"Osiris" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dreams are mingling; A lake, the ancient Mareotis, where The Goddess spreads with ever hidden face Her wedding couch to greet Osiris Lord. ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... of Babylon and Persepolis, and Mardonius of forays beside the wide Caspian, and Roxana of her girlhood, while Gobryas was satrap of Egypt, spent beside the magic river, of the Pharaohs, the great pyramid, of Isis and Osiris and the world beyond the dead. Before the Athenian was opened the golden East, its glitter, its wonderment, its fascination. He even was silent when his hosts talked boldly of the coming war, how soon the Persian power would rule from the Pillars ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... Thebes. Let us look at the finest of them—the tomb of Sety I., the father of that Ramses II. of whom we have heard so much. Entering the dark doorway in the cliff, you descend through passage after passage and hall after hall, until at last you reach the fourteenth chamber, "the gold house of Osiris," 470 feet from the entrance, where the great King was laid in his magnificent alabaster coffin. The walls and pillars of each chamber are wonderfully carved and painted. The pillars show pictures of the King making offerings to the gods, or being welcomed by them, ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... Phallic, or fire-worship. They had, as the Talmud, Targums, and the Old Testament show, a knowledge of the Egyptian or Chaldaic account of the creation and fall, the latter still to be seen on the walls of the temple of Osiris at Philae. They had much knowledge of the Cabala, through their great prophet Moses, who was "learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," and, like Pythagoras, had been initiated into their mysteries, and who both imparted ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... is acquainted with sphinxes, and should be quick at guessing riddles. Will Cleopatra or Antony answer my conundrum? When my erudition creates a panic, why am I like those who dwelt about Chemmis, when the tragical fate of Osiris was accomplished?" ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... power divine! And on thy hospitable Argos shine; Whether the style of Titan please thee more, Whose purple rays th' Achaemenes adore: Or great Osiris, who first taught the swain In Pharian fields to sow the golden grain; 860 Or Mithra, to whose beams the Persian bows, And pays, in hollow rocks, his awful vows; Mithra! whose head the blaze of light adorns, Who grasps the ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... of the Morning and Evening. The mummy itself was enclosed in a handsome cartonnage case laced up the back. The Professor lifted it gently out on the table, and substituted Carrel's body. He staunched as he best could the blood which trickled on to the glaring pictures of the Judgment of Osiris and the goddess Nut imparting the Waters of Life; then he turned to examine the former occupant, whom two thousand years, even at such a moment endowed with a greater interest than could attach to the corpse of a defunct blackmailer. It now occurred to him that ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... the portraits of kings and effigies of the gods? On the walls of the tombs still remain Pthah, the creator, and Neph, the divine spirit, sitting at the potters wheel, turning clay to form men; and Athor, who receives the setting sun into her arms; and Osiris, the judge of the dead. The granite statues have outlived ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... only authorized by the laws, but even, in some measure, originated from their religion, from the example and practice of such of their gods as had been the most anciently and universally adored in Egypt, that is, Osiris ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... sorcerer was in the composition of the Archbishop himself, for he judged mankind alone by its general stupidity and credulity;— stupidity and credulity which formed excellent ground for the working of miracles, whether such miracles were wrought in the name of Osiris or Christ. Mokanna, the "Veiled Prophet," while corrupt to the core with unnameable vices, had managed in his time to delude the people into thinking him a holy man; and,—without any adequate reason ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... dying, Egypt, dying; Hark! the insulting foeman's cry. They are coming—quick, my falchion! Let me front them ere I die. Ah! no more amid the battle Shall my heart exulting swell; Isis and Osiris guard ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Mother, and Son, still it existed very vividly in Egypt. And the people expected the coming of God's only Son, the third person of their Trinity, not an imaginary being like Horus, but the real son of Osiris in flesh and blood who would bring happiness to men. Well, Jesus of Nazareth was this Son of God, and He as Christ was the eternal sharer of the ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... celestial bodies.' Again, he writes: 'Their notions about the stars are that some of them have been men, and others different sorts, of animals and fishes.' But every reader of Ovid knows that this was the very mythical theory of the Greeks and Romans. The Egyptians, again, worshipped Osiris, Isis, and the rest as ancestors, and there are even modern scholars, like Mr. Loftie in his 'Essay of Scarabs,' who hold Osiris to have been originally a real historical person. But the Egyptian priests who showed Plutarch the grave of Osiris, showed him, too, the stars into which Osiris, Isis, ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... proved by a passage in a Book of Precepts, which was written by a king of the ninth or tenth dynasty for his son, who reigned under the name of Merikara. The royal writer in it reminds his son that the Chiefs [of Osiris] who judge sinners perform their duty with merciless justice on the Day of Judgment. It is useless to assume that length of years will be accepted by them as a plea of justification. With them the lifetime of a man is only regarded as a moment. After death these Chiefs must be faced, and ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... on the nations that reposed in night, And chased the Stygian shades with rosy smile That spread from Error's home, the land of Nile. No more with harp and sistrum Music calls To wanton rites within Astarte's halls, The priests forget to mourn their Apis slain, And bear Osiris' ark with pompous train; Gone is Serapis, and Anubis fled, And Neitha's unraised vail shrouds Isis' prostrate head. Where Jove shook heaven when the red bolt was hurled, Neptune the sea—and Phoebus lit the world; Where fair-haired naiads held ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... dimly, we have glimpsed this now and then, in the old triune godhead of Isis, Osiris and Horus; and in our modern worship of the ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... rather with the principles of agriculture and political organization. The deity is the fertilizing Nile, or the judge of right conduct. There is recorded in {239} the Book of the Dead the pleading of a soul before Osiris, in which the commands of the god are thus identified with the conditions of ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... well observed, the cruel and dark religions are far more successful than those of Greece and Rome, for Osiris, etc., by the might of the devil, of darkness, are truly terrific. Cybele stands as a middle term half-way between these dark forms and the Greek or Roman. Pluto is the very model of a puny attempt at darkness utterly failing. He looks big; he paints himself histrionically; he soots his ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... mythologists of the schools of Mr. Max Muller and Kuhn have usually resolved most Gods and heroes into Sun, Sky, Dawn, Twilight; or, again, into elemental powers of Thunder, Tempest, Lightning, and Night, Mr. Frazer is apt to see in them the Spirit of Vegetation. Osiris is a Tree Spirit or a Corn Spirit (Mannhardt, the founder of the system, however, took Osiris to be the Sun). Balder is the Spirit of the Oak. The oak, "we may certainly conclude, was one of the chief, if not the very chief divinity ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... will, no doubt, some day succeed my father as high priest of Osiris," he told Amuba. "I know that my father does not think that he is clever, but it is not necessary to be very clever to serve in the temple. I thought that, of course, I too should come to high rank in the priesthood; ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... Osiris did the plough bestow, And first with iron urged the yielding ground. He taught mankind good seed to throw In furrows all untried; He plucked fair fruits the nameless trees did hide: He first the young vine to ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... of the popular mythology were frequently grouped in triads. First in importance among these groups was that formed by Osiris, Isis (his wife and sister), and Horus, their son. The members of this ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... by the author of the treatise "On Isis and Osiris," attributed to Plutarch (c. 47), already pointed out this doctrine as existing among ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Jew of Judas Maccabeus, a worshipper of Jehovah, having, from his infancy, heard him called the King of kings, the God of strength, of vengeance, of armies, the Eternal, coming suddenly face to face with the mysterious Osiris of the Egyptians, or the thundering Jupiter ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... vulg. Buzah; hence the medical Lat. Buza, the Russian Buza (millet beer), our booze, the O. Dutch "buyzen" and the German "busen." This is the old of negro and negroid Africa, the beer of Osiris, of which dried remains have been found in jars amongst Egyptian tombs. In Equatorial Africa it known as Pombe; on the Upper Nile "Merissa" or "Mirisi" and amongst the Kafirs (Caffers) "Tshuala," "Oala" or "Boyala:" ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the development of a religion one of whose most prominent elements was a promise of a life after death. It was still a great religion when the Christian doctrine of immortality was enunciated. In the early centuries of the Christian era, it seemed almost possible that the worship of Osiris and Isis might become the religion of the classical world; and the last stand made by civilized paganism against Christianity was in the temple of Isis at Philae in the ...
— The Egyptian Conception of Immortality • George Andrew Reisner
... salaam and said, 'Isis guard you, beautiful lady.' Such perfect courtesy, and yet with the air of scorning the money. As I passed out I couldn't help slipping another dollar into his hand, and he took it as if utterly unaware of it, and muttered, 'Osiris keep you, O flower of women!' And as I got into the motor I gave him another dollar and he said, 'Osis and Osiris both prolong your existence, O lily of the ricefield,' and after he had said it he stood beside the door of the motor and waited ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... any man,—with scientific certainty. As you know, she had a brother; the cult of Osiris and Isis was one and the same. What, precisely, were its dogmas, or its practices, or anything about it, none, now, can tell. The Papyri, hieroglyphics, and so on, which remain are very far from being exhaustive, and our knowledge ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... Osiris' balances weighed impartially the souls of Coptic lord and slave, before the pyramids rose on Egypt's plains; austere Minos meted even justice to citizen and helot, while the sculptured ideals of Attica slept in Pentelican quarries; Brahmin and Sudra, according to deeds done in the body— strictly ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... "Arcadia" of St. Pierre is simply this: A learned young Egyptian, educated at Thebes by the priests of Osiris, desirous of benefiting humanity, undertakes a voyage to Gaul for the purpose of carrying thither the arts and religion of Egypt. He is shipwrecked on his return in the Gulf of Messina, and lands upon the coast, where he is entertained by an Arcadian, to whom he relates ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... space of a year he dwelt, a fervent worshipper at the temple of Isis on the Campus Martius. Once more visions of the night began to afflict him; he consulted the priests and discovered the cause; he required yet to be initiated into the mysteries of Osiris. The priests of Corinth had worked upon his credulity to such good effect, that he found himself in serious financial difficulties, but by practising as a lawyer he succeeded in making a sufficient income to provide more than adequately for the expenses of this fresh initiation ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... the third division are tesserae from Egyptian mummies of the Grecian period, with various figures, including one of Anubis, the embalmer of the dead; a mummy of Amounirion covered with a curious network of bugles in blue porcelain; the upper part of a coffin with dedications to the Egyptian god Osiris; a small coffin containing the mummy of a child; the mummy of a female, Auch-sen-nefer, upon which is a scarabaeus, the sacred beetle of the Egyptians. In the fourth division the principal object ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... barbaric, and colossal. The legends of Aeschylus seem to harmonise less with the fragrant groves and graceful porticoes in which his countrymen paid their vows to the God of Light and Goddess of Desire, than with those huge and grotesque labyrinths of eternal granite in which Egypt enshrined her mystic Osiris, or in which Hindustan still bows down to her seven-headed idols. His favourite gods are those of the elder generation, the sons of heaven and earth, compared with whom Jupiter himself was a stripling and an upstart, the gigantic Titans, and the inexorable ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the Greek stories can well testify that the very religion of that time stood upon many and many-fashioned gods; not taught so by poets, but followed according to their nature of imitation. Who list may read in Plutarch the discourses of Isis and Osiris, of the cause why oracles ceased, of the Divine providence, and see whether the theology of that nation stood not upon such dreams, which the poets indeed superstitiously observed; and truly, since they had not the light of Christ, did ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... of the priesthood enjoy the power of worshiping beside us the same God—whilst in our cities, where we refuse them the right of celebrating our holy mysteries, we allow heathens to celebrate the mysteries of Iris and Osiris? Mahometans to invoke their prophet? the rabbin to make his burnt-offerings? To what extent, I ask, shall such strange tolerance be permissible? to what extent, I ask also, will you push despotism and persecution? ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... certain emotional state (ου μαθειν τι δειν αλλα παθειν {ou mathein ti dein alla pathein}). A passion-play was enacted amid the most impressive surroundings, and we need not doubt that the moral effect was beneficial and sometimes profound. When the Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Osiris were fused with the Hellenic, a type of worship was evolved which was startlingly like Christianity. A famous Egyptian text contains the promise: 'As truly as Osiris lives, shall he [the worshipper] live; as truly as Osiris is not dead, shall he not die.' ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... attractive was any form of worship which promised a continued existence, and probably a happier existence, after death. Even the mere mysteriousness of a form of worship had its allurements. Hence a tendency to Judaism, still more to the Egyptian worship of Isis and Osiris. The latter made many proselytes, particularly among the women, and contained ideas which are by no means ignoble but to our modern minds far more truly "religious" than anything to be found in the native Roman cults. To pass through purification, to practise asceticism, ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... A leper once he lost, and gained a king— Ahaz, his sottish conqueror, whom he drew God's altar to disparage and displace For one of Syrian mode, whereon to burn His odious offerings, and adore the gods Whom he had vanquished. After these appeared A crew who, under names of old renown— Osiris, Isis, Orus, and their train— With monstrous shapes and sorceries abused Fanatic Egypt and her priests to seek Their wandering gods disguised in brutish forms Rather than human. Nor did Israel scape Th' infection, when their borrowed gold composed The calf in Oreb; ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... as horribly and as slowly. And it seemed as though in that powerful, symmetrical, magnificent body, even after it became scarcely recognizable as human, that the spark of life could not be extinguished even though it were cut into a million shreds and scattered to the winds like the fair body of Osiris. ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... sand of the vast arena, bordered with a million heads, gleamed like mica dust beneath the light, falling from a sky as blue as the enamel on the statuettes of Osiris. On the south side of the field the terraces were broken, making way for a road which stretched toward Upper Ethiopia, the whole length of the Libyan chain. In the corresponding corner, the opening in the massive brick walls prolonged the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... deceased immunity from punishment for moral offenses: a sacred beetle of stone, inscribed with a charm beginning "O my heart, rise not up against me as a witness," laid on the breast of the mummy, silences the heart in the presence of Osiris, and the man, even though guilty, goes free. Forms of charms were prepared by the priests, and the name of any one who could pay was inserted in blanks left for this purpose.[201] This sort of corrupting procedure ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... of deuellishe delusion. To the whiche Idolles and Images of deuelles he stirred vp men to do the honour (Helas) due onely to God. As to Saturne in Italie, to Iupiter in Candie, to Iuno in Samos, to Bacchus in India, and at Thebes: to Isis, and Osiris in Egypte: in old Troie to Vesta: aboute Tritona in Aphrique, to Pallas, in Germanie and Fraunce to Mercurie, vnder the name of Theuthe: to Minerua at Athenes and Himetto, to Apollo in Delphos, Rhodes, Chio, Patara, Troade and Tymbra. To Diane in Delos and in ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... the Colossi, the Sphinx, the images of the gods had ceased to represent living realities. They had ceased to be objects of faith. Others of more recent birth were needful, and Serapis confronted Osiris. In the shops and streets of Alexandria there were thousands of Jews who had forgotten the God that had made his habitation behind ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... other groups or dynasties of gods which were worshipped throughout Egypt. These were mostly mythical beings, who were supposed to perform especial functions in the creation and control of the universe. Among these Osiris and Isis, his wife and sister, were important, and their worship common throughout all Egypt. Osiris came upon the earth in the interests of mankind, to manifest the true and the good in life. He was put to death by the machinations of the evil spirit, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... considered the most conclusive proof of the nature of the vanquished, and, as it established the sex, it conferred a greater title to bravery and skill than a mere collection of hands or scalps, which would not denote the sex. In conformity with this custom, we find that Osiris, when he returned to Egypt and found that Typhon had fomented dissension in his absence, being vanquished by the latter in the conflict that followed, was dismembered and cut into pieces, the followers of Typhon each securing ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... been witnessed in India, Persia, Egypt, Greece, and Italy.—Hence among the Hindoos, those personified agencies have been systematized under the titles of Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, Crishna, &c. Among the Egyptians, they were worshipped in the forms of living animals, and called Osiris, Ammon, Oris, Typhon, Isis, &c. Among the Chaldeans, and, after them, among the Jews, they were classed in principalities, powers, and dominions of angels and devils, under chiefs, who bore the names of Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, Moloch, Legion, Satan, Beelzebub, &c. ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... zealous attempt to galvanise a moribund creed into fresh life failed even to arrest the progress of decay. National thought, fickle as the wind, had turned from an impersonal philosophy to the materialistic cult of Hindu deities, as the Israelites of old hankered after the visible symbol of Isis and Osiris in the Golden Calf. No definite creed succeeded in gaining a permanent hold upon the wandering minds and shallow feelings of a race whose deepest instincts reveal the fleeting fancies and inconstant ideas indigenous to a sea-faring ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... steps, having lifted the sky from the earth in the form of a triangle; and that at each point stood one of the gods, Sut and Shu at the base, the apex being the Pole Star where Horus of the Horizon had his throne. This is, in so far, true; but the pyramid emblem was older than Osiris, Isis, and Horus, and runs back ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... at the Egyptian mystery of Osiris in this light. Osiris had gradually become one of the most important Egyptian divinities; he supplanted other gods in certain parts of the country; and an important cycle of myths was formed round ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... when I came to the priest he held out the roses, and I ate them, and was changed into a man. The people raised their hands to heaven, wonder-stricken by the miracle, and the fame of it went out over all the world. The priest initiated me into the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, and I shaved my head, and entered the College of Pastors, and became a servant ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... slain by the Emperor. As Arrian compared his master to Achilles, so Pancrates flattered him with allusions to Herakles. The lotos, it is well known, was a sacred flower in Egypt. Both as a symbol of the all-nourishing moisture of the earth and of the mystic marriage of Isis and Osiris, and also as an emblem of immortality, it appeared on all the sacred places of the Egyptians, especially on tombs and funeral utensils. To dignify Antinous with the lotos emblem was to consecrate him; to find a new species of the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... performed their vows. Amongst the Ancients their Mythology went no further than the epoch of the Deluge, and in honour of which, and also of the Ark, they erected many temples called Aren, Theba, Argus (from whence was probably derived the Argo of the Argonauts, and the sacred ship of Osiris), Cibotus, Toleus, ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... Devi, Durga, Kali, oread[obs3], the Great Spirit, Ushas; water nymph, wood nymph; Yama, Varuna, Zeus; Vishnu[Hindu deities], Siva, Shiva, Krishna, Juggernath[obs3], Buddha; Isis[Egyptian deities], Osiris, Ra; Belus, Bel, Baal[obs3], Asteroth &c.[obs3]; Thor[Norse deities], Odin; Mumbo Jumbo; good genius, tutelary genius; demiurge, familiar; sibyl; fairy, fay; sylph,, sylphid; Ariel[obs3], peri, nymph, nereid, dryad, seamaid, banshee, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Christian era his works enjoyed a considerable vogue, and he also had a very great influence on the Renaissance period. The Hermetic books, with all their mysteries, have become part of the theosophical gospel, as well as the doctrines of Plato and of the Neo-Platonists, Plutarch's treatises on Isis and Osiris, the philosophies of Plotinus and Iamblichus, the teachings of Philo and of the Gnostics, and the works of innumerable others, who in seeking to throw light on the super-physical realms seem often only to have succeeded in plunging them into greater darkness. Augmented by all these ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... the block contains three houses which have been distinguished by names, the House of Isis and Osiris, the House of Narcissus, and the House of the Female Dancers. Of these the latter is remarkable for the beauty of the paintings which ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... have the Orient dieties strayed? Swart gods of the Nile, in dusk splendors arrayed, Brooding Isis and somber Osiris, You were gone ere the fragile papyrus, (That ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... Plutarch's "Morals" is less known, and seldom reprinted. Yet such a reader as I am writing to can as ill spare it as the "Lives." He will read in it the essays "On the Daemon of Socrates," "On Isis and Osiris," "On Progress in Virtue," "On Garrulity," "On Love," and thank anew the art of printing, and the cheerful domain of ancient thinking. Plutarch charms by the facility of his associations; so that it signifies little where you open his book, you find yourself at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... The first part of the dream was a fairly evident birth phantasy. In dreams as in mythology, the delivery of a child from the uterine waters is commonly presented by distortion as the entry of the child into water; among many others, the births of Adonis, Osiris, Moses, and Bacchus are well-known illustrations of this. The bobbing up and down of the head in the water at once recalled to the patient the sensation of quickening she had experienced in her only pregnancy. Thinking of the boy going ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... India. In the Endowment House at Salt Lake City, secret rites are practised of a character similar to the mysteries of the Nile, and presided over by Young and Kimball, two Vermont Yankees, with all the solemnity of priests of Isis and Osiris. In these rites, which are symbolical of the mystery of procreation, both sexes participate, clad in loose flowing robes of white linen, with cleansed bodies and anointed hair. Since the revelation of the processes of the Endowment, which was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... battle-blade the huge Osiris found, And Mnestheus slays Archetius, Achates Epulo, And Gyas Ufens: yea, the seer Tolumnius lieth low, 460 He who was first against the foe to hurl the war-shaft out. The cry goes up unto the heaven; the war-tide turns about, Dust-cloud of flight the Rutuli raise up across ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... in his treatise of Isis and Osiris, informs us that the kings of Egypt, who were not already priests, were initiated, after their election, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... names! What hedge-schoolmaster has scattered them so loosely and profusely over this lovely land? Whip the wretch with rattlesnakes! Memphis indeed!—as if Memphis with its monolithic statues needed commemoration on the banks of the Mississippi! A new Osiris—a new Sphinx, "half horse, half alligator, with a sprinkling of the snapping turtle." At every forking of the roads, whenever I inquired my way, in my ears rang those classic homonyms, till my soul was sick of sounds. "Swampville" was euphony, and "Mud Creek" ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... ball, they patiently labour on. Walking backwards, having the pellet between their broad hind legs, they push it up and up until it is placed in safety. The persevering energy of this insect led the Egyptians to adopt it as an emblem of the labours of their great deity, Osiris, or the sun; they also traced a resemblance in the spiny projections on its head to the ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... Brahm and Osiris, Are they peeved with this revel, I ask? . . . Does Pluto like this, where his fire is? . . . What in hell do they think of ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... For the Eleusinia are older than Eleusis,—older than Demeter, even the Demeter of Thrace,—certainly as old as Isis, who was to Egypt what Demeter was to Greece,—the Great Mother[2] of a thousand names, who also had her endlessly repeated sorrow for the loss of Osiris, and in honor of whom the Egyptians held an annual festival. Thus we only remove the mystery back to the very verge of myth itself; and we must either give up the solution or take a different course. But perhaps Isis will reveal herself, and at the same time unveil the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... entangled amid what seem to be symbolized memories of unusual floodings of the river Nile. "The Noah of Egypt," says Professor Hitchcock, in his singularly ingenious essay (Historical and Geological Deluges Compared), "appears to have been Osiris. Typhon, a personification of the ocean, enticed him into an ark, which, being closed, he was forced to sea; and it was a curious fact, that he embarked on the seventeenth day of the month Athyr,—the very day, most probably, when Noah ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... mummy, ere ever his living spirit had left him. What arts I used to this last purpose it boots not, nor do I choose to tell. When I had done this thing I put him secretly away in a fitting box, even as Set concealed Osiris. Then came my maidens and tidied him away, as is the wont of these accursed ones. From that hour, even until now, has no man nor woman known where to find him, even Jambres the magician. For though ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... slaves bearing trophies of war and chase as offerings to the divine beings. On others, groups of men and women are shown, humbly presenting salvers of fruit and the sacred flower—the lotus—to their gods. Some of the most effective work is decorated with a simple life-size figure of Osiris or Rameses the Great in brilliant colours. A few of the more subdued patchwork designs consist of a solitary scarab, the sacred beetle of the Pharaohs, or an asp or two gracefully entwined. The smaller pieces make practical and admirable cushion covers. ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... is Osiris[129] seen In Memphian grove or green, Trampling the unshowered[130] grass with lowings loud; Nor can he be at rest Within his sacred chest; Nought but profoundest hell can be his shroud; In vain, with timbrelled anthems dark, The ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... their manner of use among different nations. Alongside the dignity of such is placed, and their several inventors are named. But on the exterior all the inventors in science, in warfare, and in law are represented. There I saw Moses, Osiris, Jupiter, Mercury, Lycurgus, Pompilius, Pythagoras, Zamolxis, Solon, Charondas, Phoroneus, with very many others. They even have Mahomet, whom nevertheless they hate as a false and sordid legislator. In the most dignified position I saw a representation ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... Egyptians were far from being fools," I answered Sir John with the air of being in their confidence. "We who are tempted to think so, don't take the trouble to try the key of their Faith in its door. I might say that its door was the door of the Tomb. If we go through that door into the Kingdom of Osiris, Amenti, which the Greeks renamed Hades, the mysteries which appear tangled sort themselves graciously out. The story of Isis the Great Enchantress, and her search for the body of her husband Osiris, murdered by Set, his wicked ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... prominent. This was comparable to the phallus on Japanese highways. In the festivals of Bacchus high phalli were carried, the male organ being represented about the size of the rest of the body. The Egyptians carried a gilt phallus, 150 cubits high, at the festivals of Osiris. In Syria, at the entrance of the temple at Hieropolis, was placed a human figure with a phallus 120 cubits high. A man mounted this upright twice a year and remained ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II
... only facts connecting the egg with Sun-God worship, for the Sun-God Apollo was of old represented as born from the egg of Leda, and the Sun-God Osiris was also said to have ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons
... Egypt, music is entirely under the patronage of male gods. Thoth, the Egyptian Hermes, invented the lyre by striking the tendons of a dead tortoise, which had dried and stretched in the shell. Osiris, too, the chief of the Egyptian gods, protected the art, although Strabo says music was not allowed in his temple at Abydos. While travelling in Ethiopia, the story runs, Osiris met a troupe of revelling satyrs, and, being fond of singing, he admitted them to his train of musicians. ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson
... lunar horns, and yellow wheat them bound In golden radiance, with a regal crown. With her Anubis, barker came; and came Bubastis holy; Apis various-mark'd; He who the voice suppresses, and directs To silence with his finger; timbrels loud; Osiris never sought enough; and snakes Of foreign lands full of somniferous gall. To her the goddess thus, as rais'd from sleep She seem'd, and manifest each object stood:— "O vot'ry, Telethusa! fling aside "Thy weighty cares; thy husband's mandates cheat; "Nor waver, when Lucina ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... of the Celestials) had done its work. His young friends betted Chu a bird's-nest dinner that he would not go to the nearest temple, enter the room devoted to coloured sculptures representing the torments of Purgatory, and carry off the image of the Chinese judge of the dead, their Osiris or Rhadamanthus. Off went old Chu, and soon returned with the august effigy (which wore "a green face, a red beard, and a hideous expression") in his arms. The other men were frightened, and begged Chu to restore ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... some redeeming qualities—the Erymanthean boar, the Hydra-headed monster, Medusa of the snaky locks, Cyclops, Polyphemus with one awful eye, the deceitful Sirens, the Old Man of the Mountain, Wodin and Osiris, and, last and most terrible of all, ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... disbelieve or to question the power of the ancient deities; but, as the mind absolutely requires some religion on which to rest, they gave their real devotion to all kinds of strange and foreign deities,—to Isis and Osiris, and the dog Anubus, to Chaldaean magicians, to Jewish exercisers, to Greek quacks, and to the wretched vagabond priests of Cybele, who infested all the streets with their Oriental dances and tinkling tambourines. The visitor to the ruins ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... to it by classical writers. The principal colors of the ancient Egyptians were red, yellow, and blue. Black was the symbol of error. White signified a holy life, purity, innocence of soul. The priests of Zeus and of Osiris were robed in white. Red was the symbol of zeal for the faith. Yellow was supposed to bring evil and sorrow. Blue was the symbol of truth. Black and white were often used to ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... of the reckless hero, Lemminkainen, (chopped to pieces by the Sons Of Nana, as in the myth of Osiris) was raking together the fragments of his body from the river of Tuoui, and fearing that the sprites of the Death-stream might resent her intrusion, the Sun, in answer to her entreaties, throws his Powerful rays upon the dreaded Shades, and sinks them into a deep sleep, while the mother gathers ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... way through the fields of Abydos in the dazzling splendour of the forenoon, having come, like so many pilgrims of old, from the banks of the Nile to visit the sanctuaries of Osiris, which lie beyond the green plains, on ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... reason of their sharing the things sacred to them. And for this reason he named the place Philae. Now both these nations, the Blemyes and the Nobatae, believe in all the gods in which the Greeks believe, and they also reverence Isis and Osiris, and not least of all Priapus. But the Blemyes are accustomed also to sacrifice human beings to the sun. These sanctuaries in Philae were kept by these barbarians even up to my time, but the Emperor Justinian decided to tear them down. Accordingly ...
— History of the Wars, Books I and II (of 8) - The Persian War • Procopius
... at the brink of a large rectangular well, or shaft. Holding the lamps aloft, the surrounding walls were seen to be covered with wonderfully preserved paintings executed on slightly raised plaster. Here Horemheb was seen standing before Isis, Osiris, Horus, and other gods; and his cartouches stood out boldly from amidst the elaborate inscriptions. The colours were extremely rich, and, though there was so much to be seen ahead, we stood there for some minutes, ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... written Sais, like the city of the Delta. The Gauls swore by the bull, an idea derived from the bull Apis. The Latin name of Bellocastes, which was that of the people of Bayeux, comes from Beli Casa, dwelling, sanctuary of Belus—Belus and Osiris, the same divinity! ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... although they did not seem to know it, the priestess was nothing less than a personification of the great goddess Isis, and the Ivory Child, their fetish, was a statue of the infant Horus, the fabled son of Isis and Osiris whom the Egyptians looked upon as the overcomer of Set or the Devil, the murderer of Osiris before his resurrection and ascent to Heaven to be the ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... sorrow; the seat of malady; harassed with pains; haunted with the quality of darkness (Tama-guna), and incapable of standing. The Pot and Potter began with the ancient Egyptians. Sitting as a potter at the wheel, Cneph (at Phil) moulds clay, and gives the spirit of life to the nostrils of Osiris. Hence the Genesitic breath. Then we meet him in the Vedas, the Being by whom the fictile vase is formed; the clay out of which it is fabricated. We find him next in Jeremiahs Arise and go down unto the Potters house, etc. (xviii. 2), and lastly in Romans (ix. 20), ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references ...
— The Waste Land • T. S. Eliot
... princelets who sold their subjects to be shot at in America,—creatures strong enough to oppress, too weak to protect their people. Whoever would have found a Germany to love must have pieced it together as painfully as Isis did the scattered bits of Osiris. Yet he says that "the true patriot is by no means extinguished" in him. It was the noisy ones that he could not abide; and, writing to Gleim about his "Grenadier" verses, he advises him to soften the ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... roll of the Book of the Dead, at a copy of which the doctor had been looking a day or so before. Sir Richmond became a brown naked figure, crossing a bridge of danger, passing between terrific monsters, ferrying a dark and dreadful stream. He came to the scales of judgment before the very throne of Osiris and stood waiting while dogheaded Anubis weighed his conscience and that evil monster, the Devourer of the Dead, crouched ready if the judgment went against him. The doctor's attention concentrated upon the scales. ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... balance of souls and good works, your judgment pronounced by the angels Monkir and Nekir, derives its attributes from the mysterious ceremonies of the cave of Mithra; and your heaven is exactly coincident with that of Osiris, Ormuzd, ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... his dead died not. He closed his eyes, he bore him to the Necropolis, to the house of the embalmer, or Kolchytes, and then to the grave; but he knew that the souls of the departed lived on; that the justified absorbed into Osiris floated over the Heavens in the vessel of the Sun; that they appeared on earth in the form they choose to take upon them, and that they might exert influence on the current of the lives of the survivors. So he took care to give a worthy interment to his dead, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... it was this same Ptolemy, but make the place of origin the famous town of Memphis,[457] once the bulwark of ancient Egypt. Many take the god for Aesculapius, because he cures disease: others for Osiris, the oldest of the local gods; some, again, for Jupiter, as being the sovereign lord of the world. But the majority of people, either judging by what are clearly attributes of the god or by an ingenious process of conjecture, ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... Folk, p. 83) remarks that great ethical leaders have often exhibited feminine traits, and adds: "It becomes easy to suppose of those early figures—who once probably were men—those Apollos, Buddhas, Dionysus, Osiris, and so forth—to suppose that they too were somewhat bisexual in temperament, and that it was really largely owing to that fact that they were endowed with far-reaching powers and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... foundation of Memphis was ascribed to Menes, the first king of Egypt. It was a large, rich, and splendid city, and the second capital of Egypt. Among its buildings were several magnificent temples, as those of Phtha, Osiris, Serapis, etc.; its palaces were also remarkable. In Strabo's time, it was next to Alexandria in size and population. Edrisi, who visited Memphis in the 12th century, thus describes its remains then existing: "Notwithstanding the vast extent ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... masters of ceremonies and the presidents of the sacred lodges, who receive neophytes and confer dignities. Their rites are secret; none but a member can be admitted. These divines, as of old the priest of Isis and Osiris, are deeply learned; and truly their knowledge of natural history is astonishing. They are well acquainted with astronomy and botany, and keep the records and great transactions of the tribes, employing certain hieroglyphics, which they paint in the sacred lodges, and which ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... student learned? Does he know why the twenty- sixth chapter of the 'Book of the dead' was written upon lapis-lazuli, the twenty-seventh upon green felspar, the twenty-ninth upon cornelian, and the thirtieth upon serpentine? He does not. Having studied Part Four, has he learned the secret of why Osiris was a black god, although he typified the Sun? Has he learned why modern Christianity is losing its hold upon the nations, whilst Buddhism, so called, counts its disciples by millions? He has not. This is because the scholar ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... quietude of soul in which the philosophic morality of the Greeks saw a privilege of the sage; in the serenity of Olympus they enjoyed perpetual youth; they were Immortals. The divinities of the Orient, on the contrary, suffered and died, but only to revive again.[12] Osiris, Attis and Adonis were mourned like mortals by wife or mistress, Isis, Cybele or Astarte. With them the mystics moaned for their deceased god and later, after he had revived, celebrated with exultation ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... Matrimony under the form of a Right-Angled Triangle. That triangle contains one of the perpendiculars of three, the base of four, and the hypotenuse of five parts, the square of which is equal to the squares of those sides containing the right angle. The perpendicular (three) is the Male, Osiris, the originating principle ([Greek: arche]); the base (four) is the Female, Isis, the receptive principle ([Greek: hypodoche]); and the Hypotenuse (five) is the offspring of both, Horus, the product ([Greek: apotelesma])." The central feature of this triangle, upon which its property is based, ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... writers been construed into a prophecy of a forthcoming Messiah, Hyzlo, who was a scholar, knew to have been addressed to a son of Virgil's intimate friend. Tacitus, too, has been interpolated. Seneca's ideal man is not Jesus, for Jesus is Osiris, Horus, Krishna, Mithra, Hercules, Adonis,—think of this beautiful young god's death!—Buddha. Such a mock trial and death could not have taken place under the Roman or Jewish laws. The sacraments derive from the Greeks, from the Indians—the ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... the work on Edfu by M. de Rochemonteix. In it a Page 101 complete temple will be placed before students. The entire Egyptian religion will be illustrated, in all its rituals,—ritual of foundation, of sacrifice, of the feast of Osiris. M. Benedite has commenced in the same way the publication of the Temples of Philae.—Revue Critique, ...
— The American Journal of Archaeology, 1893-1 • Various
... form, some granite god we deemed, Or king of palmy Nile, colossal shapes Such as Syene's rosy quarries yield To Memphian art; Horus, Osiris called, Or Amenoph, who, on the Theban plain, With magic melody the sun salutes; Or he, far mightier, to whose conquering car Monarchs were yoked, Rameses: by the Greeks Sesostris styled. And yet no sculptor's art Moulded this shape, for form it seemed of flesh, Yet motionless; ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... come I, Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters, Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah, Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson, Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha, In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix engraved, With Odin and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image, Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... sacred beetle, which has been shaped by some workman down in Thebae on the Nile. We may be sure that no people believes more intensely in a future life. What compliment they pay this physical frame of men when they hold that embalmment restores to the soul its former body! After the judgment of Osiris, if their lives be true, the worthy shall enjoy the companionship of the great god forever. No other people wears such a visible emblem of their faith in another life. I will buy this scarab for an amulet against ...
— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford
... colleges; under the Ptolemies the head librarian, in after times the professor of rhetoric, held the highest post within this ancient university. The librarian was usually chief priest of one of the greatest gods, Isis, Osiris, or Serapis. [35] His appointment was for life, and lay at the disposal of the monarch. Thus the museum was essentially a court institution, and its savants and litterateurs were accomplished courtiers and men of the world. Learning being thus nursed as in ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... like a jewel in the crown of Osiris, those of his kind, screaming defiance, spread their wings and hastened ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... dangerous sickness, and new upon his recovery, must be forborn, spared, and cherished, in such sort that they may harbour in their own breasts this opinion, that there is not in the world a king or a prince who does not desire fewer enemies and more friends. Thus Osiris, the great king of the Egyptians, conquered almost the whole earth, not so much by force of arms as by easing the people of their troubles, teaching them how to live well, and honestly giving them good laws, and using them with ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... is, the greatest triad of the Sephiroth, the Crown, King, and Queen; which finds a parallel in the Osiris, Isis, and Horus; the Axieros, Axiochersos, and Axiochersa of Lemnos ...
— Hebrew Literature
... over the psychical powers of a man at that supreme moment, whereby he can do no more good, but may harden into a more hopeless reprobate. The notion that a judgment of the soul takes place, as in the hall of Osiris, of Egyptian mythology, at the instant of dissolution, whereby the destiny of the individual is sealed for ever, we repudiate in terms. Man is judged, not then, but at every moment of his life. "The moral laws vindicate themselves" without the intervention of ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... Thessaly, of Inachus of Argos, and, AEgialeus of Sicyon; nor in the long line of princes who are derived from them. The supposed heroes of the first ages, in every country are equally fabulous. No such conquests were ever achieved as are ascribed to Osiris, Dionusus, and Sesostris. The histories of Hercules and Perseus are equally void of truth. I am convinced, and hope I shall satisfactorily prove, that Cadmus never brought letters to Greece; and that no such person existed as the Grecians have described. What I have ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant |
