The Greek version of the myth next describes the conduct of Osiris as a "culture-hero." He instituted laws, taught agriculture, instructed the Egyptians in the ritual of worship, and won them from "their destitute and bestial mode of living." After civilising Egypt, he travelled over the world, like the Greek Dionysus, whom he so closely resembles in some portions of his legend that Herodotus supposed the Dionysiac myth to have been imported from Egypt.[1] In the absence of Osiris, his evil brother, Typhon, kept quiet. But, on the hero's return, Typhon laid an ambush against him, like Ægisthus against Agamemnon. He had a decorated coffer (mummy-case?) made of the exact length of Osiris, and offered this as a present to any one whom
- ↑ "Osiris is Dionysus in the tongue of Hellas" (Herodotus, ii. 144, ii. 48). "Most of the details of the mystery of Osiris, as practised by the Egyptians, resemble the Dionysus mysteries of Greece. . . . Methinks that Melampus, Amythaon's son, was well seen in this knowledge, for it was Melampus that brought among the Greeks the name and rites and phallic procession of Dionysus." (Compare De Is. et Os., xxxv.) The coincidences are probably not to be explained by borrowing; many of them are found in America.
replies, "I will not go out thence, that is a dangerous way; right through the side will I burst." Compare (Leland, Algonquin Legends, p. 15) the birth of the Algonquin Typhon, the evil Malsumis, the wolf. "Glooskap said, 'I will be born as others are.'" But the evil Malsumis thought himself too great to be brought forth in such a manner, and declared that he would burst through his mother's side. Mr. Leland's note, containing a Buddhist and an Armenian parallel, but referring neither to Indra nor Typhon, shows the bona fides of the Algonquin report. The Bodhisattva was born through his mother's right side (Kern., Der Buddhismus, 30). The Irish version is that our Lord was born through the crown of the head of the Virgin, like Athene. Saltair na Rann, 7529, 7530. See also Liebrecht, Zur Volkskunde, p. 490. For the Irish and Buddhist legends (there is an Anglo-Saxon parallel) I am indebted to Mr. Whitley Stokes. Probably the feeling that a supernatural child should have no natural birth, and not the borrowing of ideas, accounts for those strange similarities of myth.
