101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

Myths of the Founders 113
In the first part of the cycle, Osiris (who originally signified the grain) married his
sister Isis and became king of Egypt when the god Geb (the earth) stepped down and
gave Osiris the crown. Set, brother to Osiris and Isis, wanted to be king, plotted to kill
his brother, and successfully carried out his mission. After killing him, he hacked the
body into pieces and buried the parts around the country (the planting of seed). Isis
sought to recover all the parts of her husband’s body (harvest the crop) and found
everything but the penis (the original seed before it sprouted into grain), which she
reconstructed through some form of magic (the new seed within the grain). Through
Isis’s help, Osiris survived his death but only in the form of an afterlife. Despite this
condition, he fathered a child with Isis and the child was named Horus.
In the second part of the cycle, Isis hid Horus away to keep Set from finding him
and when the child reached adulthood he returned to avenge his father’s murder. After
a series of contests and conflicts, Horus defeated Set and his allies and became king
of Egypt.
Egyptians believed that all kings were a form of Horus and that when the king
died he became Osiris and the new king became the new Horus. Osiris served as
judge of the afterlife, determining who could cross over and who couldn’t. In theory,
when a king died, the Osiris that judged him was the previous king, who should have
been the newly deceased king’s biological father.
There is no canonical version of the Osiris cycle. For the most part, it is pieced
together from numerous inscriptions and verses in a variety of texts. Many contradictions
exist but the broad themes of the story remain consistent. There is, however, a
collection of stories known as The Contendings of Horus and Set, dating to about the
twelfth century B.C. but based on long-standing traditions, which details numerous
incidents in the struggles between Horus and Set. We also have a Greek version of the
Osiris myth from Plutarch (c. first century A.D.) which, though somewhat Hellenized
and modified to reflect some Greek ideas, still preserves many of the basic traditions
that go back more than two millennia.
Overlaying the Osiris cycle is some confusion by the Egyptians as to the identity
of Horus and Set. The Egyptians recognized at least three major Horus deities, each
with separate characteristics, and the Egyptians tended to merge them into a single