THE FOLLOWING IS COPYWRITTEN MATERIAL
NO PART OF IT MAY BE REPRODUCED
WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR
This is Part 5 of an 11-Part Series
Extracted from Chapter Two of my book The Seven Gates of Soul
Previous posts in this series include:
The Fear of Death in Early Cultures
The Fear of the Soul’s Journey After Death
Toward a Cyclical Conception of Death as a Part of Life
The Cyclical Worldview and the Release From Suffering
The Myth of Immortality
To meet the understandable human need for alleviation of the fear of death, a new paradigm begin to emerge in religious thought, probably somewhere around 3000-2000 BCE[1]. This paradigm, which assumed an afterlife and the immortality of a soul that could survive bodily death, gradually superseded the more abject, fear-based belief that the death of the body marked the soul’s demise. Though it brought hope to the faithful within the religions where it took root, the concept of immortality also became a pivot point around which soul became increasingly identified with Spirit. Paradoxically, it was this identification that marked the death of religion as a language useful to the evolution of the embodied soul, since the body was now something to be shed on the way to a more relevant identification with a disembodied God.
The shift toward immortality and the spiritual severance of soul and body probably originated with the Egyptians and the myth of Osiris. In Plutarch’s version of the myth (circa 120 AD), Osiris was an Egyptian king responsible for bringing civilization to Egypt (Powell 215-218). Together with his sister and queen, Isis, Osiris abolished cannibalism, introduced agriculture and marriage, and passed laws that made everyday life safer, more productive, and more socially integrated. After this new way of life was established, he left the rule of Egypt to Isis, and traveled for a while to teach and spread his ideas to other parts of the world. Upon his return, his enemies led by the evil Typhoeus, tricked him into climbing into a coffin, slammed the lid shut, and threw the coffin into the Nile. The coffin floated down the river into the sea and across it to Phoenica, where it lodged against a tamarisk tree, which grew around it.
When the king of Phoenica ordered the tree cut down, many years later, to be used as a pillar in his palace, the coffin with Osiris inside was taken with it. Meanwhile, Isis had been desperately searching for her brother/consort, and eventually caught up with him. Disguising herself as a nanny, she gained entrance to the palace, where she revealed herself and demanded Osiris’ return. She took Osiris back to Egypt and hid his coffin in the marshes. On the way, according to some versions of the myth, Isis opened the coffin, and taking the form of a hawk, hovered over Osiris’ penis, inflaming it into an erection, and allowing it to impregnate her.
Typhoeus later stumbled into the coffin one moonlit night while hunting, and tore the corpse of Osiris into fourteen pieces, which he scattered all over the country. Isis set out in a papyrus boat to search for each piece, and built a temple whenever she found one. She eventually found them all, except for the penis that had impregnated her, for which she substituted a wooden phallus. With his body reconstructed, Osiris arose from the underworld to prepare his son, Horus, whom Isis had now borne, to do battle with Typhoeus and avenge his murder. After many days of fighting, Typhoeus’ allies deserted him, and Horus delivered him to Isis in chains.
Every reigning pharaoh since Osiris has been identified with Horus, the hawk god, who represented the unvanquishable immortality of Osiris. In the embrace of this myth, the concept of resurrection became the anticipated expectation after death, at least in the case of the ruling class. By about 2400 BCE, the elaborate funeral rites for which the Egyptians are so well known had evolved to imitate the acts that they believed were performed by the gods to preserve the body of Osiris, with whom the deceased was ritually assimilated. This funeral rite was gradually extended to others, until by 1400 BCE or so, it was available to anyone who could afford it (Doctrines and Dogmas, Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 17, p. 414). After the conquests of Alexander, the Great (circa 334 BCE), the cult of Isis, including the central myth of Osiris’ resurrection, spread throughout the Greco-Roman world, became quite popular, and asserted a profound influence on Western concepts of the fate of the soul after death (European Religions, Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 18, p. 798).
1 I am assuming that this development roughly coincided with the period prior to publication of the Egyptian Pyramid Texts (c 2375-2200 BCE), which represent the first known written documentation of the belief in immortality. While it is likely that some belief in an afterlife was prevalent among prehistoric cultures throughout the world, it was primarily the Egyptian conceptualization of immortality that was passed on to Western religious tradition. It is with the passing of this legacy that I associate the paradigm shift mentioned in the text to which this endnote refers.