Our relationship as Iranians with our cultural and civilisational past — Part Three
(A reading of the myth of Osiris and Horus in ancient Egypt)

Having summarised the myth, let us now reflect on its meaning and ask why Egyptians transmitted this mythic story for thousands of years as one of their most important epics, and why it became one of the most frequently repeated narratives in the inscriptions of Egyptian monuments.

In psychological and symbolic interpretations of myths and stories, much as in interpreting films, one foundational principle should be kept in mind: the characters and names in the story are not simply historical persons. They can be read as embodiments of active forces within the psyche or in the external world. By replacing each mythic figure with the force or meaning it represents, we can begin to decipher the structure of the myth.

1) Osiris can be read as an embodiment of culture and of the traditional structures governing a society. Culture is like a generous father who teaches each generation how to live and establishes and preserves social systems. Yet, as the story itself suggests, the culture and traditions of every society eventually age, and over time can lose both usefulness and vision. As traditions and social structures grow old, another and darker aspect of existence—decay, disorder and disintegration—enters.

2) Set, the second-born figure in this story and embodiment of forces of chaos, destruction and disintegration, emerges as traditions, culture and social structures become exhausted. He draws the old and infertile society towards corruption and decay and eventually kills it. The fate of a society that fails to renew itself and loses its capacity for youthful creation is blindness to what is happening to it, followed finally by the death of civilisation at the hands of corruption and disintegration as these forces envelop its institutions.

3) Isis embodies the force of fertility, repair and renewal: that which preserves culture and carries it from one generation to another. Isis protects Osiris against Set and possesses the power to bring Osiris—culture—back towards life. This vital force exists within every culture, however old and blind it may become, and for a time can preserve Osiris. But eventually a point may come when decay, corruption and chaos not only kill Osiris—the old civilisation and culture—but dismember him, until people remember almost nothing of their own traditions. The forces of disintegration aim at complete fragmentation. In such a condition, pieces of a dead culture are scattered across history and across the geography of its former world. We Iranians understand well the meaning of such fragmentation. Our culture and traditions have been broken apart by historical storms and by the inevitable decay accompanying age and exhaustion. If we search, we can still find fragments here and there, yet the old and blind king is no longer alive; he sleeps in the depths of history.

4) Here Isis—the mother of the world and symbol of protective, restorative and life-giving forces—can finally search for the pieces of Osiris/culture and gather them together with the help of knowledge. Older Egyptian versions in which the god of knowledge, Thoth, assists in this gathering express the point in a direct way: knowledge, together with the generative power of love for an ancient civilisation and culture, can recover the fragments. By placing them together it can reconstruct an integrated but still lifeless body of the old civilisation, bringing it one step closer to rebirth.

5) Isis, who loves Osiris, discovers his essence and becomes pregnant by him. Love of culture, together with knowledge, makes it possible to bring forth from the body of an old, blind and destroyed culture a new child who, although born of the father, does not simply resemble him. The aim of the myth is not the literal return of Osiris. Osiris is old, blind and no longer adequate to the new world. However deeply we love the corpse, it will not become a powerful and intelligent ruler. The truth is that it is dead and weak before corruption. The significant message of the myth is that no people attains greatness merely by reassembling the fragmented corpse of its civilisation. The ancient civilisation must give life to a new generation and be reborn through that generation in a new form.

Aydin Areta