OSIRIS, a god of the ancient Egyptians. He was worshipped as the Lord, the God and Father of each individual soul, the Judge of men, wild passes sentence strictly according to right and wrong, rewarding goodness and punishing crime. The worship of animals was not intro duced into the established religion earlier than the second dynasty, 200 years after Menes, there fore not much more than 5000 years ago (Bunsen's God in History, i. p. 226). According to some authors, Amun, the King; Neph, the Divine Spirit; Phthah, the Creative Power ; Khem, the Repro ductive Power ; Thoth, the Divine Intellect ; and Osiris, the Goodness of God, were all one and the same being. Osiris was the essential per sonification of divine goodness. Many cities claimed the honour of being his burial-place, par ticularly Philn, Sais, Busiris, and Taposiris. At Memphis he became united to Phthah, and was called Phthah-sokar-Osiris ; and also to the bull Apis, and then became Osiris-apis or Serapis, who was afterwards the chief god of Egypt. Isis, his
queen and sister, held rank before him, and was the favourite divinity of the country. She had the characters of all goddesses in turn. She was sometimes the mother, sometimes the queen of heaven, sometimes Hecate, the goddess of enchant ments. Horns, their son, had a hawk's head, and wears the crown. He was the avenger of his father's death. But he sometimes appears with the sun on his head, as Horus-ra or Aroeris, the elder Horns, and he is not then the son of Isis. They had another son, Arrubis, with a jackal's head, whose office was to lay out the dead body and to make it into a mummy. The god Tymphon is in form of a she-bear or hippopotamus, walking on its hind legs. He was the author of evil, and he killed his brother Osiris. Nephthys was the sister and companion of Isis. Of this family, the trinity is sometimes Isis, Osiris, and Nephthys.