Osiris – He’s usually identified as the god of the afterlife, the underworld and the dead. Traditionally depicted as a green-skinned man with a pharaoh’s beard, partially mummy-wrapped at the legs, wearing a distinctive crown with two large ostrich feathers at either side, and holding a symbolic crook and flail.
Never has there been, nor shall there be a king more perfect than Osiris. Son of the Earth God, Geb, Osiris was divine royalty by birth, and all the land his birthright. Benevolence and prosperity were the hallmarks of his reign. Would that he had been left to shape the world, but the jealousy of his brother, Set, changed the course of fate.
The cult of Osiris (who was a god chiefly of regeneration and rebirth) had a particularly strong interest in the concept of immortality. Plutarch recounts one version of the myth in which Set (Osiris’ brother), along with the Queen of Ethiopia, conspired with 72 accomplices to plot the assassination of Osiris. Set fooled Osiris into getting into a box, which Set then shut, sealed with lead, and threw into the Nile. Osiris’ wife, Isis, searched for his remains until she finally found him embedded in a tamarind tree trunk, which was holding up the roof of a palace in Byblos on the Phoenician coast. She managed to remove the coffin and open it, but Osiris was already dead.
There are many stories of this altercation. Another: seeking to usurp the throne, Set deceived and murdered his brother, tearing his body to pieces and casting them across the land. Isis, Osiris’ wife, secretly fled while Set plunged the kingdom into darkness. For years she toiled to reassemble her husband while his spirit form, his Ba, endured. Yet for all her searching, she could not find every part of him, and Isis was forced to reanimate Osiris without. Though not strong enough to defy Set in this incomplete form, Osiris gave Isis a son that would topple the tyrant Set and restore balance to Egypt.
What remains of Osiris is a fragment of what he once was. Robbed of his crown over the earth, he now governs the realm of the dead with the same benevolence he ruled the living.