Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
Speaker 2: name is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with part
Speaker 3: two of our discussion of Osiris, the ancient Egyptian god
Speaker 3: of fertility, an embodiment of kingship, especially dead kingship and
Speaker 3: the lord and judge of the dead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, also in agricultural god. There's a lot of complexity
Speaker 2: to Osiris, and so in the last episode we basically
Speaker 2: talked about who this figure of Osiris is, where and
Speaker 2: when he emerges from, as much as we can answer
Speaker 2: that question, and the basic canon of myths surrounding him.
Speaker 3: And the fact that you were inspired to do this
Speaker 3: topic because we covered the movie Doctor Five's Rises again.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, like seventy five percent Doctor Phibs, maybe twenty
Speaker 2: five percent Easter. So props to Doctor Phibes than Jesus
Speaker 2: for inspiring this episode. Now, before we get into some
Speaker 2: we are going to get into some additional questions that
Speaker 2: we tease last time about comparisons to be made between
Speaker 2: the figure of Osiris and other deities and other religions.
Speaker 2: But before we do that I want to come back
Speaker 2: to a deity that I mentioned in the last episode
Speaker 2: towards the end of it, and that is the Greco
Speaker 2: Egyptian syncretic deity Serapists. This is the deity that is
Speaker 2: established under the rule of the Ptolemies in Egypt, a
Speaker 2: god that combines elements of Osiris and APIs, the Sacred Bull.
Speaker 2: These are both again Egyptian deities, along with various Greek
Speaker 2: deities like Zeus and Hades. So I just wanted to
Speaker 2: add a little more context on this because I don't
Speaker 2: think I explained the scenario as well as I could have,
Speaker 2: or didn't go into as much detail as I could
Speaker 2: have in a way that I think benefits our understanding,
Speaker 2: because we get into this idea again of kind of
Speaker 2: like an amalgam god that is, to a certain degree,
Speaker 2: kind of built by committee with a certain purpose in mind.
Speaker 2: And that purpose is not just like, oh, I have
Speaker 2: to figure out who you know, what God is real
Speaker 2: and I must convene with it and get its blessings.
Speaker 3: Rob in our outline, you have attached a photo of
Speaker 3: a sculpture of Serapis seated on a throne, or at
Speaker 3: least on a chair sort of dressed in a robe
Speaker 3: and holding up some kind of wand or maybe a
Speaker 3: scroll of a toon of some some sort of cylindrical object.
Speaker 3: But under his other hand, oh, there's a very good boy.
Speaker 3: It is the three headed hound of Hades.
Speaker 2: Cerberus that's right, looking very loyal and very domesticated right
Speaker 2: there by his side. There are various that you can
Speaker 2: easily do a Google search on Siapis that's se r
Speaker 2: a Pi s and you'll find various images that basically
Speaker 2: fit this. Sometimes it's just the head, sometimes you see
Speaker 2: the full body. Sometimes Cerberus is there, sometimes not. But
Speaker 2: I do have to drive home like the utter greekness
Speaker 2: of this image, because this will be important to come
Speaker 2: back to later, Like this is a very Greek looking god.
Speaker 2: If you didn't know exactly what deity this is, or
Speaker 2: what figure this is, you wouldn't have to know much
Speaker 2: at all about iconography and sculpture and depictions of the
Speaker 2: divine to say, oh, this looks very Greek to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's certainly a Greek art style.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and of course ye, and then the three headed
Speaker 2: dog right out of Greek mythology. So come back to
Speaker 2: Sorapis here in a second. But just to back up
Speaker 2: a little bit, I do want to drive home that
Speaker 2: Egypt experienced foreign rule at various points throughout its long history.
Speaker 2: There were the Hisos, which I believe we've talked about
Speaker 2: a little bit on the show before. This is a
Speaker 2: term that means rulers of foreign lands, and they controlled
Speaker 2: the Delta region of Egypt during the seventeenth century BCE.
Speaker 2: These were the first foreigners to rule over part of Egypt,
Speaker 2: and there's much that's not known about them, with various
Speaker 2: theories about their exact origin, though it seems that some
Speaker 2: sort of Canaanite origin is possible, and there has also
Speaker 2: been some evidence to suggest that it was perhaps not
Speaker 2: an outward invasion, but an uprising of peoples who had
Speaker 2: previously immigrated to the regions. So there's a lot of
Speaker 2: scholarly dispute on exactly who these people were and what
Speaker 2: this time period consisted of. Now, subsequent invasions by the Nubians,
Speaker 2: the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks also occurred, but
Speaker 2: pertinent to our discussion here is that in three point
Speaker 2: thirty two BCE, Macedonian king Alexander the Great conquered Egypt
Speaker 2: from the Persians and after his death. After Alexander's death
Speaker 2: in three twenty three BCE, likely by either poison or disease.
Speaker 2: He was only thirty two at the time, so there's
Speaker 2: a lot of arguments for the poison theory here. But
Speaker 2: after he dies, a Macedonian general that had served under Alexander,
Speaker 2: by the of Ptolemy, declared himself ruler of Egypt, and
Speaker 2: the Ptolemy family would rule Egypt for three centuries. So
Speaker 2: in her book Egyptian Mythology that I cited in the
Speaker 2: last episode, Jeraldine Pinch writes a little bit about this
Speaker 2: and points out that the Ptolemy's ruled from Alexandria, and
Speaker 2: that is the course where they built the Great Library
Speaker 2: of Alexandria. Though most of its contents, she points out,
Speaker 2: would not have concerned Egyptian culture, Egyptian history, and Egyptian mythology,
Speaker 2: you know, Greek culture was very much the focal point
Speaker 2: of the lost contents of this place. Most of the
Speaker 2: Ptolemy's apparently never learned to speak Egyptian, but they did,
Speaker 2: she says, recognize the challenges of governing a multicultural society
Speaker 2: and keeping powerful Egyptian factions content and this is ultimately
Speaker 2: where the invention of Sirapis comes into play, which she
Speaker 2: describes as quote a symbol of cultural fusion. So Sirapis
Speaker 2: is often described as a patron deity for the Ptolemy
Speaker 2: capital of Alexandria, so again a unifying entity. And also
Speaker 2: in combining all these elements, Serapists becomes a god of
Speaker 2: not only fertility and the underworld, which, if you know,
Speaker 2: we're already loaded in our concept of Osiris, but also
Speaker 2: he becomes the god of the sun in the sky
Speaker 2: and he sometimes credited in this role as Zeus Serapis.
Speaker 2: And it's interesting that by absorbing these various powers, he
Speaker 2: essentially becomes a god of everything, sort of a monotheism
Speaker 2: by monopoly or something like.
Speaker 3: That, one god among many, increasingly absorbing more and more responsibilities.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like I was trying to think of it in
Speaker 2: terms of, like what's a secular example of like have
Speaker 2: have team mascots ever been merged into single mascots for
Speaker 2: you know, like the unification of sports teams. Have the
Speaker 2: mascots of of Oh, I don't know, fast food chains
Speaker 2: ever been utilized in this fashion, Like well, you know,
Speaker 2: the Shones has been taken over by McDonald's and now
Speaker 2: the Shonese Boy or the Shonese Bear must be combined
Speaker 2: with elements of of you know, the Ronald MacDonald or
Speaker 2: Grimace or something.
Speaker 3: You know like that that is funny, but that that
Speaker 3: does kind of imply a necessary competition, like between sports
Speaker 3: teams or between competitors within a market space, whereas that
Speaker 3: wasn't always the case for gods. I mean, like you could,
Speaker 3: you know, worship multiple gods and that wasn't usually a problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But but here we see this this intentional attempt
Speaker 2: to create a deity and create a followship of this
Speaker 2: deity that that has stabilizing political objectives behind it. Owen
Speaker 2: real quick just because this plays. And something we talk
Speaker 2: about in the last episode is we're stressing that isis
Speaker 2: remains a separate entity. So it's not like they just
Speaker 2: took everything and threw it into this concept of the god.
Speaker 2: That would be that would be too much, I imagine.
Speaker 2: But distinct gods are combined into this entity now. According
Speaker 2: to Lauren Murphy and Beware Greeks, bearing God's serapis as
Speaker 2: a cross cultural deity, published in the journal Amphora in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty one, the invented God doesn't seem to have
Speaker 2: unified the people in any meaningful way as far as
Speaker 2: we can tell, but it does stand as an example
Speaker 2: of the diversity that was present in Egypt at the time.
Speaker 2: But it was the religion of the ruling class of
Speaker 2: foreigners and those wishing to mix with that ruling class
Speaker 2: of foreigners. And also it seems like there were possible
Speaker 2: connections to an inspiration via a pre Ptolemaic cult of
Speaker 2: Osiris APIs, as one can see in images of Serapis,
Speaker 2: he's predominantly depicted as a Greek deity, but it does
Speaker 2: sound like there might have already been some fusion of
Speaker 2: Osiris and APIs previously. This would not it would seem
Speaker 2: not be out of character with Egyptian religion prior to
Speaker 2: outside influence. Now, the Ptolemaic line would of course end
Speaker 2: with its last ruler, Cleopatra, in thirty as it was,
Speaker 2: and after this point it was absorbed by the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2: Worship of Serapis lived on under Roman rule but experienced
Speaker 2: eventual decline with the spread of Christianity during the fourth
Speaker 2: century CE. I should say, like the top down mandated
Speaker 2: spread of Christianity in particular, is the death blow to
Speaker 2: the cult of Serapis. So if Sirapis is a kind
Speaker 2: of monotheism by monopoly, he's eventually replaced by actual monotheism.
Speaker 2: And I think there's some discussion of whether the worship
Speaker 2: of a figure like Sirapis helped pave the way for
Speaker 2: the rise of Christianity. I've seen that discussed, but at
Speaker 2: the very least, it seems like there are other factors
Speaker 2: involved here within the Roman Empire and regions affected by
Speaker 2: the Roman Empire.
Speaker 3: Interesting.
Speaker 2: But anyway, that's enough on Sirapis. Let's get back to
Speaker 2: the original deity, but then also into some of these
Speaker 2: conversations about Osirius's possible connection with other cultural traditions. Let's
Speaker 2: return to Osiris, right.
Speaker 3: So, Rob, when we were initially looking at this topic,
Speaker 3: I was asking, is there anything you wanted me to
Speaker 3: look into? And what you suggested was a question that
Speaker 3: I had read a little bit about before, but I
Speaker 3: was quite intrigued to go deeper into. And this is
Speaker 3: a question that has been widely explored in the comparative
Speaker 3: study of religion. The connecting principle or lack thereof, between
Speaker 3: Osiris and other gods from the ancient world, most controversially
Speaker 3: the Christian Jesus, who are believed to in some way
Speaker 3: die and then rise again, so resurrected gods. This question
Speaker 3: will take us back to our old friend James G.
Speaker 3: Fraser and his incredibly popular, influential and controversial work The
Speaker 3: Golden Bough, which this was a book published in several
Speaker 3: of over the course of a couple of decades, beginning
Speaker 3: in eighteen ninety. Fraser was a Scottish scholar of religion
Speaker 3: in folklore who lived eighteen fifty four to nineteen forty one,
Speaker 3: and The Golden Bough is his best known work. In
Speaker 3: this book, Fraser catalogs and analyzes a huge number of myths, rituals,
Speaker 3: and magical beliefs from cultures around the world. So he
Speaker 3: sources these observations both from like records of things believed
Speaker 3: in the ancient world and you know, ancient myths and
Speaker 3: practices in the Greco Roman world and so forth, but
Speaker 3: also he sources this from ethnographic observations that people have
Speaker 3: made of just beliefs and magical practices in cultures all
Speaker 3: around the globe, using these observations ultimately to support his
Speaker 3: broader thesis, which include the idea that the ritual and
Speaker 3: mythic elements shared by most ancient religions point back to
Speaker 3: an originating cult practice that involved the ritual sacrifice of
Speaker 3: a holy king or guardian figure, often when his fertility
Speaker 3: was waning, and the linkage of that practice to the
Speaker 3: seasonal rebirth of nature and the crops. So his framework
Speaker 3: has a core of this sacrifice of a divine figure,
Speaker 3: often a divine king, and a cycle of death and
Speaker 3: rebirth that has some implications for nature. You can see
Speaker 3: why this would be relevant to the question at hand. Now,
Speaker 3: before we get into the specifics of resurrected gods, a
Speaker 3: couple of general notes on Fraser and the Golden Bow.
Speaker 3: I am not at all an expert in religious anthropology,
Speaker 3: but my personal take on The Golden Bough is that
Speaker 3: it is on one hand worth reading because it's important
Speaker 3: in understanding the history of Western scholarship on comparative religion,
Speaker 3: and it's also just a very absorbing and fascinating text.
Speaker 3: But on the other hand, this is like one hundred
Speaker 3: to two hundred and thirty year old book making the
Speaker 3: case for a sweeping theory of world religions. And it
Speaker 3: should be read with the caution you might expect for
Speaker 3: that kind of work, So I would not take any
Speaker 3: of its claims, specific or general, at face value without
Speaker 3: checking for confirmation in other sources. I would also be
Speaker 3: skeptical of his core theoretical framework, and I would just
Speaker 3: warn that from research we have done on this book
Speaker 3: in the past, I recall discovering that some of Fraser's
Speaker 3: presentation of ethnographic information about religious practices seems often tailored
Speaker 3: or cherry picked to fit his theories. Now the next
Speaker 3: general note, I don't know if what I'm about to
Speaker 3: say is completely fair, because Fraser doesn't say the following exactly,
Speaker 3: but I think one of the informal conclusions that a
Speaker 3: reader is likely to take away from The Golden Bough
Speaker 3: is that when it comes down to it, all religions
Speaker 3: are basically the same and the differences between them are
Speaker 3: incidental and superficial, which I would argue is not correct.
Speaker 3: And even if that's just an unintended takeaway that people
Speaker 3: would get from this book, I think that's a thing
Speaker 3: that's a conclusion that I would really stress people should resist.
Speaker 3: I do think there are common themes that you will
Speaker 3: find popping up again and again in many religions, but
Speaker 3: not all. And I also think that the differences between
Speaker 3: religious beliefs and practices around the world and throughout history
Speaker 3: do go quite deep. Those differences are significant, They're not
Speaker 3: just superficial variations on the same thing, and some religions
Speaker 3: end up serving profoundly different purposes. So personally, I wonder
Speaker 3: if the desire to locate so much sameness or commonality
Speaker 3: between different religions is something that really is not something
Speaker 3: that comes out of the religions themselves, but more emerges
Speaker 3: from the need of scholars to have a theory that
Speaker 3: explains how religions work and where they come from, when
Speaker 3: in fact, it's a very just like messy, complicated, variegated
Speaker 3: phenomenon that you know, lots of different factors are at work,
Speaker 3: and so it's hard to have a very simple theory
Speaker 3: that explains where they come from.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, even like the discussion we just had
Speaker 2: about Serapis and Serapis's origins and all, I mean, that
Speaker 2: doesn't fully capture what this entity may have meant and
Speaker 2: the various additional complexities that may have been involved in
Speaker 2: the genesis of this figure. So yeah, when you get
Speaker 2: into religion, when you get into belief, and you get
Speaker 2: into these into a process that often you know, you're
Speaker 2: talking about a tradition that goes for centuries and therefore
Speaker 2: has all sorts of room for change and alteration and
Speaker 2: transformation and so forth.
Speaker 3: That's right, exactly exactly, But anyway to come back to
Speaker 3: these resurrected gods, A big part of Fraser's model was
Speaker 3: that many religions of the ancient world commonly shared a
Speaker 3: dying and reviving god, usually a male deity associated with fertility,
Speaker 3: who undergoes a divine marriage to a fertility goddess, who
Speaker 3: is then killed or sacrificed sometimes when his fertility wanes
Speaker 3: in some way, and then rises from death to live again.
Speaker 3: And this resurrection is linked to cycles of loss and
Speaker 3: return in the natural and political world, such as the seasons,
Speaker 3: the death of plants in winter and the rebirth in
Speaker 3: spring and summer, the seasonal inundation of the nile, and
Speaker 3: other natural cycles and political cycles like the death of
Speaker 3: kings and the coronation of their heirs. So the question
Speaker 3: is do we really find these dying and rising gods
Speaker 3: all throughout the ancient religions Unfortunately, if you look into
Speaker 3: this question, I think you find the topic horribly polluted
Speaker 3: by a lot of motivated argumentation, primarily tracing back to
Speaker 3: the question of whether Jesus of Nazareth should be thought
Speaker 3: of of as one of these dying and rising deities.
Speaker 3: So this topic is infected by both Christian apologetics and
Speaker 3: anti Christian polemics. So you've got, you know, people who
Speaker 3: don't like Christianity, anti Christian polemicists arguing, look, see how
Speaker 3: stupid Christianity is. Jesus is just a copy of these
Speaker 3: other dying and rising deities. And then you've got Christian
Speaker 3: apologists arguing that no, Christianity is totally unique, it is
Speaker 3: unlike any other religion on earth because it is the
Speaker 3: one true religion, and all such comparisons are spurious, so
Speaker 3: caveat that. There is a lot of that kind of
Speaker 3: garbage floating around in both directions. I'm trying to do
Speaker 3: my best to put together a clear and what seems
Speaker 3: to me relatively unbiased answer to the question of what
Speaker 3: similarities exist between these alleged dying and rising gods and
Speaker 3: to what extent Osiris and Jesus fit into that mold.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the real tragedy is that it just makes it
Speaker 2: almost impossible for these two to ever hang out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, all Jesus's friends are saying, O Cyrus is just
Speaker 3: trying to be like Jesus, and all of Jesus Osirus's
Speaker 3: friends are saying Jesus is just trying to be like him.
Speaker 3: Will the accusations of copying never stop? But anyway, So,
Speaker 3: of course the dying and reviving deities framework was popular
Speaker 3: with Fraser and his allies, so I think in the
Speaker 3: early twentieth century were sort of associated with Cambridge University.
Speaker 3: So I want to go through a couple of the
Speaker 3: examples that Fraser cites, and then we'll get into critiques
Speaker 3: of them. So one example is the god Adonis, a
Speaker 3: figure in Greek myth thought to have been derived from
Speaker 3: other ancient Near Eastern deities, such as the Mesopotamian god
Speaker 3: of agriculture Tamuz or Dmuzi. Adonis, in many tellings, began
Speaker 3: as a mortal man famed for his beauty. He was
Speaker 3: sort of the pinnacle of hotness, and he was so
Speaker 3: handsome that when he was young, the goddesses Aphrodite and
Speaker 3: Persephone fought bitterly over whether he would live with one
Speaker 3: of them or the There more on that myth in
Speaker 3: a minute. But then another story is that later in
Speaker 3: his life Adonis was the lover of Aphrodite until he
Speaker 3: was tragically impaled by a wild bore wild hunting, so
Speaker 3: it gets the tusk right in the guts, and so
Speaker 3: he's out there dying in the wilderness on the hunt,
Speaker 3: and the goddess Aphrodite comes and weeps over his body,
Speaker 3: and as her tears fall and Adonis's blood runs down
Speaker 3: into the earth, the ground produces delicate flowers. Sometimes a
Speaker 3: specific type of flower is named, so like you know,
Speaker 3: you've got in some understandings of the story, the body
Speaker 3: fluids of these divine lovers combine upon the young man's
Speaker 3: death and bring forth the fruits of the earth. And
Speaker 3: to try to understand the significance of this figure, Fraser
Speaker 3: starts looking at celebrations of the death of Adonis. There
Speaker 3: was a festival or a sort of commemoration of the
Speaker 3: death of Adonnis that was celebrated in the summertime, and
Speaker 3: raz looks at accounts of this ritual. So Fraser says,
Speaker 3: quote at Alexandria, images of Aphrodite and Adonis were displayed
Speaker 3: on two couches. Beside them were set ripe fruits of
Speaker 3: all kinds, cakes, plants growing in flower pots, and green
Speaker 3: bowers twined with Annis. The marriage of the lovers was
Speaker 3: celebrated one day, and then on the morrow, women attired
Speaker 3: as mourners with streaming hair and bared breasts, bore the
Speaker 3: image of the dead Adonnas to the seashore and committed
Speaker 3: it to the waves. Yet they sorrowed not without hope,
Speaker 3: for they sang that the lost one would come back again.
Speaker 3: And after describing more of these rituals, Fraser says, summarizing quote,
Speaker 3: we may therefore accept as probable an explanation of the
Speaker 3: Adonnas worship, which accords so well with the facts of
Speaker 3: nature and with the analogy of similar rites in other lands. Moreover,
Speaker 3: the explanation is countenanced by a considerable body of opinion
Speaker 3: amongst the ancients themselves, who again and again interpreted the
Speaker 3: dying and reviving God as the reaped and sprouting grain.
Speaker 3: Fraser also cites Tamus, the Mesopotamian god from which Adonis
Speaker 3: is probably derived. Tamus was the consort of the goddess
Speaker 3: Inana and was also linked to crop cycles, and apparently
Speaker 3: images of death and rebirth among many gods Fraser offers
Speaker 3: as displaying death and resurrection. He also cites the Egyptian
Speaker 3: god Osiris. Now, of course we already went over the
Speaker 3: basic myth of Osiris, But what does Fraser have to
Speaker 3: say about the meaning of Osiris here? So I'm going
Speaker 3: to read a couple of lengthier quotes from Fraser here
Speaker 3: on Osiris. Quote in the Resurrection of Osiris, the Egyptians
Speaker 3: saw the pledge of a life everlasting for themselves beyond
Speaker 3: the grave. They believed that every man would live eternally
Speaker 3: in the other world if only his surviving friends did
Speaker 3: for his body what the gods had done for the
Speaker 3: body of Osiris. Hence, the ceremonies observed by the Egyptians
Speaker 3: over the human dead were an exact copy of those
Speaker 3: which Annibis, Horus, and the rest had performed over the
Speaker 3: dead god. And then he goes on. At every burial
Speaker 3: there was enacted a representation of the divine mystery which
Speaker 3: had been performed of old over Osiris. When his son,
Speaker 3: his sisters, his friends were gathered round his mangled remains
Speaker 3: and succeeded by their spells and manipulations in converting his
Speaker 3: broken body into the first mummy, which they afterwards reanimated
Speaker 3: and furnished with the means of entering on a new
Speaker 3: individual life beyond the grave. The mummy of the deceased
Speaker 3: was Osiris. The professional female mourners were his two sisters,
Speaker 3: Isis and Nepthis Annibis Horace, all the gods of the
Speaker 3: Osirian legend gathered about the corpse. In this way, every
Speaker 3: dead Egyptian was identified with Osiris and bore his name.
Speaker 3: From the Middle Kingdom onwards, it was the regular practice
Speaker 3: to address the deceased as Osiris so and so, as
Speaker 3: if he were the god himself, and to add the
Speaker 3: standing epithet true of speech, because true speech was characteristic
Speaker 3: of Osiris. The thousands of inscribed and pictured tombs that
Speaker 3: have been opened in the Valley of the Nile prove
Speaker 3: that the mystery of the resurrection was performed for the
Speaker 3: benefit of every dead Egyptian. As Osiris died and rose
Speaker 3: again from the dead, so all men hope to arise
Speaker 3: like him from death to life eternal. So there's a
Speaker 3: kind of in what Fraser is implying here, there's a
Speaker 3: kind of special role for Osiris, especially when compared to
Speaker 3: some of these other examples of allegedly dying and reviving gods,
Speaker 3: where Osiris not only in Fraser's mind dies and then
Speaker 3: is brought to life again, but by re enacting what
Speaker 3: happens to Osiris, he shows the way that the people
Speaker 3: that regular mortals can also be revived again after death,
Speaker 3: though we will add some qualification in what sense they
Speaker 3: should be thought of as revived. So one thing that,
Speaker 3: of course causes controversy is that among many of these examples,
Speaker 3: Fraser also brings up the example of Christ, the Christian Jesus,
Speaker 3: drawing direct connection between the Easter resurrection of Christ and say,
Speaker 3: the rituals of Adonis. This drew scorn from conservative Christians,
Speaker 3: of course, but you might expect that. But the question
Speaker 3: would remain, were these comparisons sound comparisons between all these
Speaker 3: different figures, And I think, after doing some additional reading,
Speaker 3: I think the answer is a little bit, but mostly no.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 3: Later in the twentieth century, Fraser's category of dying and
Speaker 3: reviving gods came under what seems to me like quite
Speaker 3: legitimate criticism by other major scholars. One notable name here
Speaker 3: is the American historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith, who
Speaker 3: was affiliated with the University of Chicago and direct actually
Speaker 3: addressing this question of dying and reviving gods. Smith wrote
Speaker 3: a highly cited entry in the Encyclopedia of Religion edited
Speaker 3: by Eliade. The entry was called Dying and Rising Gods,
Speaker 3: and in this chapter Smith showed that really the category
Speaker 3: of dying and rising gods is not much of a category,
Speaker 3: in that most of the items Fraser and others placed
Speaker 3: within the class are quote based on imaginative reconstructions and
Speaker 3: exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts. In other words, this
Speaker 3: category emerges from reliance on questionable sources and on tortured
Speaker 3: readings of legitimate source materials to try to fit them
Speaker 3: into the resurrected god box. So how would that be
Speaker 3: given what we just looked at, it seemed like Fraser
Speaker 3: presented some good examples. Well, Smith says that actually, if
Speaker 3: you look at the examples Fraser sites, there aren't any
Speaker 3: fully dying and rising gods. Instead, you have two distinct categories.
Speaker 3: One is dying gods, these are gods that die but
Speaker 3: are not said to rise again from death, and the
Speaker 3: other is disappearing gods. Gods that disappear and then in
Speaker 3: some cases reappear sometimes quote with monotonous frequency. But the
Speaker 3: disappearance is not death, and the reappearance is not resurrection.
Speaker 2: Okay, well we have to have some examples of this.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, Adonis has got you covered here, so I'm
Speaker 3: going to look in detail at the example of Adonnas.
Speaker 3: Smith says, there are two main myths of Adonnas that
Speaker 3: we know from our sources. One is the one I
Speaker 3: mentioned earlier, where Adonis is killed by a boar and
Speaker 3: his lover, Aphrodite, weeps over his body and creates a
Speaker 3: fragile flower. So in this myth, Adonnis dies, but he
Speaker 3: does not rise. Fraser sort of allides this by connecting
Speaker 3: the story to the morning celebration of Adonnas's death with
Speaker 3: sort of the involvement of summer crops and plants and
Speaker 3: stuff like that. But in the story, Adonnas just dies.
Speaker 3: We'll get to the rituals in a second. But in
Speaker 3: the story there's no resurrection, and the festival created by
Speaker 3: Aphrodite to commemorate his death is a festival of mourning.
Speaker 3: The other Adonnas Smith. To quote Smith, here tells of
Speaker 3: quote a quarrel between two goddesses, Aphrodite and Persephone for
Speaker 3: the affections of the infant Adonis. Zeus or Calliope decrees
Speaker 3: that Adonnas should spend part of the year in the
Speaker 3: upper world with one I assume with Aphrodite, and part
Speaker 3: of the year in the lower world with the other.
Speaker 3: I assume that would be Persephone. This tradition of by
Speaker 3: location similar to that connected with Persephone, and perhaps DEMUSI
Speaker 3: has no suggestion of death and rebirth, So you could
Speaker 3: argue maybe that going into the underworld and then coming
Speaker 3: back to the upper world has like resence with the
Speaker 3: idea of resurrection. There's some kind of symbolic linkage. It's
Speaker 3: thematically similar, but it is not literally the same thing.
Speaker 2: Right, And I think that becomes obvious when you look
Speaker 2: at any number of stories about characters venturing into the underworld.
Speaker 2: It generally has the flavor of a physical journey, and
Speaker 2: we see that even carried on into literary traditions, like
Speaker 2: even in Dante's Inferno. Like Dante does not die and
Speaker 2: to send into the inferno. No, he travels there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in some important senses, he is changed, but he
Speaker 3: doesn't like have to go through bodily death, right, But okay,
Speaker 3: So Fraser was also looking not just at like written
Speaker 3: versions of the Adonna Smith, but also at rituals to
Speaker 3: see what people believed about him. So in what about
Speaker 3: evidence for the resurrection of Adonnas in ritual? In terms
Speaker 3: of ritual, there are later sources possibly linking Adonnas to resurrection,
Speaker 3: but these sources are problematic. According to Jonathan Smith, there
Speaker 3: is one allegedly second century source by Lucien that, in
Speaker 3: a pretty sketchy and ambiguous way, describes rituals which could
Speaker 3: be interpreted as celebrating the resurrection of Adonnas, but it's
Speaker 3: not clear at all that this is what Lucian is describing.
Speaker 3: To quote from Smith's summary, Lucian says, quote, on the
Speaker 3: third day of the ritual, a statue of Adonnas is
Speaker 3: quote brought out into the light en, quote addressed as
Speaker 3: if alive. And I was thinking, wait a minute, but
Speaker 3: aren't many cult statues addressed as if alive?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and yeah. You get into a complex area
Speaker 2: of interpretation when you figure out, like what does it
Speaker 2: mean for someone to address a statue of a deity?
Speaker 3: Right? So a cult statue may have some kind of
Speaker 3: eternal existence that it is connected to, even if it
Speaker 3: is an image of a god who has died, but
Speaker 3: that doesn't necessarily mean if you're like talking to the statute,
Speaker 3: that you believe that the God was resurrected again from death.
Speaker 3: And then Smith says that there are other descriptions of
Speaker 3: these rituals which do make unambiguous reference to the resurrection
Speaker 3: of Adonnas, but they only show up later in the
Speaker 3: Roman period, after the spread of Christianity, and they are
Speaker 3: written by Christians in a way that raises questions about them, Like, so,
Speaker 3: if Christians are saying that worshippers of Adonis are saying
Speaker 3: Adonis was raised from the dead, is the resurrected God
Speaker 3: theme of Christianity perhaps having some influence on the myth
Speaker 3: of Adonis by this point, Or is the resurrected God
Speaker 3: theme of Christianity influencing the way Christian observers interpret the
Speaker 3: rituals of Roman pagans.
Speaker 2: Hmm, yeah, that's a very good point, so.
Speaker 3: Smith says quote this pattern will recur for many of
Speaker 3: the figures considered and indigenous mythology and ritual focusing on
Speaker 3: the deities death and rituals of lamentation, followed by a
Speaker 3: later Christian report adding the element nowhere found in the
Speaker 3: earlier native sources that the god was resurrected. I think
Speaker 3: that is a very interesting pattern. So, like Christian observers
Speaker 3: look at other religions and they see a dead God,
Speaker 3: and it's quite possible they just assume that a dead
Speaker 3: God is supposed to rise again and kind of read
Speaker 3: that into the ritual.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think then there's probably a case to
Speaker 2: be made even in like the spread of Christianity and
Speaker 2: like the reinterpretation often with you know, an agenda of tradition,
Speaker 2: local traditions, taking existing religious traditions and sort of reframing
Speaker 2: them in the light of the Christian religion exactly.
Speaker 3: So, but what about the thing about symbolic rebirth. What
Speaker 3: about the ritual and mythic association that Fraser seems to
Speaker 3: allege between Adonis and plant life which dies in the
Speaker 3: winter and is quote resurrected in spring. Well Smith says,
Speaker 3: if you look at ancient sources, even these symbolic associations
Speaker 3: are not present in the worship of Adonnas. Smith writes,
Speaker 3: quote the frequently cited gardens of Adonnas the kepoi were
Speaker 3: proverbial illustrations of the brief, transitory nature of life and
Speaker 3: contain no hint of rebirth. The point is that the
Speaker 3: young plant shoots rapidly wither and die, not that the
Speaker 3: seeds have been reborn when they sprout. So I thought
Speaker 3: that was also really interesting, because I would just so
Speaker 3: easily and so naturally look at a sort of plant
Speaker 3: based ritual celebration and assume it had something to do
Speaker 3: with cycles of death and rebirth. But that's an assumption
Speaker 3: that might not be what the people doing that practice
Speaker 3: think it means. So Smith is saying what ancient people
Speaker 3: said about these gardens was not that they were to
Speaker 3: emphasize the theme of resurrection, but to emphasize the theme
Speaker 3: once again of mourning and loss of the beautiful youth
Speaker 3: who died too soon, just like these young plant shoots
Speaker 3: that come up and then wither rapidly. I feel like
Speaker 3: this kind of thing makes me a little more cautious
Speaker 3: about my my myth interpretation goggles that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean absolutely. It even goes back to some
Speaker 2: of the ways that we discussed and cited discussions of
Speaker 2: osiris in the first episode. You know, thinking about how
Speaker 2: this basic myth matches up with you know, cyclical life
Speaker 2: and death and the agricultural cycles as well.
Speaker 3: But okay, that's a donnas. What about Osiris? It seems
Speaker 3: to me that of all the examples that Smith looks at,
Speaker 3: Osiris comes the closest to being genuinely killed and resurrected
Speaker 3: on a plane reading of the myth. But is he
Speaker 3: really resurrected? Smith argues, no, Osiris is not actually resurrected,
Speaker 3: because remember, of course, Osiris in story is killed and
Speaker 3: dismembered by Seth or set and then the pieces of
Speaker 3: his body are put back together again and he is rejuvenated,
Speaker 3: but not in this world. Instead, he goes on living
Speaker 3: in the other place, in the underworld, the realm of
Speaker 3: the dead, where he is empowered to become the master
Speaker 3: and judge of the wandering dead. So he does not
Speaker 3: rise from the dead. He goes on living in the afterlife.
Speaker 3: So it almost seems to me that his resurrection in
Speaker 3: the afterlife could be seen as kind of synonymous with
Speaker 3: his enthronement as the lord of the dead and his
Speaker 3: empowerment to serve the role of judgment.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, And regarding the ritual reenactment of this story in
Speaker 3: Osiris worship practices. Smith says, quote the repeated formula rise up,
Speaker 3: you have not died, whether applied to Osiris or a
Speaker 3: citizen of Egypt, signaled a new permanent life in the
Speaker 3: realm of the dead.
Speaker 2: That's right, going back to what we said about the
Speaker 2: idea that Osiris is ultimately kind of the opener of
Speaker 2: the way that democratizes or helps propel the already existing
Speaker 2: democratization of the afterlife. It's no longer just for kings.
Speaker 2: It is now something that everyone has access to, provided
Speaker 2: you can have the right mummification procedures performed on your
Speaker 2: body exactly.
Speaker 3: And so this is something that Fraser was saying where
Speaker 3: I think he was sort of on the right track
Speaker 3: in the case of Osiris. Smith argues that in the
Speaker 3: case of Osiris, there is a clear link between myth
Speaker 3: and ritual. There's the strong connection, which is something that
Speaker 3: Fraser is always trying to emphasize, is the link between
Speaker 3: myth and ritual and myths sort of being the story
Speaker 3: like that the ritual re enacts the myth, and the
Speaker 3: myth in Fraser is telling is often derived from the
Speaker 3: ritual it's like a narrativizing of the ritual. But whatever
Speaker 3: the actual chain of events there is in this case,
Speaker 3: there is clearly a strong link between the myth and
Speaker 3: the ritual, in that the mythical description of the recovery
Speaker 3: and reassembly of the pieces of the body of Osiris.
Speaker 3: I believe this is by Isis and his allies. This
Speaker 3: is a clear parallel of the funeral rights of Egypt.
Speaker 3: Smith lists these funeral rights quote the vigil over his corpse,
Speaker 3: the hymns, the hymns of lamentation, the embalmment usually performed
Speaker 3: by Annibis, the washing and purification of the corpse, the
Speaker 3: undertaking of the elaborate ritual of the opening of the
Speaker 3: mouth with its one hundred and seven separate operations, as
Speaker 3: well as other procedures for reanimation, the dressing of the body,
Speaker 3: and the pouring out of libations. So in a way,
Speaker 3: the dead Egyptian would, in a sense, through having the
Speaker 3: funeral rites performed upon their body, become Osiris, and just
Speaker 3: like Osiris, though dead to this world, they would awaken
Speaker 3: to a new life in another world. Smith writes, quote
Speaker 3: myth ritual of Osiris emphasizes the message that there is
Speaker 3: life for the dead, although it is of a different
Speaker 3: character than that of the living. What is to be
Speaker 3: feared is in a quote from the Book of Going
Speaker 3: forth by Day. I think this is another name for
Speaker 3: what is sometimes called the Book of the Dead quote,
Speaker 3: dying for a second time in the realm of the dead.
Speaker 3: And there are ways that, according to the story, this
Speaker 3: can happen to you, for example, being devoured by the lion, hippopotamus,
Speaker 3: crocodile monster am it in the underworld.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, we've talked a little bit about the
Speaker 2: complexity of the of the ancient Egyptian afterlife before where
Speaker 2: it's it's it's not just as it's not something you
Speaker 2: could compare just sort of like the sort of mainstream
Speaker 2: vision of a Christian heaven. It is a place where
Speaker 2: you're probably going to need your spells, You're going to
Speaker 2: need your followers, You're going to need tools and a
Speaker 2: plan in order to make the best go of.
Speaker 3: It, exactly right, You have to prepare. It's not just
Speaker 3: that you have to be worthy of the afterlife, but
Speaker 3: like in some visions, it takes like work to get there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is, of course, this is not just
Speaker 2: an ancient different religion. There are various examples we can
Speaker 2: turn to where like that journey between this life and
Speaker 2: the next is one that is perilous and has to
Speaker 2: go just right another in order to work right.
Speaker 3: So it seems to me that of the examples Fraser
Speaker 3: brings up Osyrius maybe comes the closest or is one
Speaker 3: of the closer ones to being a true dying and
Speaker 3: reviving god. But even in his case, there's a pretty
Speaker 3: strong conceptual distinction of of what the new life is
Speaker 3: that makes calling this a resurrection somewhat strained. So after
Speaker 3: analyzing all of the most prominent cases of alleged dying
Speaker 3: and reviving gods, Smith concludes as follows quote as the
Speaker 3: above examples make plain, the category of dying and rising
Speaker 3: deities is exceedingly dubious. It has been based largely on
Speaker 3: Christian interest and ten evidence. As such, the category is
Speaker 3: of more interest to the history of scholarship than to
Speaker 3: the history of religions. And so that might kind of
Speaker 3: make you think, like, ah, well, then who cares? But
Speaker 3: I think it is actually very illustrative that you can
Speaker 3: see this category sort of emerge where with scholars trying
Speaker 3: to make sense of all these different stories and rituals
Speaker 3: and stuff and putting all these gods and figures from
Speaker 3: myths into the category, and ultimately, if you look really close,
Speaker 3: it's not a super cohesive category. And a lot of
Speaker 3: the things, maybe all the things put into it don't
Speaker 3: really fit and don't have as much in common as
Speaker 3: the scholar is claiming they do. And if Smith is
Speaker 3: correct here, I find his case pretty convincing. If he's
Speaker 3: correct about this being largely based on Christian interest by
Speaker 3: scholars from Christian cultures, I think that's also illuminating that
Speaker 3: like dominant sort of story themes within your culture that
Speaker 3: seem very familiar to you just kind of naturally manifest
Speaker 3: when looking at ambiguously similar things in other cultural contexts.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And I mean at times this can be
Speaker 2: a very useful exercise and either helping us to get
Speaker 2: a leg up on understanding another culture or another system
Speaker 2: of beliefs. It can also be a frame of commonality.
Speaker 2: It can be very positive in terms of like seeing
Speaker 2: the similarities rather than differences. But yeah, when you get
Speaker 2: into like this deeper attempt to understand the religion, you
Speaker 2: could see where some of it could cast too much
Speaker 2: of a shadow on your interpretation of this other way
Speaker 2: of looking at the cosmos.
Speaker 3: I think that's right. But then on the other hand,
Speaker 3: I want to come back and say, we shouldn't stop
Speaker 3: looking at similarities between religions, because there are similarities. Like
Speaker 3: Smith says, yeah, this dying and reviving God category doesn't
Speaker 3: make a whole lot of sense, but there are these
Speaker 3: other patterns you can see, like dying gods. There are
Speaker 3: a bunch of dying god myths that have interesting things
Speaker 3: in common, and you could kind of look at like,
Speaker 3: why do they have these things in common that that's
Speaker 3: worth studying. You also have this pattern of the disappearing
Speaker 3: and sometimes reappearing god myth. What does that tell us
Speaker 3: about religions? You can look at these similarities, and so
Speaker 3: it's also not unreasonable to look at similarities between Christianity,
Speaker 3: a religion that certainly does have a dying and reviving God,
Speaker 3: with some of these other religions. And so one source
Speaker 3: that came across that I thought made a very interesting
Speaker 3: point A was a chapter called Resurrection in Ancient Egypt
Speaker 3: by the German egyptologist Jan Osman, who has plenty of
Speaker 3: his own ideas. He's pushing about like the lineage of
Speaker 3: certain types of resurrection beliefs. I think ultimately he thinks
Speaker 3: that a lot of these beliefs have an original source
Speaker 3: in Egyptian religion and then spread out to other places.
Speaker 3: But regardless of whether he's correct about that, I think
Speaker 3: he makes a very good point about a similarity between
Speaker 3: belief in Christ and the earlier belief in Osiris, which,
Speaker 3: on one hand, you have plenty of differences, like the
Speaker 3: death of Jesus is a one time event that is
Speaker 3: situated within history. It said, like, you know, well, he's
Speaker 3: a man who existed at a certain time and place
Speaker 3: in history, and so it's like his death is a
Speaker 3: historical event, not something that takes place within a kind
Speaker 3: of mythic time or a within a mythic landscape. But
Speaker 3: on the other hand, you could look at the deaths
Speaker 3: and revivals of these two god figures. Is having a
Speaker 3: lot in common in that, as Osman says, quote, through
Speaker 3: his death and resurrection, Christ has paved the way to
Speaker 3: Paradise or Elysium in a way not altogether dissimilar from
Speaker 3: that of Osiris, who also threw his victory over Seth
Speaker 3: opened a realm beyond the realm of death. The decisive
Speaker 3: common denominator of Christianity and ancient Egyptian religion is the
Speaker 3: idea of redemption from death, that beyond the realm of death,
Speaker 3: there is an Elysian realm of eternal life in the
Speaker 3: presence of the divine. So in both cases you can
Speaker 3: look at these gods as gods who were killed and
Speaker 3: then in some sense revived. Christ is said to be
Speaker 3: revived onto earth and then ascends into heaven. Osiris has
Speaker 3: revived and made lord a lord of the underworld and
Speaker 3: judge of the dead. But in both cases they open
Speaker 3: the way for people to have a sort of heaven again.
Speaker 3: Want to, you know, put the star on heaven there
Speaker 3: and say it means different things in the two different concepts,
Speaker 3: but it is a positive afterlife that is now available
Speaker 3: to the people.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Absolutely. In both cases, the individual is the opener
Speaker 2: of the way, you know, and the Ptolemies might come
Speaker 2: along and say, you know, we have this guy named
Speaker 2: Serapis and he does all.
Speaker 3: Of this as well, perfect give me all three Yeah, well,
Speaker 3: he's got a dog. Wait now? Was He often depicted
Speaker 3: as having Cerberus by his side, like having a three
Speaker 3: headed pup or. Is that just a unique feature of
Speaker 3: that sculpture.
Speaker 2: I mean, based on the remaining images of Serapis, it
Speaker 2: does seem like it seemed like he is sometimes depicted
Speaker 2: with Cerberus, and I believe that that is simply because, Yeah,
Speaker 2: if you are going to take this character of Osiris,
Speaker 2: who is a god of the underworld, and you're going
Speaker 2: to spin him into this very Greek themed model, well
Speaker 2: then you're going to drag in Hades, and you're going
Speaker 2: to drag in like this key example of sort of
Speaker 2: in a way summing up this idea of the taming
Speaker 2: of death right. So that's my understanding of it. But
Speaker 2: I certainly have seen other depictions of him that don't
Speaker 2: have the dog present. All right, Well, on that note,
Speaker 2: I believe we're going to go ahead and close the
Speaker 2: book on Osiris here with the caveat that. I'm not
Speaker 2: sure what the next core episode is going to be,
Speaker 2: but we were throwing around the idea of doing something
Speaker 2: that was still kind of Osiris, but is not Osiris
Speaker 2: Part three. So just I don't know. You'll have to
Speaker 2: see what happens. You'll see what happens as well. Okay,
Speaker 2: in the meantime, we'd love to hear from everyone out there.
Speaker 2: If you have thoughts on this two parter, if you
Speaker 2: have thoughts on past episodes or potential future episodes, write in.
Speaker 2: We would love to hear from you. Just to remind
Speaker 2: us that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a
Speaker 2: science and culture podcast, with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
Speaker 2: but on Mondays we do listener mail. On Wednesdays we
Speaker 2: do a short form episode, and on Fridays we set
Speaker 2: aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird
Speaker 2: movie on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 3: Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer, JJ Posway.
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