §7, Plotinos makes the case that eternity isn't merely the sum of all times, but is beyond time. (This echoes Proklos's and Taylor's distinction of "perpetual" and "eternal.") Thus something which is eternal is better than something which is perpetual, and therefore eternal good is better than perpetual good, and therefore the well-being of the soul is more to be desired than even perpetual pleasure of the body.

• In §10, Plotinos makes a cute distinction between well-being and well-doing, which echoes Plato's "world of being" and "world of becoming." I think this neatly describes the functions of each: the intellect essentially is, but a soul only accidentally is, thus the intellect can only be, but a soul can be well or be poorly. The soul essentially moves, but a body only accidentally moves; thus the soul can only do, but a body can do well or do poorly. That is to say: something that essentially possesses some quality simply embodies that quality, but something that accidentally possesses it may have it to a greater or lesser degree.

Even after five millennia, people still paint Horos on walls.

I've been continuing to research and ponder the Horos-myth. Here's my current best-effort to reconstruct it from available sources, all cited below. No interpretations, today, though: this page is for those who wish to study or contemplate the myth for themselves.

1. Geb and Nut have intercourse. Ra curses Nut so that she cannot give birth on any day of the year. Thoth takes pity on Nut and takes a seventieth part of Iah's light and adds five intercalary days to the year so that Nut can give birth. On each of those days, Nut gives birth to Osiris, Horos (who was born to Osiris and Isis while still in the womb), Seth (who bursts from Nut's side rather than being born normally), Isis, and Nephthus. [Ploutarkhos, Isis and Osiris XII. See also the similar version given by Diodoros, Library of History I xiii.]

2. Osiris becomes king of Egypt and civilizes it, then he travels the world and civilizes it, too. While he is away, Seth constructs a beautifully-ornamented box sized to fit Osiris exactly. When Osiris returns, Seth invites Osiris, Queen Aso of Ethiopia, and seventy-two conspirators to a feast. Seth tricks Osiris into the box, seals the box shut, throws it into the Nile, and usurps the throne. Seth's conspirators steer the box to the sea by way of Tanis. [Ploutarkhos, Isis and Osiris XIII. See also the detailed account of Osiris civilizing the world given by Diodoros, Library of History I xiv–xxi.]

3. Pan and the satyrs learn of Osiris's death and tell Isis. Isis grieves, cuts a lock of her hair, puts on mourning garments, and wanders in search of him. Isis meets some children, who tell her where Osiris's box entered the sea. Isis meets Nephthus and learns that she had a son by Osiris, named Anoubis, but exposed him in fear of Seth. Isis finds Anoubis and raises him to be her attendant. [Ploutarkhos, Isis and Osiris XIV. For another, sparser, account of Anoubis, see Diodoros, Library of History I lxxxvii.]

4. The box comes to land in a patch of heather near Bublos. The heather grows to an exceptional size, enclosing the box within its stalk. King Malkander of Bublos is so impressed by the stalk that he cuts it down for a pillar in his house. Isis comes to Bublos, sits by a spring, weeps, and speaks to nobody. The maids of Malkander's wife, Astarte, come by the spring. Isis plaits their hair and perfumes them. When the maids return, Astarte sees them beautifully made up and sends for Isis. Astarte makes Isis nurse of her son, Diktus. Isis nurses him with her finger rather than her breast, and puts him in a fire at night to burn away his mortal part. Meanwhile, she transforms into a swallow and flies around the pillar bewailing Osiris. Astarte becomes suspicious, spies Diktus burning, and cries out, which deprives Diktus of immortality. Isis explains herself and asks for the pillar. Astarte consents. Isis cuts the box out of the pillar, wraps the pillar in linen, perfumes it, entrusts it to the royal family as a relic, and laments her husband so profoundly that Astarte's (unnamed) younger son dies. Isis takes the box and Diktus and sails from Bublos. The Phaidros river delays the journey. Isis dries it up in spite. When she is alone, Isis opens the box and grieves over Osiris. Diktus, curious, peeks into the box. Isis, enraged, gives him such an awful look that he dies of fright. [Ploutarkhos, Isis and Osiris XV–XVII.]

5. Isis returns to Egypt by Buto and hides the box. Seth finds the box, divides Osiris into fourteen pieces, and scatters them across Egypt. A fish eats the penis. Isis searches the Nile in a papyrus boat; recovers the remaining pieces of Osiris; makes a replacement penis; reassembles him; and, using sorcery, has a son by dead Osiris, named Horos. She then institutes temples in the places where she found each part. [Ploutarkhos, Isis and Osiris XVIII. See also the very different version given by Diodoros, Library of History I xxi–xxii.]

6. Isis and Horos go into hiding from Seth. Later, Isis goes out to beg for food. A rich woman refuses to help Isis, while a poor woman gives her food. Seven scorpions who were following Isis sting the rich woman's son, who lies dying. Isis uses sorcery to neutralize the poison, and the rich woman apologizes for refusing Isis and gives her many gifts. Meanwhile, Seth sends a scorpion to their hiding place to sting Horos. The gods notify Isis. Isis races to Horos, but he dies before she arrives. Isis grieves. Nephthus and Serket advise Isis to pray to heaven. She does so. Thoth appears, comforts Isis by saying that heaven's protection of Horos is absolute, uses sorcery to resurrect him, and promises Isis that he will advocate for Horos when needed. [The Metternich Stela.]

7. When Horos grows up, Osiris comes to him from Duat in the form of a jackal to encourage him to fight and train him. Osiris tests Horos by asking what he believes is best. Horos answers, "to avenge one's parents for wrongdoing!" Osiris then asks what animal is most useful to a soldier. Horos answers, "a horse." Osiris is surprised by this and asks why he wouldn't prefer a lion to a horse. Horos answers, "A lion would be better in a pinch, but without a horse, how could you overtake and cut down a fleeing enemy?" Osiris believes that Horos is ready and rejoices. Seth's concubine, Thoueris, defects to Horos. A serpent chases her. Horos's men slay it. [Ploutarkhos, Isis and Osiris XIX. That Osiris visits in the form of a jackal, see Diodoros, Library of History I lxxxviii; J. Gwyn Griffiths, The Conflict of Horus and Seth IV ii.]

8. Horos and Seth engage in battle. Seth turns into a red bull and gouges out Horos's eye. Horos cuts off Seth's testicles. After many days, Horos defeats Seth, takes him prisoner, and delivers him to Isis. Isis releases Seth instead of executing him. Horos, enraged, beheads Isis and takes the crown for himself. Thoth replaces Isis's head with a cow's. [Ploutarkhos, Isis and Osiris XIX. That Seth turns into a red bull, see the Pyramid Texts 418a, 679d, 1543a–1550a, 1977b; Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde XLVIII p. 72. That Horos loses his eye, that Seth loses his testicles, and that they are restored after the trial, see the Pyramid Texts 36a, 39a, 65b, 95c, 418a, 535a–b, 578d, 591b, 594a, 595a–596c, 679d, 946a–c, 1614b. That Isis was beheaded, see Ploutarkhos, Isis and Osiris XX; the Papyrus Sallier IV.]

9. Seth takes Horos to court over the legitimacy of his birth (and, consequently, of his claim to the throne). Thoth argues persuasively in favor of Horos. The gods find Horos to be the legitimate son of Osiris but not of Isis, stripping Horos of his mother's part (his flesh) but leaving him his father's part (his bones). They force Horos and Seth to restore each other's missing parts and divide Egypt between them, making Horos king of Lower Egypt and Seth king of Upper Egypt. Horos defeats Seth in battle a second time. [Ploutarkhos, Isis and Osiris XIX. That Horos is stripped of his outer part after the trial, see the Papyrus Jumilhac; Ploutarkhos, Isis and Osiris XX; Ploutarkhos on Desire and Grief VI; Ploutarkhos on the Generation of the Soul in the Timaios XXVII. That Horos and Seth's missing parts are restored after the trial, see refs. to [8], above. That Horos is granted Lower Egypt after the trial, see the Shabaka Stone.]

10. Horos defeats Seth in battle a third time, becomes king of Upper Egypt (and, consequently, unifying it), and reconciles with Seth. [Ploutarkhos, Isis and Osiris XIX. That Horos becomes king of all Egypt, see the Turin King List; the Shabaka Stone; Herodotos, Histories II cxliv; Manetho, History of Egypt; Diodoros, Library of History I xxv; etc. That Horos and Seth reconcile, see the Pyramid Texts 390b, 678a–c, 801b–c, 971a–b, 975a–b, 1453b, 2100a–b; the Shabaka Stone; but see also the account where Seth was executed given by Diodoros, Library of History I xxi.]

Here are keys that I have found useful in case one is lost: Ra ("the Sun") is Love is the unifying force. Iah ("the Moon") is Strife is the separatory force. Nut ("the sky") is the state in which all is held together in Love. Thoth ("ibis-like") is Necessity (the need of the all to produce all). Geb ("the ground") is the state in which all is held apart in Strife. Osiris ("the seat of the eye") is Fire is universal consciousness. Horos ("falcon") is Light is individual consciousness (called "child" when embodied and "great" when unembodied). Seth ("to oppress" or "to subdue," cf. Ploutarkhos, Isis and Osiris XLI) is Air is the spiritual medium which transmits consciousness (separating it from universal to individual). Nephthus ("lady of the house") is Water is the material medium which transmits consciousness (distorting it from selfless to selfish). Isis ("the seat") is Earth is the material medium which receives consciousness. Anoubis ("prince") is cause-and-effect or karma (the consequences of the actions of selfish consciousness). Thoueris ("the great one") is desire. The serpent that chases Thoueris is the consequences of desire.

𓎬 𓊽 𓋹

When I revisited the Horus myth in light of discovering what Plutarch censored from it, I had neglected to revisit the sacred talismans of the mysteries, but I think what was omitted from the trial makes it clear what's going on with them.

Each of these objects represent, I think, a token from a critical scene in the mysteries themselves. The tyet knot is Isis's girdle, which she removes when she cuts her hair and puts on garments of mourning—I presume she gives the girdle to the initiate watching the mysteries, or perhaps a miniature version is given them in reminiscence of it. The djed pillar is the stalk of heather in which Osiris was imprisoned, which was perfumed and wrapped in linen and given to Malkander and Astarte—I presume a normal-sized heather stalk wrapped in linen is given to initiates at that point in the mysteries.

But what about the ankh?

Well, the tyet is intentionally soft—not only is it a garment, but it is also representative of feminine matter, which receives and is changed by receiving. The djed is intentionally hard—not only is it a structural element in the story, but it is also representative of masculine spirit, which gives and is unchanged by giving. But these are just the same as the parts of Horus mentioned in the trial: his Isaic part is his soft tissue, his flesh, while his Osirian part is his structure, his bones. By defeating Set he legitimized himself to his father, but by beheading Isis he delegitimized himself from his mother, and so the council of gods gave him the kingdom but took away his flesh. This is saying that when the soul no longer has need of a material crutch, the nature of the cosmos is that they ascend to an unembodied life.

But this is just what we see in the ankh, which writers from antiquity on all agree is representative of "eternal life," and which is expressed in the object itself: it's hard and structural like the djed—presumably initiates were given one made of reed or something—but it has the shape of the tyet knot. This is indicating spirit shaped by matter, which is just what the ascended soul is when divested of its material part: a living idea given its peculiar form through its exile in the world.

So I wonder if the ankh talisman was given to initiates as a part of the trial scene, as a symbol of Horus and a reminder that "eternal life" isn't a gift or an inevitability, but something to be hard-won through the contemplation of the mysteries and the development of one's own, personal meaning from them.

Manetho (Epitome of Physical Doctrines) and Diodorus Siculus (Library of History I xi) tell us that the Egyptian priests learned the myth of Isis and Osiris by careful observation of the Sun and Moon. That the myth refers to the month is also, of course, suggested by Thoth stealing the Moon's light to enable the "birth" of the gods. I had completely ignored that interpretation before, since I wanted to focus on Empedocles, but I thought it might be instructive to spend a little while on it.

We will start by following Manetho and Diodorus by assuming that the Sun is Osiris and the Moon is Isis. Plutarch adds (in his fourth explanation of the myth, Isis and Osiris XLIV) that Set is the eclipse and the fourteen pieces in which Osiris was divided are the fourteen days of the waning Moon. Now, the lunar month is twenty-nine-and-a-half days long, and we know that Egypt rounded it off to a 30-day civil month, and that it began once the Moon was no longer visible to the eye, which occurs approximately a day prior to the astronomical New Moon that we now use. This should give us enough to go on, and I've made a chart of the Moon's phases over the course of the month as an aid to following the touch points between the myth and the month (read it counter-clockwise from the top):

1. On the first day of the month, the Sun (Osiris) shines but the Moon (Isis) is invisible. If we regard Osiris as the soul and Isis as the body, then this is the golden age, where Osiris reigns in Egypt and the soul is pure and has no need of a body.

2. On the second day of the month, the astronomical New Moon occurs. It is possible on such days for a solar eclipse to occur, and this would fit the part of the myth where Set kills Osiris and hides him in a box (e.g. the Sun is obscured).

3. On the third day of the month, the Moon is still not yet visible. This is when Osiris's box floats down the Nile, and when Pan and the Satyrs see it and notify Isis. After this, for the remaining of the first half of the month, the Moon waxes and Isis wanders as a fugitive.

16. On the sixteenth day of the month, Isis finally recovers Osiris, which represents the Moon going full (which occurs approximately a day before the astronomical Full Moon), which is when the Moon reflects the Sun as perfectly as it is capable of and the full descent of soul into body. During the waxing Moon, the soul takes on various "incomplete" or "lower" forms of bodies, but now it is capable of manifesting itself in matter as perfectly as matter is capable of, in the human body which is capable of rational thought and reflective consciousness.

17. On the seventeenth day of the month, the astronomical Full Moon occurs. It is possible on such days for a lunar eclipse to occur, and this would fit the second appearance of Set in the myth, out hunting "by the light of the Full Moon" and chopping Osiris into fourteen pieces (the remaining fourteen days of the month, representing the various lives the soul has in a human body). At the same time, Horus (the individual soul) is born: while the soul lived in lower forms, it was as a part of a group soul; now, it is an individual and capable of making its own choices (for better or worse).

25. As the Moon wanes, the soul grows in power relative to the body (which shines ever less completely). On the twenty-fifth day of the month, the Moon becomes a waning crescent, which indicates that the soul is now more powerful than the body (as the fraction of the Moon which is dark is now greater than the fraction of the Moon which is bright). This is represented in the myth as Horus defeating Set the first time, Isis being beheaded and given a cow's head (with horns, representing the now-crescent Moon).

    Eclipses are often portrayed as serpents or dragons; I wonder if Horus's men slaying the serpent, or Apollo slaying the Python, is simply a reiterated reference to the defeat of Set (that is, the resolution of the events which the eclipse originally "brought" into motion).

30. As the Moon continues to wane, the body loses it's hold over it, and the soul gains pre-eminence. At some point during this part of the cycle, Horus defeats Set for a second time, and the soul lives free of matter.

1. Finally, when the Moon is no longer visible, the Sun is again alone and the individual has rejoined its Source, Osiris rules in Egypt, and the cycle begins again.

I don't think any of these points change the interpretation of the myth at all, but based on the above, it is certainly reasonable to say the lunar cycle is woven throughout the myth, and may well indeed be its source. Further, it ties the myth to Plutarch's explanation of the Eleusinian Mysteries (On the Man in the Moon XXVII ff.), suggesting Egyptian authority behind Plutarch's secondhand account of the Mysteries (though in that case, Horus would be the Moon, while Isis would be the Earth).

Let's tie this to another myth, that of Europa and Zeus. Without considering the lunar cycle, it didn't quite line up—Isis becomes a cow at the end of the myth, while here, Zeus becomes a bull at the beginning—but, of course, the Moon has a crescent both when it waxes and when it wanes, and so the Europa myth lines up pretty easily.

Europa (εὐρύς-ὤψ "wide-faced," referring to the surface of the Earth) is Isis, Zeus is Osiris, and Minos is Horus. Europa being from Phoenecia but ending up in Crete shows the transmission of the myth. Zeus's transformation into a bull is representative of the waxing crescent Moon as Europa (the body) is snatched away from home (the spiritual world) to Crete (e.g. the material world)—here, there is no Set, no enemy, no sin: the "snatching away" is the normal, intended course of creation. In Crete, Zeus transforms back from a bull (e.g. the Moon is full and no longer crescent), and Europa has a son by him, Minos, who, like Horus, communed with his father from the spiritual world and was so righteous that he was appointed judge over the dead.

But wait, wasn't Minos a jerk who demanded human sacrifice of Athens every nine years? Well, Plutarch (Life of Theseus XVI) implies, and Diodorus Siculus (Library of History IV lx) says explicitly, that there were two Minoses: this myth concerns the first, who was righteous (like Horus); while the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur concerns the second, who was wicked (like Set), and presumably represents a further transmission and development of the myth (e.g. from Crete to Athens).

ὄρνις γάρ σφιν ἐπῆλθε περησέμεναι μεμαῶσιν αἰετὸς ὑψιπέτης ἐπ᾽ ἀριστερὰ λαὸν ἐέργων φοινήεντα δράκοντα φέρων ὀνύχεσσι πέλωρον ζωὸν ἔτ᾽ ἀσπαίροντα, καὶ οὔ πω λήθετο χάρμης, κόψε γὰρ αὐτὸν ἔχοντα κατὰ στῆθος παρὰ δειρὴν ἰδνωθεὶς ὀπίσω: ὃ δ᾽ ἀπὸ ἕθεν ἧκε χαμᾶζε ἀλγήσας ὀδύνῃσι, μέσῳ δ᾽ ἐνὶ κάββαλ᾽ ὁμίλῳ, αὐτὸς δὲ κλάγξας πέτετο πνοιῇς ἀνέμοιο. Jove's bird on sounding pinions beat the skies; A bleeding serpent of enormous size His talons trussed; alive, and curling round, He stung the bird, whose throat received the wound: Mad with the smart, he drops the fatal prey, In airy circle wings his painful way, Floats on the winds, and rends the heaven with cries; Amidst the host the fallen serpent lies. (Homer, Iliad XII ll. 200–7, tr. Alexander Pope.)

As I said previously, I think that the myth of Isis describes the macrocosm, the myth of Osiris describes the mesocosm, and the myth of Horus describes the microcosm. Meditating on the first, therefore, taught me all sorts of interesting things about the structure of the cosmos. Meditating on the second can, presumably, teach us many things about society, but I confess that (as something of a hermit and a misanthrope) my meditations on the topic have not been very fruitful. But the last is, perhaps, the most interesting of the three to me, because, given that Fire has descended and divided, meditating on it should teach us what we can do about it.

Alas, though, what Plutarch gives us to work with is so sparse! So little of the ancient mysteries are recorded, and Plutarch has explicitly neutered much of what little was available in the interests of propriety. I have endeavored to reconstruct as much of the myth as I can from other sources, but even with those, there is not a lot to work with. (We do happen to have a papyrus specifically concerning this part of the myth, but it's very fragmentary and pretty weird, and I had trouble making much use of it.) So, just like in the Isis and Osiris myths, I've wished to attach an equivalent Greek myth to compare against. I had two candidates especially to dig into for this.

The first was the myth of Apollo, which is recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. (This is pretty reasonable since Apollo is implicitly related to Horus by Homer, Odyssey XV 525–6; and explicitly equated with Horus by Herodotus, History II cxliv; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History I xxv; Plutarch, Isis and Osiris XII; etc.; and Leto is explicitly equated with Isis by Isidorus, the Oxyrhynchus papyrus, etc.) In that myth, Zeus is Osiris; Hera, Set; Leto (Lycian lada, "wife"), Isis; Asteria ("starry," cf. astral), Nephthys; Apollo, Horus; Artemis (here, daughter of Zeus and Asteria rather than Apollo's twin), Anubis; and Delos, Buto. Leto wanders before giving birth to Apollo in Delos in the same way that Isis wanders before giving birth to Horus in Buto; Leto does not nurse Apollo but he is fed ambrosia and nectar in the same way that Isis does not nurse Diktys; finally, Apollo slays the Delphic serpent in the same way that Horus's men slay the serpent chasing Tewaret. The Apollo myth came to Greece by way of Lycia—presumably this is why Apollo was on the side of the Trojans in the Iliad?—and since the myth claims the first priests of Apollo were sailors from Crete, I suppose that the transmission of this myth is from Egypt, to Crete, to Lycia, to Greece.

The second was the myth of Io, which is recounted in Pseudo-Apollodorus, Library II i. (Again, this is pretty reasonable since Io is explicitly equated with Isis by Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, I xxiv; Ovid, Metamorphoses IX l. 666 ff.; the Oxyrhynchus papyrus; the Suda; etc.) Io is turned into a cow in the same way Isis's head is replaced with a cow's; Hermes frees Io in the same way as Thoth rescues Isis; Hera induces Io to wander in the same way as Set induces Isis to wander; Io gives birth to Epaphus when she reaches Egypt in the same way as Isis gives birth to Horus upon her return to Egypt; Hera's kidnapping of Epaphus causes Io to search for him in the same way as Set's dismemberment of Osiris causes Isis to search for him, producing Horus; the queen of Byblos nurses Epaphus in the same way as Isis "nurses" Diktys; and finally, upon her return to Egypt, Io becomes queen and institutes the mysteries in the same way as Isis institutes the mysteries after finding Osiris's pieces. Since Io is said to be the ancestor of a great many heroes (Perseus, Cadmus, Heracles, Minos, etc.)—some of whom are directly related to Dionysus—I suppose that those myths all share some chain of transmission, though it is difficult to say exactly how.

Sadly, since only rags and tatters match up—and not even in order!—neither shed a lot of light on our myth. While pondering this in my perplexity, though, my angel (ever a tease) posed a riddle to me, which lead me to realize that the story of Tiresias advising Odysseus in Hades (Odyssey XI) is the mirror image of Osiris training Horus from Hades. Tiresias prophesies the last leg of Odysseus's homeward journey, and the structure of this prophecy matches closely with the Horus myth:

I find the parallels between these two narratives compelling, and will need to reread the Odyssey with the Isis and Osiris myths in mind. I have, in the past, been fairly critical of using Homer as a theological source, but one cannot dispute that the blind Chian casts a long shadow over the philosophers; his stories obviously came from somewhere, and these days I am becoming increasingly suspicious that "somewhere" means "Egypt" in the same way that "Western philosophy" means "Plato." (Plutarch (Isis and Osiris XXXIV) says as much, and there are those legends that Homer studied under the "imagination of Egypt;" cf. Photius, Library CXC; Eustathius on the Odyssey I.) Anyway, the linking of Horus and Odysseus puts us on firm ground, since Plotinus (Enneads I vi §8–9) and Thomas Taylor (The Wanderings of Ulysses) both explain what Odysseus's journey means in a manner agreeable, it seems to me, with the interpretation of Empedocles that I have been working with, so let's take a look.

Osiris's questions to Horus (D1, above) run like this:

Osiris. What do you think is the best thing?

Horus. To avenge one's parents!

Osiris. Okay. What animal is most useful to a soldier?

Horus thinks for a moment. A horse.

Osiris raises his eyebrows. Why?

Horus. Well, a lion would be better in a pinch, but without a horse, how could you annihilate the fleeing enemy!?

Osiris beams. Yes! You are ready, my son!

I should emphasize how out-of-character this is for Osiris: he is elsewhere described as gentle, charming, laughter-loving, fond of dance, and he went out of his way (as king of Egypt) to civilize the world through pursuation rather than force. Horus, on the other hand, is bloodthirsty and merciless. If you've ever seen a falcon eat, perhaps that's unsurprising, but in terms of the myth, I believe Horus is so determined because there is no half-assing spirituality: if one is to try to ascend, they must devote their whole being to it; if they do not, they cannot become whole, and the soul must be whole to be like Fire, which is indivisible. So even though Osiris is, himself, peaceful and gentle, he encourages Horus's resolve of Necessity: after all, Horus is the son of stern-and-severe Isis, too, and having the backbone she furnishes is table stakes for the difficult climb up the mountain. Tiresias says as much to Odysseus, too: "You seek to return home, mighty Odysseus, and home is sweet as honey; but heaven will make your voyage hard and dangerous, because I do not think the Earthshaker will fail to see you and he is furious at you for blinding his son." Odysseus is less bloodthirsty than Horus, but nonetheless resigns himself to his fate: "Alas, Tiresias, if that is the thread which the gods have spun, then I have no say in the matter."

Then we have the three battles between Horus and Set, only the first of which is really described in any detail. In this part of the myth, I don't think Set is acting as Air itself, but rather as something of a proxy for Strife; this is because Air is separatory from the perspective of Fire, and Horus is "avenging" Osiris. The three battles represent the individual soul transcending each of Earth, Water, and Air, respectively, in the process of returning to its Source. This isn't as straightforward as it seems at first, though, because of a couple structural considerations stemming from how the natures of the four roots. First, Earth and Water are both material and separate out under the influence of Strife simultaneously, so a soul still requires the use of a material body until it has transcended both. Second, Fire is indivisible and descends whole and therefore must reascend whole; this implies that the third battle with Set cannot occur until all souls are ready to transcend Air simultaneously, which is something that only occurs at the end of time, when the cosmos again comes completely under the influence of Love.

What does it mean for the soul to transcend the roots? Plato's Diotima discusses it (in a roundabout sort of way) in the Symposium (201D ff.) and Plotinus discusses it in Enneads I ii "On Virtue" (which Porphyry summarizes, more lucidly I think, in the 34th of his Sentences). One's Earthy part is the physical body, the soul's "bestial" part: to transcend Earth is to move beyond purely sensory experience and gain the ability to consider ideals on the same level as them; this is the mastery of Plato's "civic virtues," the ability to live a civilized life as a man rather than the savage life of an animal. One's Watery part is one's desiring faculty, its hungers and needs: to transcend Water is to move beyond material desires; this is the mastery of Plotinus's "purificatory virtues," the ability to cease to concern oneself with material things in favor of spiritual things. One's Airy part is the soul's emotional faculty, its ability to experience and judge things from an individual perspective: to transcend Air is to move beyond individuality completely; this is the mastery of Plotinus's "contemplative virtues," the ability to process things from all perspectives simultaneously, rather than one-at-a-time. Diotima says concordantly that one climbs the ladder of love from personal beauty to general beauty, from general beauty to abstract beauty, and from abstract beauty to universal beauty. Meanwhile, Porphyry explains that mastery of the civic virtues makes one a human; the purificatory virtues, an angel; and the contemplative virtues, a god (indeed, in this context, the god Osiris-Horus specifically, as all souls return to their Source).

Only the first of these is illustrated in the Horus myth, the transcending of Earth. That it is Earth and not Water is made clear in a few ways. First, we have the killing of the snake: we have seen destroyed phalluses already, with Isis cutting Osiris out of the heather stalk (representing matter being made to support other-than-bestial forms) and with the fish eating Osiris's penis (representing society being structured to foster an other-than-bestial life). The killing of the snake itself seems to be one "hacking to pieces" (analysing and overcoming) their bestial nature. Second, Tewaret is a concubine of Set's—a "lesser Nephthys," perhaps a being of Water rather than Water itself—which suggests to me the harnessing of desire (for peace, for comfort, for security, etc.) to create a civilized existence; that is, it is for this desire that the bestial nature is hacked to pieces. Third, Horus's violent deposing of Isis is a pretty literal—if violent, calling to mind the words of another initiate—description of the individual soul transcending Earth.

In the Odysseus story, this first battle plays out between Ææa (representing the bestial life, which is why everyone is a pig except Odysseus, who has Hermes—intelligence—guiding him) and Ogygia (home to Calypso, the seductive daughter of Atlas "who separates Earth from Heaven"). Odysseus encounters many monsters and troubles, and while he manages to escape from each (with difficulty), his men are unable to control themselves and are not so lucky, and so Odysseus comes to Ogygia alone. From this, Thomas Taylor (riffing on Plotinus, Enneads II iii §13?) makes the excellent point that there are three categories of souls. The first, which he likens to Heracles (and I might liken to Pythagoras or the Buddha or Jesus), is mighty and is capable of saving both themselves and others; if Odysseus was one of these, he and his men would have traveled swiftly back to Ithaca. No, Odysseus (who I might liken to dear Porphyry), rather, is of the second category, strong enough to save himself but not strong enough to save others, and this is why he struggles and strains to return to Ithaca, and manages it only after tremendous delay with neither his men nor his ship nor his plunder. (The third category is the mass of men, strong enough to accomplish nothing but get eaten by some monster or drown at sea—that is, to be lost in sense experience. Here, I disagree a little with Taylor, as eventually all souls must return to their Source, but it may take such time and suffering as to make Odysseus's journey seem luxurious by comparison.)

The episode with Horus's eye is pretty opaque, and in fact Plutarch omits it entirely from his recording of the myth, but it becomes much more understandable when we compare it to the Odysseus story. Notice how, in D3, Horus loses his eye while Odysseus loses his ship, while in D8, Horus gets his eye back and Odysseus is ferried to Ithaca on a Phæacian ship; these imply that Horus's eye and Odysseus's ship are, symbolically, the same. I didn't notice any references describing it specifically, but Odysseus's original ship is presumably a normal one (if of fine quality); on the other hand, Homer tells us the Phæacian ships are magical, the gift of Poseidon and "swift as a thought." Recall what Empedocles says of sight:

γαίῃ μὲν γὰρ γαῖαν ὀπώπαμεν, ὕδατι δ' ὕδωρ,
αἰθέρι δ' αἰθέρα δῖον, ἀτὰρ πυρὶ πῦρ ἀίδηλον,
στοργὴν δὲ στοργῇ, νεῖκος δέ τε νείκει λυγρῷ.

We see Earth by Earth, Water by Water,
Aither by divine Aither, Fire by destructive Fire,
Love by Love, and Strife by baneful Strife.

I think Horus's eye and Odysseus's ship represent what one is capable of seeing: Horus's original (mundane) eye is the Earth-eye by which we see Earth, while the returned eye is the (magical) Water-eye by which we see Water. (In theory, there is also a (divine) Air-eye by which we see Air, but this last is inherent to the individual soul and it doesn't need a vehicle to house it, which is why Horus doesn't lose his eye a second time and why Odysseus's final journey must be made on foot and without the use of a ship at all.) It is of interest to me that Horus does without his eye for a while, able neither to properly see Earth nor Water, since I have experienced this myself: I have nearly lost the ability to perceive and enjoy the beauty of Earth, but I am only very slowly developing the ability to see and appreciate higher beauty, so there is something of a gap where I seem to have a foot in both worlds but it feels more like having a foot in neither. (I wonder if this is what St. John of the Cross was talking about when he describes "the dark night of the soul.") In any case, just as we see Odysseus climbing the ladder of roots in his use of vehicles, we see the same thing reiterated in the guidance he receives: in escaping from Circe and Calypso (transcending Earth), Odysseus is guided by Hermes, who (in terms I've discussed previously) is his intelligence; in reclaiming his household (transcending Water), Odysseus is guided by Athena, who is his wisdom; however, Odysseus receives no help at all in propitiating Poseidon (transcending Air), since in doing so he is guided only by Truth.

At the same time as the soul loses its eye for material things, Set is said to lose his testicles, for which the Pythagoreans' famous censure of "beans" comes to mind:

An old and false opinion has seized men and prevailed, that the philosopher Pythagoras [...] abstained from the bean, which the Greeks call κύαμος. In accordance with this opinion, the poet Callimachus wrote:

As Pythagoras, I tell you too:
Abstain from beans, a malign food.

[...] It seems that the cause of the error about not dining on beans is that in the poem of Empedocles, who followed Pythagoras's teachings, this verse is found:

δειλοί, πάνδειλοι, κυάμων ἄπο χεῖρας ἔχεσθαι

Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands off beans!

For most people thought that κύαμοι refered to the legume, as is the common usage. But those who have studied Empedocles's poem with more care and learning say that in this place κύαμοι means "testicles" and that these are called κύαμοι in the Pythagorean manner, cryptically and symbolically, because they conceive [punning κύαμος "bean" with κυεῖν "to conceive"] and supply the power of human reproduction. So, in that verse Empedocles wanted to draw men away not from eating beans but from a desire for sex.

(Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights IV xi.)

The first battle closes with Set in chains, brought by a triumphant Horus before Queen Isis. In the same way that gentle Osiris acts bizarrely in this myth, so too does his wife: normally severe and uncompromising, here she meekly lets her husband's murderer go free. The reason for this is, of course, that Earth is the extremity of the cosmos and most under the influence of Strife: Isis has no power over Set, whether she wishes it or not. Horus's decapitating of Isis and claiming the throne demonstrates that he asserts control over Earth, and is no longer bound to submit to her will: having mastered the civic virtues, he now is bound by a higher law than those of the Law-Giver. The replacement of Isis's head with that of a cow's shows that, rather than Earth being the master (as a human), she is now a docile beast of burden (as a cow): since Horus has mastered being human, the body can now be recognized as a mere tool rather than one's whole being. This is similar to Odysseus on Ogygia: Calypso is ever trying to seduce Odysseus, but even with all her blandishments, Odysseus simply no longer cares for creature-comforts, even those of a goddess, but is completely detached from them and ever sits on the shore looking towards Ithaca and hoping to see even a wisp of smoke on the horizon. Calypso even promises him immortality, but Calypso's sort of immortality is just more turnings on the wheel of rebirth.

While I am following what I think is a Pythagorean take on the myth, it must be noted that Manetho (Epitome of Physical Doctrines) and Diodorus Siculus (Library of History I xi) say that the Egyptians came up with all this by watching the Sun and Moon in their revolutions in the sky. I have avoided following that interpretation for now, though it has much to recommend it. (For example, the fourteen pieces that Osiris is chopped into is the two week period of the waxing Moon; Set is said to have killed Osiris under the light of the full Moon; Set is likened to the eclipses, which "eat" the Sun; etc.) But consider: if the Sun is Osiris, the soul, and the Moon is Isis, the body, then the Moon is full when she is furthest from the Sun; this is when the soul is lost in matter and the body shines brightest. But just after this, as the Moon begins to return to the Sun, she wanes, and at the very point when the body is less bright than the soul (that is, less than half of it is illuminated), the Moon becomes crescent-shaped. Perhaps this is also what is signified by Isis taking on the horns of a cow.

After the triumph over Earth comes the trial of Horus, and given the placement in the myth and the overall symbolism of a courtroom, this must surely refer to the judgement of the dead for their deeds and misdeeds in life (cf. J. Gwyn Griffiths, The Conflict of Horus and Seth III). Unlike the cautionary episodes in the myth of Isis (e. g. of Diktys and his brother), this episode is salutary: Horus has acted righteously and is rewarded for his behavior, as his eye is returned to him and his authority is legitimized. In the Odyssey, Zeus judges Odysseus to be "beyond all men in understanding and in sacrifice to the deathless gods" and lends the explicit support of Olympus to his return home. The message here is that if one acts righteously and devotes themselves to heaven, then heaven will return the favor and support them in their upward journey. Since, as I have said, one must transcend both Earth and Water to become free of material existence, and since Water has not yet been transcended by this point in the narrative, then I must suppose that this refers to reincarnation into circumstances more conducive to their spiritual growth.

Reincarnation wasn't a widespread belief in ancient Greece (cf. Homer, Iliad XXI l. 569); in fact, it was considered a peculiarity, and perhaps the keynote, of Pythagoras's teachings:

[Pythagoras] was accustomed to speak of himself in this manner: that he had formerly been Æthalides, and had been accounted the son of Mercury, and that Mercury had desired him to select any gift he pleased except immortality; he accordingly had requested that, whether living or dead, he might preserve the memory of what had happened to him. [...] At a subsequent period he passed into Euphorbus, and was wounded by Menelaus, and while he was Euphorbus, he used to say that he had formerly been Æthalides, and that he had received as a gift from Mercury the perpetual transmigration of his soul, so that it was constantly transmigrating and passing into whatever plants or animals it pleased, and he had also received the gift of knowing and recollecting all that his soul had suffered in hell, and what sufferings too are endured by the rest of the souls.

But after Euphorbus died, he said that his soul had passed into Hermotimus, and when he wished to convince people of this, he went into the territory of the Branchidæ, and going into the temple of Apollo, he showed his shield which Menelaus had dedicated there as an offering, for he said that he, when he sailed from Troy, had offered up his shield which was already getting worn out, to Apollo, and that nothing remained but the ivory face which was on it. When Hermotimus died, then he said that he had become Pyrrhus, a fisherman of Delos, and that he still recollected everything, how he had been formerly Æthalides, then Euphorbus, then Hermotimus, and then Pyrrhus. When Pyrrhus died, he became Pythagoras, and he still recollected all the aforementioned circumstances.

(Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers VIII i §4. Aulus Gellius (Attic Nights IV xi) adds that Pythagoras also claimed to have been "a beautiful courtesan named Alco.")

Empedocles famously echoes Pythagoras's teachings:

ἤδη γάρ ποτ' ἐγὼ γενόμην κοῦρός τε κόρη τε
θάμνος τ' οἰωνός τε καὶ ἐξ άλὸς ἔμπορος ἰχθύς.

For I have already become a boy and a girl
And a bush and a bird and a fish from the sea.

This is one of those teachings that causes modern commentators to suppose that Pythagoras got his doctrines from the East, but I see no reason not to suppose that the Egyptians had some similar belief. Herodotus says so explicitly (Histories II cxxiii); meanwhile, Diogenes Laertius (Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers VIII ii §2) tells us that Plato was an initiate of the Pythagoreans but, like Empedocles, was expelled for revealing the mysteries in writing; and he espouses the doctrine in the Republic, and in the Phædrus (246A–9D) he goes further and says that normal souls must struggle for ten thousand years to "grow their wings," but those souls who choose philosophical lives three times in a row "will have wings given them." In the Odyssey, after Zeus judges Odysseus favorably, he has three days' swim ahead of him before he is given the use of the Phæacian ship, "swift as wings," exhibiting nearly identical symbolism. Since the return voyage part of the Odyssey fits the Horus myth so closely, it seems plausible to me that the teaching ultimately comes from Heliopolis but the detail was either not available to Plutarch, or else was excised from the myth along with Isis's beheading and the loss of Horus's eye. (It's hard to say which! In describing the Eleusinian mysteries (On the Man in the Moon XXVII ff.), Plutarch speaks of triumphant souls being given "wreaths of feathers," and while he connects the Isis myth to his explanation there (Isis and Osiris XLIV ff.) it's perhaps more likely that he's simply following Plato.)

Not only does wisdom support Odysseus in those philosophical lives, but Zeus gives explicit divine aid comes in the form of the White Goddess (Ino, daughter of Cadmus, whom Zeus divinized), who gives Odysseus her veil so that he might safely reach land, which seems to me to symbolise those dæmons who call to the souls nearing the upper world as (for example) those of Socrates or Plotinus.

In any case, after the three philosophical lives, Horus defeats Set a second time, meanwhile Odysseus is "given wings" in the form of the Phæacian ship, returns to Ithaca, and sets his house in order, turning out all things discordant and foreign. (Indeed, the suitors remind me of nothing so much as of Plotinus's analogy of the assembly (Enneads IV iv §17), where the "brawlers and roarers" overpower the wise-but-quiet words of the best; but here, the best overrules them.) The individual soul has thus traversed the ocean (transcended Water) and become a hero: no longer do they require a material body, but they proceed to live in the world of Air as a pure soul alongside the golden race. What does the soul do there? I really don't know, and I suspect we couldn't comprehend it anyway: Horus is the child of Fire and Earth, and so those two realms must be completely natural to him; similarly, he was nursed by Water, and so while he is a foreigner there, it is at least familiar to him; but he lacks that same sort of connection with Air, and so it must be rather alien. I suppose, like Socrates (Phædo 67A–C) that we should simply have the good hope that when we reach there, that we shall "be with the pure and know all that is pure."

There remains only the third battle between Horus and Set, and for Odysseus to propitiate Poseidon. I think it very appropriate that, while it is foretold by Tiresias, the Odyssey ends before Odysseus actually goes and accomplishes it. This is because Fire is indivisible: in the same way as it must descend whole, it must also reascend whole. This means that the soul finally rejoining its Source and Goal can only occur for all souls simultaneously countless eons from now, after the last souls finally leave the material world behind and the roots begin to collapse together again. At that point, this cycle of the cosmos will end, all will be joined in Love (as Tiresias says, "your people shall be happy round you"), and a new cycle will begin where Fire will descend into matter anew (as Tiresias says, "death shall come to you from the sea"). All this is beyond the scope of the individual, and that is why the Odyssey, which is about the individual soul, ends before it takes place; in any case, I imagine this final battle to be much more sedate, requiring none of the tremendous trauma of the first two: merely long ages of time.

And with that, we're through the mysteries of Isis, Osiris, and Horus! (Phew!) I never expected to spend five months on a mere nine pages of prose, and yet exploring them has helped me to make a lot more sense of Greek mythology, the philosophical tradition, and my own personal theology and place in the cosmos; so I can see why my angel led me to it and encouraged me to study it.

While I'm satisfied with my first—erm, first-and-a-half?—pass through the myth itself, there are still a few bits and pieces I'd like to follow-up on. What's the deal with Perseus and Andromeda? There's supposedly an echo of the myth in the Iliad XIV, is that so? I've shown the second half of the Odyssey to fit the myth, but what about the rest of it? I've mentioned that I think Apuleius was an initiate of Isis, Osiris, and Horus; but does his myth of Cupid and Psyche fit, too? Is there anything to be gained by more deeply considering the Sun and Moon cycle as the origin of the myth? These are all interesting to me and you may see a smattering of smaller and less formal posts on them in the coming weeks and months as I have a chance to explore them, but they're tangential to the myth itself and so I'm considering them more in the mode of appendices.

One of those bits and pieces, though, is Achilles; I've been re-reading the Iliad over the holidays, so why don't I deal with him briefly, here? I mentioned before that his birth and childhood match the myth of Isis; it is also the case, I think, that his prophecy and death match the myth of Horus. Achilles's signature characteristic is wrath, just like Horus's is vengeance. At Horus's trial, it is said that Geb, his grandfather, was the judge; in the same way, Achilles's grandfather, Æacus, is the judge of the dead in the underworld. Just like Horus, Achilles is a demi-god, possessing a mortal half (his body) and an immortal half (his name); and just like Odysseus with Penelope and Calypso, Achilles got to choose which half was which: he could live forever as a nobody, or die young but be immortalized in glory. Achilles made the right choice, favoring soul over body. Will you?

Earlier this year, I spent a month or so going over the Corpus Hermeticum. I didn't think a whole lot of it at the time; I had just figured it was something worth studying to round out my exploration of Hellenistic philosophy a little. But my angel pulled my attention back to it a couple weeks ago: some of the images it contains helped to crystalize my thoughts concerning the myth. I suppose this should not be so surprising, since Hermetism developed out of a blending of Egyptian (including Heliopolitan), Greek (including Pythagorean), and Assyrian religious sensibilities... consider, for example, the following in light of my last post:

I saw an endless vision in which everything became light—clear and joyful—and in seeing the vision I came to love it. After a little while, darkness arose separately and descended—fearful and gloomy—coiling sinuously so that it looked to me like a snake. Then the darkness changed into something of a watery nature, indescribably agitated and smoking like a fire; it produced an unspeakable wailing roar. Then an inarticulate cry like the voice of fire came forth from it. But from the light a holy word mounted upon the watery nature, and untempered fire leapt up from the watery nature to the height above. The fire was nimble and piercing and active as well, and because the air was light it followed after spirit and rose up to the fire away from earth and water so that it seemed suspended from the fire. Earth and water stayed behind, mixed with one another, so that earth could not be distinguished from water, but they were stirred to hear by the spiritual word that moved upon them.

(Corpus Hermeticum I "Poimandres" iv–v, as translated by Brian P. Copenhaver.)

The plunging of fire above into water below, being infused with a holy word, and rising again above earth and water sounds quite a bit like Empedocles's separation and recombination of roots, does it not? Indeed, in his summary of Empedocles, Hippolytus gives us (Refutation of All Heresies VII xvii) the elegant image of the Demiurge acting as a blacksmith, taking souls as if they are irons and successively plunging them into fire and water in order to temper them. With all that successive expansion and contraction, is it any wonder that mortal life is so stressful?

We have talked about how Osiris is Fire; Set, Air; Isis, Earth; and Nephthys, Water; but we have not talked about what the roots really are. I think there's good reason for that: nobody knows. This is not to be critical of any commentator in particular, but rather simply because we are speaking about the gods, and the gods are beyond human comprehension: you can't categorize the gods because they're the categories! So the best we can do is to classify phenomena in terms of the gods, as Fiery or Airy or Earthy or Watery; this will help us to sketch broadly some of the meanings of the myth, but of course the myth has as many different meanings as the gods themselves do.

One of Empedocles's fragments gives a poetic illustration of the properties of some of the roots which can help us:

ἠέλιον μὲν λαμπρὸν ὁρᾶν καὶ θερμὸν ἁπάντῃ, [...]
ὄμβρον δ' ἐν πᾶσι δνοφόεντά τε ῥιγαλέον τε·
ἐκ δ' αἴης προρέουσι θελυμνά τε καὶ στερεωπά.

the Sun, bright to look on and hot in every respect, [...]
and rain, in all things dark and cold;
and there flow from the Earth things dense and solid.

Our old friend Proclus further provides a rigorous classification scheme (Commentary on the Timaeus III xxxviii–xliv), describing the roots in terms of three properties: ὀξύτης "sharpness" (vs. ἀμβλύτης "bluntness") indicating that Fire pervades the other roots and suffuses the cosmos; λεπτομέρεια "fineness" (vs. παχυμέρεια "coarseness"), indicating that Fire and Air are spiritual while Water and Earth are material; and εὐκινησία "ease of motion" (vs. ἀκινησία "stasis"), indicating that Earth is bound by inertia while the other roots are not. Each root varies from the next densest root by the presence or absence of exactly one property, as follows:

This classification scheme is Proclus's, but there's support for it elsewhere in the tradition: Plato (Timaeus 56A ff., 58B ff.) and Aristotle (On Generation and Corruption II iii) make the distinction between sharp Fire and the other roots; Hippolytus (Refutation of All Heresies VII xvii) summarizes Empedocles by calling Water and Earth material, but Fire and Air immaterial; etc.

There are other traditional schemes of classifying the elements—Aristotle, for example, famously classifies them as secondary to the properties hot, cold, wet, and dry—but Proclus demonstrates that these disagree with Empedocles and so I will ignore them.

In light of these properties and the metaphysics they imply, let me hazard a rough guess at one possible way of interpreting what the gods refer to in the myth, with the understanding that there are surely many others that are all valid.

Osiris, as Fire, is (among other things) energy and light. I have in the past equated light with the soul, and I think that applies here, with a caveat. Osiris is what the Greeks call νοῦς "Mind," but this isn't what we normally think of today as the mind, the thing that thinks; it is more like pure, unreflective consciousness (hence why Osiris is naive and innocent). Susan Brind Morrow (The Dawning Moon of the Mind I) says that his name (𓊨𓁹, Ꜣusjrj) means "the seat of the eye," presumably whatever that thing is that "sits behind the eyes." (This strikes me as a very curious conception, since I don't think one's consciousness sits anywhere, but it seems that I am unusual in this regard.) When Plato and Proclus say that Fire is "sharp," they are saying that it is able to penetrate through the other roots, suffusing the entire cosmos with Light and Life (an image also evoked by Air and Water being transparent). Pythagoras tells us that the Monad is Fiery; Plotinus tells us that the Mind is unitary; and the Poimanders corroborates:

[Poimandres said,] "I am the light you saw: mind, your god [...]. The light-giving word who comes from mind is the son of god. [...] This is what you must know: that in you which sees and hears is the word of the lord, but your mind is god the father; they are not divided from one another for their union is life."

Thus I suppose there is only one Fire—that is to say, there is only one consciousness, and our experience of individuality is merely that consciousness "seeing" through individual bodies, the same as a single Fire emits many rays of light. Presumably consciousness is universal and indivisible because meaning is separate from judgement: Osiris does not discriminate good from bad, but considers everything as good and right just as it is (which is why everything is joyful and perfect at the beginning of the myth when he rules in Egypt). But, just like Osiris's "essence" is born as Horus, so too does the universal Mind contain "the light-giving word," the individual soul, within it. This is reiterated by Aetius, who tells us (Doxographi Graeci CCCXCII) that Empedocles says "that soul and mind are the same thing:" Fire is what animates the cosmos, and there is no corner so dark that it does not penetrate to.

Set, as Air, is (among other things) the world of Hesiod's golden race (and the righteous part of the lower races) and which Plotinus cryptically describes as vast and diverse. It is perhaps unsurprising that our notions of this world are vague, as Air is, of course, invisible and sparse. Air mediates between energetic Fire and dense matter: it is therefore, somewhat paradoxically, separatory from the perspective of Fire (hence why it is Set that tricks Osiris into a box and chops him into pieces) but unitive from the perspective of matter (hence why Set is also the protector of Ra in his underworld journey).

Isis, as Earth, is (among other things) the familiar Material Cosmos which gives form and structure to things, and of which your body makes up a very tiny part. It is her skirt that the Western scientific tradition has spent the last four hundred years trying (and failing) to peek under. (This failure is because Earth, being a god, is ever-fecund: the more Fire works upon her, the more she brings forth. This is why Plotinus calls Nature infinitely-divisible and why scientists find more and more subatomic particles the closer and closer they look.) I had noted previously that her name in Egyptian (𓊨𓏏, Ꜣusat) simply means "the seat;" I think this is because Earth, as the densest root, is the foundation of the world upon which all else rests. Isis is depicted as stern and severe because Earth is static: Nature's laws cannot be broken—woe unto them who attempt it—and it is for this reason that she and Demeter are both called θεσμοφόρος (thesmophoros, "law-giving").

Nephthys, as Water, is also matter but of a much more subtle sort: she is (among other things) the Underworld, the world of Hesiod's silver race (and the unrighteous part of the lower races), the substance of dreams, mental imagery, ghosts, etc., and of which your "lower soul" ("astral body") makes up a very tiny part. Empedocles's commentators all call Water "nutritive" because it connects dense Earth to the all-pervading light (energy, vitality, etc.) of the immaterial, and it is for this reason that while Isis is the mother of Horus, Nephthys is said to be his nurse; this association is echoed by Homer (Odyssey XI) when Odysseus first offers a libation of milk to the dead.

Those are the gods in macrocosm. In the microcosm, we have the Fiery, Airy, Watery, and Earthy parts of one's self, and I personally have been wondering if this is where Plato got his tripartite theory of soul: one's Fiery part is the λόγος (logos, usually translated "reason," but also "word," as in the Poimandres, above), the seat of consciousness; one's Airy part is the θυμός (thumos, "passion"), the seat of emotion; and one's Watery part is the ἐπιθυμία (epithumia, "desire"), the seat of appetite, since Empedocles says that desire is caused by a lack of nutrition. (One's Earthy part is of course the body, the seat of sensation, and hence is not counted as a "part of soul" at all.) I think we should be careful of words like "reason" for Fire: we think of "reason" as one's capacity for discursive or logical thought, but Empedocles is emphatic that thinking occurs in the blood because it is as close to a perfect mix of the roots in the body as possible: thought involves all of one's capacities. Instead, I think "word" is meant in the sense of "the expression of an idea:" the soul is the expression of a unique idea in the divine Mind, which is just what Horus is with respect to Osiris.

It is interesting to compare (my interpretation of) Empedocles's roots with Plotinus, since while there are broad similarities, we have a few differences, too. Empedocles's roots are co-eval, while Plotinus's hypostases are explicitly ordered. Empedocles's roots all co-exist and indeed seem to mix to various degrees, while Plotinus's hypostases seem much more discrete and separate from each other. Plotinus separates Mind and souls and makes them eternal, while Empedocles equates them and makes them merely immortal. Plotinus considers the Mind to be the demiurge ("Creator"), while Empedocles assigns this role to Strife (as the force that brings beings into becoming) rather than Fire. I haven't spent a lot of time unpacking these differences, but I think doing so would be worthwhile; my "Bayesian prior," so to speak, is to assume that Plotinus is a refinement of Empedocles, since while we don't know what became of Empedocles—certainly, he didn't jump into Etna!—we have on unimpeachable authority what became of Plotinus! Alas, it's impossible to know what the Egyptian priests throughout the millennia believed and taught (and, indeed, what may have become of them).

With those keys in hand, let's proceed to the mysteries of Isis. Hesiod gave us the authoritative Greek version of the theogony, but the authoritative version of the Demeter myth comes from the Homeric Hymns, and this is what I have compared Plutarch with. The two agree so closely that the relationship between them is certain:

This part of the myth has two broad sections: B1–14 and 26–7 (which describes Isis wandering), and B14–25 (which describes Isis instituting her mysteries). The Osiris part of the myth also has a section on the institution of his mysteries, and while it is very brief, we could probably reconstruct a bit from the comparable Assyrian, Phrygian, and Greek mysteries (no doubt there were lots of penises involved). The Horus part of the myth lacks such a section: I suppose that it must have existed but any details are lost to us.

While the Isis myth and the Demeter myth both share nearly identical structures, I think that they have very different meanings. The latter is, of course, about the descent of an individual soul into matter due to desire and getting stuck in the cycle of reincarnation. But Osiris isn't an individual soul: Horus is, and he will not be seen until the end of the Isis myth's sequel. This myth, then, is universal in scope: it is about the descent and loss of consciousness in matter in its entirety, and the slow, slow process by which material bodies are evolved to be capable of admitting the reascent of souls at all. That is, we are speaking of the creation of humanity.

Initially, Osiris rules Egypt, teaching the Egyptians all good things. Egypt is the spiritual world of Fire and Air: Osiris is Fire itself and the Egyptians are Empedocles's daimons, the denizens of Air which Osiris "illuminates"—that is, gives life and consciousness to. Hesiod seems to imply, and Plotinus says explicitly, that some great souls never descend into the material world of Water and Earth at all; I think the myth teaches the same thing, since Osiris teaches them to refrain from cannbalism, which is what Empedocles says causes daimons to fall. In the same way, in the Demeter myth, Nysa is the spiritual world and the Oceanids are those souls that do not fall. Egypt and Nysa are both the sky, and the Egyptians and Oceanids (the daughters of the heavenly Ocean) are, of course, the stars. (Indeed, because of the ease of identifying Egypt and the Egyptians, or Nysa and the Oceanids, with the stars, I wonder if my previous association of Nut with Love was incorrect: perhaps Nut is simply the spiritual world of Fire and Air, while Geb is the material world of Water and Earth. Something to consider further—alas, so many of my speculations raise more questions than answers!)

Plotinus tells us that the reason for the descent of souls is that the Mind endeavors to be comprehensive, conscious of all that it can possibly be conscious of. This is why Osiris desires the box and allows himself to be tricked into it: the descent of souls isn't an individual sin so much as a universally necessary byproduct of the Mind's comprehensivity: it is not man that falls, but Man—or, perhaps, the entire category of beings of which humanity constitutes but a small part. The Nile is the Milky Way, the "bridge" by which the divine (the greater world, the galaxy) connects to the material (the smaller world, the solar system). Byblos is the Earth. So Osiris being sealed in Set's box, dumped in the Nile, coming to rest in Byblos, and being encased in a stalk of heather shows Mind being encased first in Air, then in Water, and finally in Earth: matter is not initially capable of supporting consciousness, and so Mind in the lower world is lost, incapable of expression, "dead."

And that is just why Isis wanders and frets so over Osiris: there need to be forms such that the Mind can express itself in Earth as completely as possible, but Earth is so solid and fixed that it is difficult to contort it into a shape that makes this possible, and so it takes long, long ages of time to accomplish. That is, Isis's wandering represents the process of evolution. We think of this as a modern notion invented by Charles Darwin, but several of Empedocles's fragments discuss it, saying that the first creatures appeared out of the earth parthenogenically, and gradually combined and mixed into ever-more sophisticated forms which can exemplify, however imperfectly, the attributes of the higher world:

οὐλοφυεῖς μὲν πρῶτα τύποι χθονὸς ἐξανέτελλον,
ἀμφοτέρων ὕδατός τε καὶ εἴδεος αἶσαν ἔχοντες·
τοὺς μὲν πῦρ ἀνέπεμπε θέλον πρὸς ὁμοῖον ἱκέσθαι,
οὔτε τί πω μελέων ἐρατὸν δέμας ἐμφαίνοντας,
οὔτ' ἐνοπὴν οὔτ' αὖ ἐπιχώριον ἀνδράσι γυῖον. [...]
ᾗ πολλαὶ μὲν κόρσαι ἀναύχενες ἐβλάστησαν.
γυμνοὶ δ' ἐπλάζοντο βραχίονες εὔνιδες ὤμων,
ὄμματά τ' οἶ' ἐμπλανᾶτο πενητεύοντα μετώπων[, ...]
αὐτὰρ ἐπεὶ κατὰ μεῖζον ἐμίσγετο δαίμονι δαίμων,
ταῦτά τε συμπίπτεσκον, ὅπῃ συνέκυρσεν ἕκαστα,
ἄλλα τε πρὸς τοῖς πολλὰ διηνεκῆ ἐξεγένοντο. [...]
πολλὰ μὲν ἀμφιπρόσωπα καὶ ἀμφίστερνα φύεσθαι,
βουγενῆ ἀνδρόπρῳρα, τὰ δ' ἔμπαλιν ἐξανατέλλειν
ἀνδροφυῆ βούκρανα, μεμιγμένα τῇ μὲν ἀπ' ἀνδρῶν
τῇ δὲ γυναικοφυῆ, στείροις ἠσκημένα γυίοις.

First there came up from the Earth whole-natured outlines
having a share of both Water and Heat;
Fire sent them up, wanting to reach its like,
and they did not yet show any lovely frame of limbs,
nor voice nor again the male "limb." [...]
Then sprouted up many heads without necks
and arms wandered naked, bereft of shoulders,
and eyes roamed alone bereft of brows[, ...]
But when daimon mixed more with daimon,
and these things came together as each happened to meet
and many others in addition to these were constantly emerging. [...]
Many grew with two heads or two torsos;
oxen with the heads of men, and others arose as
bull-headed men, and still others with mixed male
and female natures and so rendered sterile.

Note the presence of chance in Empedocles's description and reproductive fitness in this process: many bizarre and useless combinations are produced, but as Aristotle (Physics II viii) comments, "wherever all the parts came about as if they had been appropriately designed to, such creatures survived; but those which grew otherwise died out, just like Empedocles says his 'oxen with the heads of men' did."

In the Demeter myth, Persephone—the individual soul—already exists and is fully-formed in the mind of god before she falls; but in the Egyptian myth, it is universal Osiris who falls, containing Horus the Elder—the potential for individual souls—within him. Note also how Empedocles speaks of "daimon mixing more with daimon:" the Neoplatonist conception of souls as individual, discrete atoms clearly can't apply if they are capable of mixing! Instead, I wonder if the teaching here is that soul descends en masse like a cloud of fog, and it is only when it has reached the ground does the water vapor begin to condense into droplets, some greater, some less, which can finally reascend as unified wholes. Thus when Isis wanders aimlessly and when Empedocles speaks of chance, this seems to be saying that the descending soul is amorphous and that the individual soul that will eventually arise doesn't necessarily have a fixed form or unique place in the cosmos from the outset: it is only when Isis brings Osiris back to the Egyptian coast, which represents the creation of material forms (like humanity) that are on the very edge of the upper world and capable of individuation and reascent, that the amorphous group soul can begin to differentiate and individual souls begins to form. Until that point, we're dealing with something more akin to an undifferentiated continuum of soul-stuff; while Osiris is always one, it is Isis, in a sense, which draws the lines between which parts of Osiris go into one kind of creature and which go into another, and thus what eventually constitutes the "individual soul." It is uncomfortable for me to give chance much of a place in a universe ruled by Providence, but Plotinus says that happenstance is involved in the sublunary world, and perhaps this is the reason why Isis is said to invent while Osiris is said to teach: what Isis brings forth by chance, Osiris imbues with purpose? Certainly, it at least makes good sense of Iamblichus's and Proclus's argument that a human soul can't reincarnate as a beast: once the human part of the soul-continuum has differentiated, it is no longer the right "shape" to fit in bodies adapted to other parts of the soul-continuum. In any case, once Horus—whose purpose is to take flight—is born, it is hard to see how lower bodies can further that purpose, so even if it is possible, it must be impractical.

As a consequence of the above difference between the two myths, I think Demeter's wandering must mean something different from Isis's. Hesiod tells us (Theogony, l. 713) that "a brazen anvil falling down from Heaven nine nights and days would reach the Earth upon the tenth;" that is, nine days is presumably how long it takes for her to get from Heaven to Earth. As soon as she reaches the Earth, she meets with Hekate and Helios, the Moon and Sun, also suggesting this. But if this is so, her quitting Olympus in a huff afterwards seems to be confused: did she not already quit it?

Speaking of Hekate, we have not yet discussed Anubis, her counterpart in the Isis myth. By being the child of bright Fire and dark Water, he is obviously native to both the upper and lower worlds simultaneously, which of course is why he is said to be a psychopomp. But I think there's another side to it: Fire is the first of the roots while Water is the last, hence Anubis is the child of cause and effect; that is to say, he is the link between them, or karma. (He sits in judgement in Duat because one reviews their conscious actions (Fire) when they are dead (Water), as any number of near-death experiencers can tell you.) The dogs that lead Isis to Anubis are, as Pythagoras tells us, the planets, which are the mechanism by which karma operates: the circumstances or energies that cause us to have experiences (and to develop experience) in the lower world. Hippolytus (Refutation of all Heresies I iv) says that Empedocles believed that evils only existed in the sublunary world, and this is why Anubis attends to Isis—what we call "evil" is simply the consequences of selfish action. The equivalent of Anubis in the Demeter myth is Hekate, who follows Demeter (representing natural law generally) and eventually clings to Persephone (representing individual karma); the general Greek equivalent is Artemis (sibling of Apollo in the same way Anubis is the sibling of Horus): consider the myth of Actaeon, who is devoured by his own dogs (that is, his own deeds). Artemis and Hekate are both associated with the moon because this is where their influence begins.

The remainder of the myth concerns the institution of the mysteries themselves, and I think that this part switches gears significantly, since it appears to no longer be speaking of cosmic processes, but rather of the "ground rules" of the mysteries that initiates must abide by. No longer is Isis, Earth; or Osiris, Fire; etc.: Isis is now the initiator, Osiris is the mystery teachings themselves, Astarte and Malkander are the initiate, Diktys and the unnamed younger son are the initiate's personal Horus (soul) and Anubis (karma), etc.

Malkander is most likely a Greek transliteration of Phoenecian Melqart ("King of the City"); Astarte and Melqart were the local Isis and Osiris of Tyre. Indeed, Ishtar/Astarte/Aphrodite and Dumuzid/Hadad/Baal ("King")/Adonis ("Lord") were the local Isis and Osiris of many different cities in the Near East, just as Demeter and Zeus were at Eleusis. I think all this syncretism is because the mysteries were intended to be as tolerant and anti-dogmatic as possible; indeed, we see many, many local reflections of the myth: most of the heroes (ahem, Horuses) of Greek myth have echoes of the Isis myth in them, suggesting that they weren't historical kings but rather the names attached to local mystery cults. My favorite example of this is Achilles: Pseudo-Apollodorus (Library III xiii §6) tells us how Thetis would feed him ambrosia by day and burn him in a fire at night to make him immortal, but Peleus's outcry halted this. (He even says that the etymology of Achilles is ἀ-χεῖλος "without lips," indicating that Thetis never nursed him with her breast, just like Isis.)

What are these "ground rules?" Isis speaking to nobody and making-over Astarte's maids teaches how the mysteries did not proselytize, but how people were supposed to come to them of their own volition, whether by seeing the effects they had on other initiates (as here in the myth), or by being so directed in a dream (cf. Pausanias, Descriptions of Greece X xxxii; Apuleius, Golden Ass XI), or by intense personal drive (Apuleius, Apology §§53–6). Malkander making Osiris into a pillar in his house indicates that the initiate should take the mystery teachings into their heart (and, indeed, make them of central importance). Isis suckling Diktys with her finger rather than her breast indicates feeding one's soul spiritual food rather than indulging in material pleasures. Isis burning Diktys in the fire indicates meekly bearing material misfortunes. Astarte's outcry depriving Diktys of immortality is a censure of discussing the mysteries: one is only to contemplate them within their heart. Isis lamenting Osiris and killing Astarte's younger son thereby indicates that one must not bewail their lot: one can only become immortal by embracing their karma as a friend and guide, rather than a curse. Diktys peeking in the box to see Osiris and dying is a censure of trying to pry into the mysteries without having been legitimately initiated.

Isis's homeward journey with Osiris seems to me to be something of a reference to overcoming the elements: the heather stalk is earth, the Phaedrus river is water, the wind coming off the river is air, and Osiris himself is fire. But I don't think these are the actual Earth, Water, Air, and Fire, but rather merely the vulgar forms those principles take when reflected in Earth: the passage through them represents the mystery teachings giving one authority to overcome, or even command, the material world, just as Empedocles says:

φάρμακα δ' ὅσσα γεγᾶσι κακῶν καὶ γήραος ἄλκαρ
πεύσῃ, ἐπεὶ μούνῳ σοι ἐγὼ κρανέω τάδε πάντα.
παύσεις δ' ἀκαμάτων ἀνέμων μένος οἵ τ' ἐπὶ γαῖαν [· ...]
καὶ πάλιν, ἤν κ' ἐθέλῃσθα, παλίντιτα πνεύματ' ἐπάξεις· [...]
ἄξεις δ' ἐξ Ἀίδαο καταφθιμένου μένος ἀνδρός. [...]
εἰ γὰρ καὶ ἐν σφ' ἁδινῇσιν ὑπὸ πραπίδεσσιν ἐρείσας
εὐμενέως καθαρῇσιν ἐποπτεύσεις μελέτῃσιν,
ταῦτά τέ σοι μάλα πάντα δι' αἰῶνος παρέσονται,
ἄλλα τε πόλλ' ἀπὸ τω-νδε κτήσεαι· αὐτὰ γὰρ αὔξει
ταῦτ' εἰς ἦθος ἕκαστον, ὅπῃ φύσις ἐστὶν ἑκάστῳ.

All the potions which there are as a defence against evils and old age
you shall learn, since for you alone will I accomplish all these things.
You shall put a stop to the strength of tireless winds, [...]
and again, if you wish, you shall bring the winds back again, [...]
and you shall bring from Hades the strength of a man who has died. [...]
For if, thrusting [my words] deep down into your crowded heart,
you gaze on them in kindly fashion, with pure meditations,
absolutely all these things will be with you throughout your life,
and from these you acquire many others, for these things themselves
will expand to form each character, according to the nature of each.

Finally, there's one last thing I'd like to mention. When she becomes aware of Osiris's death, Isis puts on a mourning garment. As far as I can tell, this was a black linen cloth which was tied with a rope or long shawl, which went around the neck and arms as was tied between the breasts, supporting them, keeping the garment secure, and shaping it to the body. This girdle, I think, is the tyet knot of Isis, representing the shaping or binding principle, which is the property of Earth. The heather stalk that Osiris was contained within and which grew to prodigious size thereby is, of course, the djed pillar, representative of Mind as a quickening (erm, penetrating) principle, which is the property of Fire. When you combine the form of the tyet with the rigidity of the djed, you get an ankh, which is the symbol of Horus as the union of Earth and Fire, the individual soul, and that greater Life which it might aspire to. I think these three—a small knotted cord, a stalk of heather, and an ankh of reed or something—were made, perfumed, wrapped in linen, and given to initiates as mementos, in order to encourage them to contemplate the mysteries in private long after their initiations.

𓎬 𓊽 𓋹

Find the right way down through the maze, to the food, then find the exit. Push the exit button. If the food tastes awful, don't eat it, go back and try another way.

They want the same thing that you do, really, they want a path, just like you. You are in a maze in a maze, but which one counts? Your maze, their maze, my maze. Or are the mazes all the same, defined by the limits of their paths? [...]

There is only one path and that is the path that you take, but you can take more than one path. Cross over the cell bars, find a new maze, make the maze from it's path, find the cell bars, cross over the bars, find a maze, make the maze from its path, eat the food, eat the path.

(Greg Kirkpatrick, Marathon Infinity XVII "Eat the Path")

Unpacking the mysteries is like navigating a maze: you take the path you think is right, but sometimes you hit a dead end and need to double-back; usually you don't have to double-back too far, and so you can catch it before you draw your line on the page, but sometimes the dead end is very deep and you need to erase the line you already drew. But, of course, I'm posting these essays online as I go, and they're written in ink, and I can't erase them.

This is all to say that while my unpacking of the myth so far seems to be internally consistent, I ran into two things this week that caused me to doubt my analysis, and the issue is fundamental enough that I think I need to backtrack quite a bit.

The first is that I spent a good while examining the etymology of all the names mentioned in both the Isis and Demeter myths, but especially those of Isis and Osiris. These are made complicated by the fact that Egyptian linguists have been arguing over etymology for over a century and are no closer to a solution than they were when they started, due to (it seems to me) a combination of institutional inertia and overspecialization. My guesswork is speculative, and yet it led me somewhere interesting nonetheless:

• English Isis is from Greek Ἶσις, which is from Egyptian 𓊨𓏏 (Ꜣusat), which is the logogram of a throne with a feminine noun suffix: hence Isis is "the seat."

• English Osiris is from Greek Ὄσιρις, which is from Egyptian 𓊨𓁹 (Ꜣusjrj), which is the logogram of a throne with the verb "to create, to do:" hence Osiris is something approximating "the creation or action of the seat."

The second is that I found a haunting few lines in a third century BC hymn to Isis inscribed in her temple at Philae:

For she is the Lady of Heaven,
Her man is the Lord of Duat,
Her son is the Lord of the Earth.

Think about those for a moment.

Both of them point to something much more akin to Plotinus's emanationism than what I have been working with: taking the soul as "the seat" of consciousness, then Isis is a god, the prototype of the human soul; Osiris is the emanation of Isis, a daimon, and the prototype of the human imagination (Plotinus's "lower soul," Porphyry's "pneumatic vehicle"); then, finally Horus is the emanation of Isis via Osiris, a human, and the prototype of the human body. We might say that Isis is symbolised by Sirius (cf. Plutarch, Isis and Osiris XXI), which is the brightest star of Heaven and, to the Egyptian, brought the flooding of the Nile and life; Osiris is symbolized by the planet Venus (cf. Joachim Friedrich Quack, The Planets in Ancient Egypt), which is the brightest planet of Duat and lives an amphibious life as a morning star (when alive) and an evening star (when dead); Horus is symbolized by the role of Pharaoh, who is the first among humans, but is not himself a man but rather a succession of men invested with the role, some better, some worse.

If that's right, we start to see where the philosophy of the ancients comes from: every individual is a reflection of these prototypes, being composed of a single god illuminating an dual daimon illuminating an indefinite sequence of humans until philosophy fills up the god and allows them to pull their daimon back together into one piece... which is really a just sketch of what the myth is all about anyhow. I had been hesitant to read such a thing into Isis and Osiris, since I had been working on the assumption that Plotinus was doing his own weird thing and reading it all into Plato, but now it seems to me that there was at least some amount of continuity of tradition going back millennia, and it's plausible to use such a model for interpreting the myth. Unfortunately, this means that my analysis of the theogony at the beginning, and everything stemming from it, is flawed. So I am going to have to sit with it awhile, feel my way through my doubts, and see where I'm led. Clearly, I am being led somewhere, though, as in hindsight it is obvious that my angel fed me Sallustius in preparation for Plotinus, and Plotinus in preparation for Plutarch!

In the meantime, I'll leave you with something I was wondering about. Diodorus says (in the Library of History I xcvi) that the mysteries of Demeter are just the mysteries of Isis with the names changed, and having read both myths, I was inclined to agree... until I ran across that hymn. See, in Egypt, the soul (Isis) and the imagination (Osiris) were married and the body (Horus) was produced by them, together: not a thing to be reviled, but rather celebrated (though, of course, raised and educated with great care). In Eleusis, however, the soul (Demeter) stood apart and the imagination (Persephone) and body (Hades) were uneasily married, making the body something of an enemy to be fought and ultimately defeated. That difference in emphasis seems to me very significant. It crept into Greek philosophy and, from there, spread all throughout the Western worldview. I wonder whether the shift in the mythic family structure was intentional or accidental. I wonder what good it has done, weighed against what harm it has done...

I suppose apprehending such great mysteries are too much for a man. I will content myself in trying to apprehend my little, lesser mystery: it is enough. May you all have a contemplative Autumnal equinox tomorrow, as Osiris and Kore descend again.

Why do we read books from beginning to end, anyway? The real world doesn't happen linearly, however we like to pretend it does: sometimes, many things happen at once; sometimes, things that happen before only make sense in light of things that happen later; sometimes, it is more useful or entertaining to pause the story for an aside. (You all know how much I adore footnotes by now, yes?) Sometimes I wonder if we read them from beginning to end just so we don't lose our place: a lot of bookmarks get unwieldy pretty quickly.

So, after spending a lot of time with Isis and Osiris, it seems to me that the best way to approach it is not from beginning to end, but rather thematically. Plutarch presents it as a narrative, but as Sallustius tells us, myths never happened but always are; we're not speaking of a sequence of events, but of eternal principles. So I will jumping around the narrative a bit as we dig in, in order to tease apart the various threads in the hope that we might follow them more easily. Today, I will be focusing on the gods presented in the myth. Who are they? What are we to learn from them?

As we embark on exploring this myth, I must hasten to remind you that my goal is not factual correctness: I am not an Egyptologist, don't believe the actual beliefs and worldviews of the ancient Egyptians are accessible to us moderns at all, and don't believe they would much avail us even if they were. The goal for all souls is to develop meaning within their own unique context: when a Zen master asks a student, "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" there is no correct answer; the goal is for the student to "hear" the unique sound within their own unique soul. Such a sound, being specific to the hearer alone, cannot be communicated; but if the master is worth his salt, then he will recognize when the student has heard whatever it is.

Because of all this, I am purposefully trying to limit myself to studying the myth itself in isolation, and not draw in the larger context of Egyptian religion. (For example, I am trying to base my understanding of Isis strictly on her characterization within the myth itself, ignoring all of the academic and esoteric discussion of her over the last few centuries.) It is possible—indeed, likely?—that in so limiting myself, I draw further away from the bigger picture and walk down a blind alley which is entirely valid within the context of the myth and entirely invalid within a larger context. That is fine: my project is to try and hear the unique resonance of the myth within myself, not to uncover whatever it may have meant either to the Egyptians or to Plutarch. So please do not treat my assessments as correct or incorrect, for we are trying to journey to that place which is beyond such judgements. I merely hope that my endeavors are pleasing to Divinity and, perhaps, helpful to you in your own seeking.

1. [§12] Heaven [Kronos=Nut] and Earth [Rhea=Geb] continually have intercourse.

The myth begins with a theogony [θεο-γονία, "birth of the gods"], describing several "generations" of gods. There were several theogonies present in Egypt throughout the millennia, and this one comes from Heliopolis [Ἡλιούπολις, "city of the Sun"]. We've dug up a fair amount of information about the city's cult and evidently the geneology goes back some generations further (looking suspiciously like Plotinus's theogony), but Plutarch has elected to begin our myth with Heaven and Earth. Why?

I think what is going on is, just as Plato's Athenian stranger discusses in the Epinomis, that astrology is the beginning of wisdom. Beginning here emphasizes two related points: first, that this is ultimately an astrological myth, describing phenomena which can be seen to occur in the heavens; second, that Heaven and Earth are intimately connected, that the things we see in the heavens aren't merely pretty to look at, but are reflected here on earth. "As above, so below:" we can learn about ourselves through careful observation of the heavens, and just like Ariadne gives Theseus the clew to navigate the labyrinth, the myth exists to provide hints or keys as to how to discover the answers to those Big Questions which haunt and devour men.

We know that by the time they reached Greece, the mysteries had come to be seen as a means of salvation in and of themselves, but I think this is a perversion: the Minotaur wasn't, after all, slain by Ariadne. The mysteries can't save you: they can only teach you how to save yourself, and the means of that salvation will (and must) vary for each individual: Theseus had his sword, Orpheus his lyre, etc. That is to say, just as you need a key to unpack the myth, the unpacked myth is, itself, merely your own personal key to a greater myth: the world itself.

2. The Sun [Helios] sees them and curses Heaven to be unable to give birth during any month of the year.

3. Thoth [Hermes] takes pity on Heaven and takes a seventieth part of the Moon's [Selene's] light and fashions it into five intercalary days which he adds to the year, allowing Heaven to circumvent the curse.

Of course it is silly to think that the Sun is jealous or scandalized by Heaven and Earth's constant intercourse. The Sun's "curse" is that he illuminates the earth at the expense of heaven, which is what allows us to live a material life at all; but, if we wish to go beyond this and pursue the spiritual life and the awareness of the gods, then our work of observing Heaven must circumvent this.

I think the references to the Sun, Moon, and five extra days of the year give us a hint as to how. Because the solar year isn't an even multiple of the lunar month, the lunar calendar rapidly drifts away from solar calendar, making it difficult to make use of the month for timekeeping. This problem can be fixed with intercalation, but how do you know when to insert extra days or months? The simplest solution is to track the heliacal rising and setting of stars: that is, which stars appear on the horizon just before the Sun rises, or just after the Sun sets. (The dates on which various stars rise or set change over time, too, but only very slowly and so are much less of a problem.) So, if you fix the start of your year to a particular star's heliacal rising, simply adding extra days or months at the end of the year until you see it rise again, then your lunar and solar calendars will always stay synchronized. (And this is just what the Egyptians did with Sirius, the "dog star." woof woof)

So the Sun's "curse," the day, is the material life; and the night is the spiritual life. But the spiritual life is too remote, too detached to understand directly: the mechanics of the heavens and the life of the gods are too complex for us to comprehend without some contrivance. We need to use the twilight carefully if we wish to make an approach, and as we shall see this is shown in detailed observation and record-keeping, which is why it is Thoth who breaks the curse.

4. On the first day, Heaven gives birth to Osiris.

6. [Skipping ahead,] on the third day, Set [Typhon] bursts out of Heaven's side.

7. On the fourth day, Heaven gives birth to Isis, wife of Osiris.

8. On the fifth day, Heaven gives birth to Nephthys, wife of Set.

Here, we have our second generation of gods. But who are they? What does it mean for them to be the children of Heaven and Earth?

I think the marriages are the key to unlocking this section. Marriages describe polarizations: the spouses represent the two complementary halves of a greater whole. In the example we've seen already, Heaven and Earth are the two halves of the Cosmos: Heaven contains stars which remain ever the same, while Earth contains bodies which are always changing. So I think Heaven and Earth represent the axis of animation: Heaven is the negative ("female") pole of stasis, while Earth is the positive ("male") pole of animation.

Because Heaven is static, she can't change: her "giving birth" isn't a thing that happens, but rather refers to an ontological relationship. Therefore, we may suppose that the children of Heaven and Earth should be intermediate between the two, possessing some characteristics of eternal stars and other characteristics of mortal bodies. Obviously, these must be the planets, which look like stars but move; but they remain eternal, since their motions are repetitive and orderly, rather than the irreversible, chaotic motions of earthly bodies. These characteristics are enough to sketch a realm in between Heaven and Earth where such beings live: this is Duat, the astral world.

As I have said above, heliacal rising and setting is crucial to identifying the gods. (It is noteworthy that Duat is related to the word duau, "dawn.") We also have the hint that Osiris and Isis, and Set and Nephthys, are married. These both seem to point to Osiris, Set, Isis, and Nephthys being, collectively, the planets Mercury and Venus, since these planets can only be seen at dawn and dusk, and each has a morning star and evening star aspect. Can we identify them more closely?

Osiris is easy: as the firstborn and king of the intermediate world, he must be Venus, the brightest star in the sky; and as the gentle bringer of civilization, he must be associated with beginnings, and thus a morning star. Since he is married to Isis, she must be Venus as an evening star, and this fits with her mythic characterisation of grieving and killing (which are both associated with endings), and also explains why Osiris and Isis are said in the myth to alternate ruling Egypt (since only one of them can be in the sky at a time).

Set and Nephthys, then, are the planet Mercury. Set, being associated with destruction and sterility (as he has no children), must be an evening star; Nephthys, who gives birth and is more beneficent than Set, should be a morning star. Set bursts from his mother's side in imitation of a viper as a metaphor for his treacherous character. It is appropriate for Isis and Set to both be evening stars, as we are told that Set can't cause mischief while Isis is keeping an eye on him, and this occurs when both planets are in the sky in the evening. Similarly, Osiris and Nephthys have liasons, which can occur when both planets are in the sky in the morning.

While we can see these planets in the sky on nearly any clear day, their behavior only becomes clear if we carefully track their positions over years (which is why it is Thoth, above, who "allows" them to "be born"). We see that, while they exist in Duat, they frequently descend as if to visit Earth. We see that Osiris and Isis, and Set and Nephthys, are linked: that their appearance is the same, and that only one is present while the other is absent. We see that Osiris and Isis travel at a measured and stately pace, while Set and Nephthys move much more frenetically.

5. [Skipping back,] on the second day, Heaven gives birth to Horus the Elder, who was born to Isis and Osiris in Nut's womb.

16. [§14. After Osiris dies, grieving Isis wanders in search of his body and] meets Nephthys. Seeing a token of sweet yellow clover belonging to Osiris on her, Isis discovers that Osiris had accidentally slept with her, believing her to be Isis; Nephthys bore a child by him and exposed it in fear of discovery by Set.

17. Isis searches for the baby. Dogs lead her to it and she raises the baby, Anubis, to be her guardian and attendant.

45. [§19. After Osiris is resurrected, he] and Isis conceive Horus the Younger, but he is born premature and lame.

And here, we have our third generation of gods. Given the associations I gave to their parents, I think the case can easily be made that these three are the outer planets, for a few reasons:

• First, as children of beings in Duat, these three must also be present in Duat, and there are exactly three more planets present there.

• Second, when their motions are tracked relative to the Sun (e.g. at heliacal rising or setting), these planets exhibit a very different sort of motion than the inner planets do: rather than meander around exclusively in the morning or evening, they travel in something of a straight line; rising in the morning, shooting across the sky, and setting in the evening. In a sense, they seem much more "purpose-driven" or "single-minded" than the inner planets; so it is reasonable to consider them somehow different or lesser than them, and I think this is done by making them a separate "generation."

• Third, rather than "disappearing" for significant stretches of time, the outer planets are always somewhere in the sky, except for those weeks where they are conjunct the Sun itself.

Identifying which planet is which god is more difficult than it was with their parents, since of the three, only Horus the Elder is given any significant characterization in the myth. Nevertheless, let's hazard it.

Horus the Elder is Jupiter. He is the child of Osiris and Isis because Jupiter is very close in general color and appearance to Venus, being only slightly dimmer. He is born after Osiris and before Set, Isis, and Nephthys because Jupiter is the second-brightest star in the sky. He is conceived "in the womb of Nut" because Isis and Osiris are never together in the sky, so they must have been together when neither is in the sky (e.g. when Venus is conjunct by the Sun). When his motion is tracked over time, he seems to be born, converse with Osiris in the east, and then race across the battlefields of the sky in order to attack Set in the west, which is just what we see him do in the myth.

Anubis (woof woof) is Saturn. He is the child of Nephthys because his appearance is like Mercury, being very swift, grayish or brownish, and dim. We see him fly from Nephthys in the morning (being her child) across the sky to Isis in the evening (being her attendant).

Horus the Younger is Mars. Mars is unusual compared to the other planets: he is red in color, variably bright (he is as bright as Jupiter at best, but the dimmest planet on average), and when viewed relative to the Sun seems to creep very slowly across the sky. We are told nothing of Horus the Younger except that he is lame and sickly, and I think these characteristics of Mars are why.

Let us step back and look at this section of the myth as a whole. What does all this mean to us? Why does identifying the gods in the sky matter? Well, Heaven and Earth are married, and so the great lives of these children of Heaven and Earth are linked to our small lives: their endlessly-repeating dance in Duat is reflected, so far as is possible, in us. The myth is a key, a hint to understanding what we see in the sky, and what we understand from it can tell us something about ourselves. For example, just as the denizens of Duat are the children of two worlds, so too are we; and just as they descend to Earth for a time and then return above to Duat, so too do we...

But, exploring such things in detail will need to wait until next time. In the meanwhile, some comments on this section:

It is not essential to the myth, but I found it surprising that my bilingual edition of Isis and Osiris capitalizes Helios [Ἥλιος], but does not capitalize Selene [σελήνη], as if only the former is a proper noun! (What punks!) This would not be a distinction of Plutarch's, since lower-case letters were only invented some eight centuries after he died, so my complaint must lie with some scribe or scholar. In any case, I've capitalized the Moon in my summary out of respect to she of the long wings and lovely hair...

I have mentioned in the past that I think the Isis and Osiris myth really got around the Mediterranean. I had only been talking about underworld mysteries, but in studying this part of the myth, I think the associations are far more widespread than I had thought:

• Reading this myth, it is very hard not to see a reflection of it in Hesiod's myth of Kronos and Rhea in the Theogony (ll. 453 ff.): after all, Kronos has five children in his belly, which are prevented from coming out of it, and are only finally released through the aid of Metis [Μῆτις, "skill"]. For centuries, the Greek philosophers underwent many contortions to contrive how Kronos, most wise king of the Golden Age, could be so wretched as to eat his own children (eventually culminating in Plotinus' self-contemplating Intellect); how ironic if it were all merely because, when the Egyptian myth reached Greece, the nearest local analog to Nut was masculine?

• Nobody knows where the name "Apollo" comes from. Now, I'm no linguist, but I conjecture that Apollo is none other than Heru-ur, Horus the Elder, transliterated through at least a couple Mediterranean languages. Not only do they share the myth of slaying a serpent who was chasing a fertility goddess, but both gods are the special shepherd of humanity (Horus taking over this role from Osiris), and both are associated with similar domains (like war, protection, and healing).

• Similarly, nobody knows where the name "Hephaistos" comes from, but I conjecture that Hephaistos is none other than Heru-pa-khered, Horus the Younger, transliterated through at least a couple Mediterranean languages. (Certainly, "Hephaistos" is no worse a transliteration than "Harpokrates!") Horus is given very little characterization in the myth; but both gods are born lame; and determined, cold Mars is certainly the appropriate planet for all-work-and-no-play Hephaistos...

I woke up this morning with the myth of Osiris ringing in my head, trying to correlate it with other myths I've read. After breakfast, my daughters and I were out looking at various garage sales in town; one of them had a complete children's encyclopedia set, and since we home-school our daughters, I thought it might be worth investigating. I picked up and opened a volume at random, and the page fell open to a mosaic of Dionysus, riding on his leopard. Funny, I thought, since Dionysus is Osiris, and I was just thinking about that... I then picked up a second volume and opened it at random, and the page fell open to the entry for Plutarch (who wrote Isis and Osiris and whose name I was very surprised to see in a children's encyclopedia).

Well!

"They have a saying in Chicago, 'Once is happenstance; twice is coincidence; the third time, it's enemy action.'" I haven't managed to make headway for a while on Proclus, and it seems that my angel would like me to try something else... so let's do it!

I have hypothesized that the Isis and Osiris myth is the original mystery teaching, and that most (all?) of the other ancient mystery schools of which we are aware are either degenerations or imitations of it.

This is an obviously (and deliberately) grandiose claim which is quite literally unproveable, since any evidence we possess for or against it is scanty, existing as it does in the twilight realm of early recorded history, where records exist but are fragmented and sparse. However, it is at least plausible, for a few reasons:

• First, the earliest references we have to the myth are from the enigmatic Pyramid Texts, the earliest of which date to the fifth dynasty. We don't really know when this was, but even in the worst case (c. 2400 BC) would give us centuries before any foreign myths we have evidence for, for example the Inana and Dumuzid myth (Sumer, c. 2100 BC), the Gilgamesh and Enkidu myth (Sumer, c. 2100 BC), the Theseus and the Minotaur myth (Crete, c. mid-1000s BC?), and the Attis and Cybele myth (Asia Minor, c. 1250 BC).

• Second, foreign sources readily acknowledge their debt to Egypt. (I think, here, of Herodotus' Histories, Plato's Timaeus, and Pseudo-Lucian's On the Syrian Goddess.)

• Third, while it is foolish to assume Egypt was unified under a single theology at all, let alone for its entire millennia-long history, the Isis and Osiris myth demonstrates a remarkable durability (attestations exist over the span of millennia) and a remarkable degree of influence and popularity (exoteric celebrations of the myth persisted all over Egypt and even outside it, and it is attested more widely, and in a wider range of styles, than all other myths).

• Fourth, the myth seems to have penetrated very far afield at a very early time. Many Greek myths, for example, are obvious degeneracies of different parts of the Isis and Osiris myth mapped onto local deities, and date as far back as Hesiod, the very beginning of Greek mythography.

Because of all this, it seems to me that the Isis and Osiris myth is foundational to Western thought. Consider that modern materialism is a degeneration of Christianity; Christianity is a repurposing of Greek philosophy; Greek philosophy is a fusion of Mesopotamian and Egyptian mystery teachings (through various intermediaries); and, of course, the Mesopotamian mystery teachings themselves are a reimagining of those of Egypt. It is difficult not to see Hesiod's Ages of Man in all this: we were once much wiser, but we get more stupid and sickly as time goes on, and in another couple thousand years, it seems a wonder that we will be able to survive at all.

Nonetheless, we live in the age we do by the hand of Providence, and we are here to learn the lessons appropriate to our age. (At any rate, we've already survived a couple thousand years longer than Hesiod expected us to!) As Matsuo Basho tells us,

古人の跡を求めず、
古人の求めたるの所を求めよ。

Seek not the paths of the ancients—
Seek that which the ancients sought.

We cannot recover the ancient wisdom and would not be able to understand it even if we did; but this is irrelevant: we develop and grow by seeking, not by understanding. The seeking is enough: Heaven watches over Her own.

With all this in mind, I am going to attempt a deep dive into the Isis and Osiris myth. (I've read it before, of course, but have not spent much energy contemplating it.) Such a deep dive is necessarily fraught: our Egyptian sources for the myth are cryptic and fragmentary (it was a secret teaching reserved for the elite, after all), and our Greek sources are quite late and similarly fragmentary: Herodotus keeps mum in keeping with his oaths (as was an initiate of the Eleusinian mysteries, and considered the Isaic mysteries to be "close enough" that speaking of them would be impious) and Diodorus Siculus jumps around like a grasshopper, interspersing parts of the myth with Egyptian history and unrelated anecdotes, and so his recording is both fragmentary and confused. The only comprehensive source we have for the myth is Plutarch, and while he was among the greatest sages of his time, he was not an initiate of the Isaic mysteries (or he would not have wrote about them), he was a Platonist and tended to read Plato into everything, he omits details from the myth that he perceives as superfluous, and he was writing at least two-and-a-half millennia after the fact. I will be following his version of the myth, but no matter what, we will be required to fill in gaps, ourselves.

What is worse, I myself am no interpreter of mysteries: I am a dummy compared to Plutarch, to say nothing of the Egyptian sages, and am—to my torment—befitting of the sorry age in which I live. So while I will attempt to grapple with the myth, be you certain that my interpretations are those of the Peristyle: I cannot, at present, hope to penetrate into the Naos. You will not find the True Ancient Wisdom here, only conjecture. I can barely read even basic Greek, and I have not studied Ancient Egypt in any depth: my only qualification is that peculiar badge, the love of Divinity, which renders one unfit to live among men. I can only hope that by seeking I may eventually attain, and that my attempts to explore the ancient wisdom may please those Divinities which I love.

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that, while Plotinus spends a lot of time refining his metaphysics, it's all in the service of the question, "So what should we actually do about it?" I think he lays it all out very clearly and concisely in this particular essay. I may fault Porphyry, on the other hand, for putting it so early in the collection: he arranged by difficulty, and indeed this essay is, indeed, easy to understand in isolation, but the problem is that one needs to understand all of the complicated and difficult metaphysics first. Since I hadn't gotten there last time I read this essay, my original summary is a big, fat mess and I decided to rewrite the whole thing.

I ii: On Virtue [Revision of my original summary.]

Plato tells us [Theaetetus 176A–B], "we ought to try to escape from earth to the dwelling of the gods as quickly as we can; and to escape is to become like God, so far as this is possible; and to become like God is to become righteous and holy and wise," and, in short, to become virtuous. But is God really virtuous? Surely, for example, He can't be courageous, since what is there to frighten Him? Neither can He be temperate, since what can He desire that He doesn't already possess? So if God isn't virtuous, how does becoming virtuous make us like Him?

By way of analogy, consider a fire: if you come near it, you become warm. But a fire doesn't need to come near to some other fire to become warm, because it is intrinsically warm. In the same way, virtue is the process of "coming near" some higher power, but the higher power has no need of "coming near" to itself; rather it intrinsically possesses whatever those virtues attain to. So if we practice the "civic" virtues [Republic IV 427E–434D], we make society more orderly and harmonious, which reflects, in a very small way, the Order and Harmony which God intrinsically possesses.

It is all well to live in an orderly society, but how does one become like God? The "purificatory" virtues for doing so are similar to the civic virtues, but consist of the withdrawal of the soul from the body: instead of being courageous in the face of danger, one ceases to worry over the body; instead of being temperate in one's enjoyment of bodily pleasures, one ceases to regard them; in short, one endeavors, so far as is possible, to submit one's body to reason and never act involuntarily.

These, too, are modeled on the virtues of the soul, which consist of, so far as is possible, in turning itself towards contemplation, since this is what the Intellect intrinsically possesses. And so everything has it's own virtues, all leading up, step-by-step like a ladder, to the Source.

In both my summary and Plotinus' original, "God" refers to the first and greatest soul, the "World Soul," and not "God" in a monotheistic sense. (In the quote of Plato's, I think it merely refers to divinity generally.)

Porphyry's summary of and commentary on this essay is in Sentences XXXIV. (I recommend reading it since he's rather clearer than Plotinus is.) I, myself, summarize it very briefly here.

While re-reading this essay, I had a moment of clarity as to why I have such a problem with the Christianity I was raised with, and Plotinus elegantly and diplomatically sums it up in a mere sentence in §6: "in all this there is no sin—that is only a matter of discipline—but our concern is not merely to be sinless but to be God." I realized, reading this, that the doctrines of sin and Satan and demons and hell and so on are like Christianity's version of the civic virtues: a way of teaching one how to live in the world! But if one is beyond that step, and working on the purificatory virtues, then such things are only a hindrance. The Sufi says, "Citizens of the country of Love have a religion apart from all others, for God alone is their religion." We citizens of that higher Country should, rather than growing frustrated with such dualisms, peacefully leave those of earthly countries to practice the civic virtues, since it is good to them. (And sometimes, when circumstances grow hard, those civic virtues require the eviction of citizens of other countries—but so much the better for us, I suppose, as doing so merely hastens us on our way!)

Last time I missed a crucial point at the end of §7, and I wish to call attention to it: "to model ourselves upon good men is to produce an image of an image: we have to fix our gaze above the image and attain Likeness to the Supreme Exemplar." That is, you can only rise as high as you aim. Socrates said that "the gods need nothing, so those men whose needs are fewest are most like the gods;" hence we have Diogenes living in a jar and smashing his begging bowl and hugging marble statues in winter: he was modeling himself on the gods rather than any human example, thereby purifying himself. Who are you modelling yourself on?