Isis and Osiris, the wife who made the god whole again

In Egyptian religion the couple formed by Isis and Osiris holds a central place. Brother and sister as well as husband and wife, children of the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut, they stand at the centre of a myth about kingship, death and rebirth. At its heart, however, there is also a love story: that of a wife who will not accept her husband's disappearance and crosses Egypt to find him.

The sources of a very ancient myth

The myth of Osiris is already attested in the Pyramid Texts, carved in royal tombs from the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, and in many later hymns and funerary texts. The Egyptian sources, however, allude to the episodes rather than telling them in full, perhaps partly out of the respect owed to sacred and painful events. What survives are fragments, invocations and laments attributed to Isis and her sister Nephthys.

The complete and orderly account we know is owed to a Greek writer, Plutarch of Chaeronea, who between the 1st and 2nd centuries AD composed the treatise On Isis and Osiris, dedicated to Clea, a priestess at Delphi. Plutarch combines Egyptian material with Greek philosophical interpretations and so must be read with caution. Even so, he remains the most detailed source for the story.

The chest and the tree of Byblos

According to Plutarch, Osiris ruled over Egypt and had taught mankind agriculture and laws. His brother Seth, out of envy, had a precious chest made to the measure of his body and at a banquet promised to give it to whoever fitted it exactly. When Osiris lay down inside, the accomplices shut the lid, sealed it and threw the chest into the Nile.

The current carried it to the sea and then to Byblos in Phoenicia, where a tree grew around it, enclosing it in its trunk. The local king, admiring the tree, had it cut down to make a column for his palace. Isis, searching for her husband in mourning, came to Byblos, entered the queen's service as a nurse and in the end obtained the column with what it contained.

The scattered limbs

Having brought the body back to Egypt, Isis hid it. But Seth, hunting at night by moonlight, found it and cut it into pieces, fourteen according to Plutarch, scattering them across the country. Isis resumed her search in a papyrus boat and found the parts one by one. This, the writer explains, was why many places in Egypt claimed to have a tomb of Osiris.

In the Egyptian versions Isis, often depicted as a kite, restores life to her husband's body with the help of Nephthys and the god Anubis, and conceives by him a son, Horus, who will grow up hidden in the marshes of the Delta and avenge his father by defeating Seth. Osiris, however, does not return to rule on earth: he becomes lord of the afterlife and judge of souls.

From the Nile to the Roman Empire

The main centre of the cult of Osiris was Abydos, in Upper Egypt, where solemn festivals re-enacted his death and rebirth. The cult of Isis, by contrast, spread across the whole Mediterranean: a temple to her survives at Pompeii, and Apuleius devotes the last book of the Metamorphoses to the goddess. The sanctuary of Philae, near Aswan, remained active until the 6th century AD.

In the figure of Isis the ancients saw the wife and mother par excellence, able through her devotion to overcome dispersal and death. The myth of the divine couple, read as a love story, shows that even in the most ancient religions the union of husband and wife could become the symbol of a force greater than destruction.