Michael Maier
Emblem XLIV. Typhon kills Osiris by deceit, and disperses his limbs. But the famous Isis gathered them together.
"He is indeed the Sun, but it is the Philosophical one. Now that name being often attributed to him, the Vulgar who read it, and knew of no other Sun but that which gives light to the World, interpreted it in that sense.
The Sun of the Philosophers has its denomination from the sun of the World, because it contains those properties of Nature which descend from the celestial Sun, or are agreeable to it. Therefore Sol is Osiris, Dionysus, Bacchus, Jupiter, Mars, Adonis, Oedipus, Perseus, Achilles, Triptolemus, Pelops, Hippomanes, Pollux. And Luna is Isis, Juno, Venus the Mother of Oedipus, Danae, Deidaneira, Atalanta, Helena; as also Latona, Semele, Leda, Antiope, Thalia. These are the parts of that compound which before the Operation is called the Stone; and by the Name of every metal, Magnesia.
After operation it is called Orcus, Pyrrhus, Apollo, Aesculapius. The Adjuncts are Typhon, Python, the Boar. The Artists are Hercules, Ulysses, Jason, Perithous. And the labours and dangers which those Artists underwent were innumerable. We may see the Labours of Hercules, the Errors of Ulysses, the Dangers of Jason, the Endeavours of Theseus, the Remorse of Perithous.
This is the great volume of Matter and Doctrine, through which in every page, Saturn, Mercury and Vulcan do often occur: The first as Father of all, the Cause without which nothing can be effected; the second as the matter or form; the third as the Efficient. Sol takes Luna his Sister to be his wife, Jupiter takes Juno, as Saturn Rhea, and Osiris does Isis.
Dionysus is snatched out of his mother Semele, who was burnt by the thunder of Jupiter, that so he may come to maturity in the thigh of his Father Jupiter. Aesculapius from his Mother Coronis; Dionysus being grown up shows men the Use of Wine, making an Expedition as far as the Indies; Osiris and Triptolemus that of Corn, and how to sow it; and Aesculapius that of Medicine.
The Greeks call him Dionysus, the Latins Bacchus, the Egyptians Osiris, and the Syrians Adonis. Oedipus killed his Father and married his Mother. Perseus slew his Grandfather; Typhon his brother Osiris; and the Boar, Adonis; Ceres the Nurse of Triptolemus, his Father Eleusiris. Hippomanes overcame Atalanta by a Golden Apple; Tantalus the father of Pelops, obtained Hippodamia by overcoming her in a race of Chariots.
Osiris being cut in pieces, was joined together again by Isis, his mother, sister and wife. The child Pelops was boiled and dressed, his shoulder eaten by Ceres and again returned to life, an Ivory shoulder being added to him. Achilles and Triptolemus were put under coals of fire by Night, and in the Day time nourished by milk; one by Ceres his nurse, the other by his mother Thetis.
Achilles and Helena were the Causes of the Trojan War: She as the Impulsive, he as the Efficient cause. Helena was hatched from an Egg, and at the Nuptials of Peleus and Thetis from whom Achilles descended, that apple of Eris [Discord] which was the the first cause of the Rape of Helena, was thrown about. Pollux was assisting to the Argonauts, who are supposed ( if ever they lived at all ) to have lived at least fifty Years before the Trojan War began, and both he and Helena were produced out of one Egg, therefore Helena was an old woman when she was ravished by Paris.
Medea when an old woman, and without a tooth in her Head, was married to Achilles in the Elysian Fields ( unless she restored youth to herself, as she did to Aeson the father of Jason, and as Ceres did to Pelops, for which reason he is said to have been twice Young. ) Perseus received a flying Horse from Pallas, and in recompense brought the head of Medusa to Her to whom Mercury gave a Scymiter, and the rest of the gods other Weapons.
Ceres gave Triptolemus a Chariot with flying Dragons. When Pallas was born of the Brain of Jupiter, and Sol was in conjunction with Venus, it rained gold at Rhodes. And Jupiter in the form of a golden Shower lay with Danae, as a Swan with Leda; as a Cuckoo with his Sister Juno; as a Bull with Europa; as a Satyr with Antiope.
And so there is a concord in them all." [Atalanta Fugiens, c. 1618, by Michael Maier]
Manly Palmer Hall
"Denuded of its superfluities, the story centers around the activities of four persons: Osiris, the black king of the Nile and later regent of Amenti; Isis, his sister, wife, and widow; Typhon, the brother of Osiris and the spirit of evil; and Horus, the hawk-headed prince of the sun and the avenger of his murdered father. The story is briefly this.
Osiris, having established his empire in Egypt, set forth on a tour of colonization, leaving his brother Typhon as regent in his absence. Typhon, having tasted of sovereignty, had no desire to relinquish the throne and began plotting how to remove Osiris from the path of his ambitions. At last, he contrived a scheme, abetted by seventy-two fellow conspirators whom he enlisted in his service.
Osiris, unaware of the designs against his life, returned triumphantly to Egypt, where Typhon met him with elaborately simulated rejoicing. The feasts in honor of the triumphant king formed a vital part of the plot. Typhon had constructed a wonderful ark or chest, its surface inlaid with precious stones and its inner dimensions shaped to the "measure of a man." The assembled princes of the land examined the box, amazed at its strange shape and charmed with its unusual beauty.
Typhon then declared that the chest had been fashioned by clever workmen to supply novelty and sport at this glad time and that he would present the priceless ark to the person whose body most closely conformed to its inner shape. The various nobles, each desiring to own the fabulously beautiful box, each in turn lay down in it, but for each it was either too long or too short, too broad or too narrow. At last, none remained but Osiris himself, and one of the princes suggested that maybe he was of the right proportions. Laughingly, Osiris removed his crown and lay down in the box.
A cry of amazement went up, for the chest fitted him exactly. But even as the court watched, there was a great commotion without. The seventy-two conspirators rushed into the banquet hall. They nailed down the lid upon the casket, poured molten lead into the cracks, and before the faithful princes of Osiris could rally to his support, carried the ark out of the palace and cast it into the Nile, down which it floated to the coast of Byblos.
Isis, Queen of Egypt and faithful consort of Osiris, learning of the foul murder of her lord and donning the sackcloth and ashes of a widow, set forth in quest of the body of her husband. After many adventures, she discovered that the ark had been caught in the roots of a tree which had miraculously grown up about the box, finally completely concealing it. The King of Byblos had caused this wonderful tree to be cut down and from its trunk had been fashioned a great pillar for the throne room of his palace. Isis at last contrived to secure the body from the pillar and was returning in triumph to the city of Osiris when Typhon, learning that she had been successful in her search, dispatched hirelings who again stole the body and, that it might never be recovered, divided the remains of the king into fourteen pieces which they scattered through all the corners of the earth.
Frantically, Isis again set forth in her attempt to recover the scattered parts and members of Osiris. At last, after what seemed ages of searching, she recovered thirteen of the pieces, but the fourteenth had been cast into the sea and swallowed by a great fish. This member Isis caused to be replaced in gold, and the body of Osiris was interred in the great city over which he had ruled. Typhon, the usurper, sat uneasy on his throne, for Horus, the young son of Osiris, grew up to manhood with a single aim—namely, to avenge his father's murder and the long years of his mother's widowhood. At last, in a great battle, he overthrew the reign of Typhon and restored the rule of right in Egypt. But the great Osiris still lay dead, and his role as an underworld god forms no part of the allegory. So much for the outline as Plutarch gives it.
The story of Osiris as here given is obviously comparatively late and belongs to a period when Egyptian metaphysics was in a state of decline. But while the profundities of the legend may have been lost upon the Greeks and Romans, these nations still remembered enough of the ancient Mysteries to sense the vast significance of this most remarkable allegory.
Osiris, the black god of the Nile, must be regarded as the personification of an order of learning. He was never a man but the embodiment of an idea. It is even possible that he represented a hierarchy or order of priests. As Hermes personified the whole sphere of knowledge, so Osiris embodied the secret and most sacred wisdom. Unquestionably, he was later confused with other members of the vast pantheon of divinities, but to the elect, he represented primordial knowing, that utter realization of truth undefiled by intellection, unlimited by mortal procedures, uncircumscribed by any limitation of thinking. He may have also been the prototype of those who possessed certain spiritual faculties or even recognized as a symbol for a definite discipline. He signified not only the end but revealed the means to the achievement of that end.
The personality of Osiris might well typify the institutions erected by the ancients to perpetuate the deathless truths of the soul. The living head was crowned with the plumes of wisdom and power, the hands bore the scepters of the three worlds, and the body was bound with the mummy wrappings of the dead. Here we find spirit, the living head, bound incongruously to matter, the mummified body. The soul was imprisoned in the narrow bonds of flesh. One thing is certain—Osiris represented the Secret Doctrine prior to that time when the Omnific Word was lost.
From the reign of Osiris we glean, then, the following: There was a time when truth and wisdom ruled the earth, and this autocracy of wisdom was a benevolent despotism in which men were led to a nobler state by the firm, kind hand of the enlightened sage. This was the divine dynasty of the mythological priest-kings who were qualified to govern humanity by virtue of not only temporal but divine attributes. Osiris, representative of the hidden tradition, ruled the world by virtue of the perfection resident in that tradition.
If we concede that Osiris is the positive pole of the universal life agent, then Isis becomes the receptive pole of that activity. He is the doctrine; she is the church. As in Christendom it is customary to refer to the church as the bride of Christ, so in Egypt the institution of the Mysteries was the Great Mother, the consort of Heaven itself. From this interpretation, we gain a deeper insight into the symbolism involved. Isis becomes the whole temporal order of the priesthood. She is personified in the temple. She is the mother of all good, the protectress of all right, and the patron of all improvements. She ensures nobility, inspires virtue, and awakens the nobler passions of the soul. As Diana of Ephesus, she is the Multimammia who feeds all creatures from herself. Like the moon, she shines only with the light of her sovereign sun even as the temple can only be illumined by indwelling truth.
Typhon is the embodiment of every perversity. He is neither a single evil nor even a sequence of ills but an infinite diversity of them, indescribably insidious in the power to infect the fabric of church and state. Typhon lures Osiris into the ark at the time when the sun enters the house of the Scorpion. Hence, we know that he is the Eternal Betrayer, that ageless Judas who undoes all good things and inevitably presages ruin. He strikes in the eighth month and now it is supposed that a child delivered in the eighth month cannot live because of the curse of Typhon.
This evil monster may well be generalized under the appellation of the Adversary. Of all good things he is the opposer, occupying the position of the inevitable negative. He is the personification of ambition and ambition is the patron of ruin. It was ambition that set Typhon plotting for the throne of Egypt, designing how he could destroy the power of his brother. A learned Jesuit father sees in Typhon Cain and his brother, Osiris, Abel. If such parallel actually exists, then the Biblical allegory is susceptible of the same interpretation. Typhon is the desire of the few pitted against the good of the many. He is the spirit of dissension and discord that breaks up unity of purpose by setting factions against each other, so that great issues lose the name of action.
The desire for riches, power, pomp, sovereignty by which this evil genius was obsessed reveals the temptations by which humanity is deflected from its ultimate goal and led into the byways of sorrow and despair. The birth of greed marked the end of the Golden Age and when the good prince Osiris—the deeper truth—returned to his own land, the trap was ready to be sprung. What is this mysterious box so beautiful in its outward appearance but so fatal? Plato would have answered that it was the body that lures the soul into the sorrows of generation.
If this interpretation be projected into a wider sphere, it becomes symbolic of material organization. Witness the application of this thought to Christianity where the pomp and glory of the outer show has all but destroyed the simplicity and meaning of the primitive revelation. The murderers rush from the palace with the lead-sealed casket and cast it and its princely contents into the dark waters of the Nile. Thus are the ideals which lead men into the paths of truth and righteousness obscured and with truth no longer evident, error can rule supreme.
Typhon ascended the throne as regent of the world, swinishly gloating over a humanity he had led into dark and devious byways. With Truth dead, facts were superseded by opinions. Opinions bred hates and men finally fought and died over notions both senseless and soul-less. Greed became the dominating impulse, gain the all-absorbing end, and ruthlessness the all-sufficient means. In the dark ages of uncertainty when reality hid its face and no man dared to know, the leering Typhon ruled his ill-gotten world, binding men to himself by breeding a thousand uncertainties to sap courage and weaken conviction.
Men asked, "Why seek to know? Knowledge does not exist and life is a cruel jest, purposeless and of short duration." Because the human mind demanded expression, Typhon sowed the seeds of intellectual confusion so that numerous orders of learning appeared which were convincingly plausible but untrue. These various orders of thought survived by catering to the weaknesses and limitations of the flesh.
Today our great industrial civilization is feeling the heavy hand of an outraged destiny. The evil genius of our ambitions has again undone us and made our follies crumble about us. Typhon rules the world, for the earth today is the arena of the ambitious. What, then, of Isis, the mother of the Mysteries, so defiled and desecrated by the profane that the sages and prophets were forced to flee into the wilderness to escape the machinations of the evil one?
The mighty temples still stood but their light had gone. The priests bowed hopelessly before the dead embers of their altars. One by one the sanctuaries crumbled into ruin and the custodians of these ancient truths hid themselves in obscure corners of the earth lest they be hunted down and slain for the sin of dreaming and hoping for a better day. Isis, then, is the temple where men today gather searching for that secret that is lost. In all parts of the world, the virtuous still raise their hands to the heavens. This congregation of those who pray, who labor, and who wait, the great congregation of a world in anguish—this is Isis in sackcloth and ashes.
Seeking in all parts of the earth throughout the ages, men at last rediscovered the lost arcana and brought it back with rejoicing to the world over which once it ruled. But ambition, knowing that it must die if truth was reestablished, put forth all its power to scatter the doctrine once again, this time so thoroughly that it should never be rediscovered. So the body of Osiris (the secret doctrine) was divided into fourteen parts and divided among the races of mankind. It was scattered so hopelessly that ambitious Typhon felt his authority to be secure at last. But Wisdom is not thus easily to be cheated.
In the dark retreats of Islam, the Sufi and Dervish explored the depths of Nature; among the Jews, the learned Rabbins unraveled the intricate skein of Qabbalism; and alchemists in their retreats explored the infinite chemistry of existence. These all together were Isis, still searching for the members of her Lord. At last, all were restored again but one, but this one could not be reclaimed. The Egyptian allegory tells us that the phallus of Osiris was swallowed by a fish. This is most significant and we may even infer that mankind itself is the fish, the phallus being the symbol of the vital power and so used in Egyptian hieroglyphics is the Lost Word which was not discovered but for which a golden replica was substituted.
The institutions raised in the world to perpetuate the deeper truths of life labored on through the centuries seeking for that "Lost Key" which, if rediscovered, would enliven the whole and restore the good Osiris to the rulership of the world.
The purpose of Isis was now revealed as twofold. The first motive was the almost hopeless effort to restore her dead husband to life. That was the great abstract ideal. The second and more imminent motive was to avenge herself upon Typhon and to destroy his power over the world."
"The day must ultimately come when the Horus, by virtue of their royal purpose, accomplish the consummation of the Great Work. The missing Word will be found, the golden substitute will be cast aside, and as promised in the ancient rite, Osiris will rise resplendent from the dead and rule the world through those sages and philosophers in whom wisdom becomes incarnate.
In the meantime, the Widow—the Mystery School—continues to produce out of herself a host of potential redeemers, one of whom must someday become the true Horus, the avenger of all evil." [The All Seeing Eye, Vol.5 December 1930 by Manly Palmer Hall]
See Also