Osiris
Osiris’s symbols are the crook and flail in his hands and the atef, the tall white crown with a plume on each side. He is the Egyptian king of the dead, drawn as a mummy with only his hands and face free, sometimes with green skin, and the djed pillar was read as his backbone.
Meaning
Osiris (oh-SY-ris, as Dictionary.com respells it) was the Egyptian god of death, resurrection and fertility, the son of Geb and Nut and the brother of Isis, Nephthys and Set. The Global Egyptian Museum describes his usual figure: a mummy-shaped man whose hands and head are free, holding a staff of office and a flail, “signs of royal dignity”, and wearing the atef crown, a tall white crown with a feather on either side, sometimes set on ram’s horns. Adolf Erman, in his Handbook of Egyptian Religion (1907), calls the crown, sceptre and whip the symbols of his rank as a king, and a hymn in Wallis Budge’s translation says that “as prince of gods and men he hath received the crook and the whip” (the crook and flail). His name was written with two hieroglyphs, a throne and an eye; Budge, writing in 1904, thought that what the pair first meant could not be known, and that the Egyptians knew as little about it as modern scholars. The Greeks identified him with Dionysus, Plutarch says. He is still worshipped: Kemetic Orthodoxy, a modern practice of the Egyptian religion founded in the late 1980s, calls him Wesir and teaches that all the dead still take on his identity, as dead kings were once said to.
Origin and history
The fullest telling of his death is Greek. In Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris, Osiris is a king who rescued the Egyptians from a brutish life by showing them how to farm, giving them laws and teaching them to honour the gods. His brother Typhon, the Greek name for Set, secretly measured his body and had a fine chest made to fit it, then promised it at a feast to whoever fitted it exactly. When Osiris lay down in it, the conspirators slammed the lid, nailed it, sealed it with molten lead and sent it down the river to the sea. The chest came ashore at Byblos, where a heather bush grew round it and the king cut the trunk to hold up his roof. Isis brought it home, but Typhon, hunting by moonlight, found the body, cut it into fourteen pieces and scattered them. Isis held a funeral for each piece where she found it, and that, Plutarch explains, is why Egypt had so many tombs of Osiris.
The Egyptian texts tell it differently. The Global Egyptian Museum notes that parts of Plutarch’s story are not known from Egyptian sources, and that the first evidence of Set as the murderer dates from the Middle Kingdom; Budge, in Legends of the Gods (1912), read the older Pyramid Texts as already saying that Set hurled Osiris’s body to the ground at a place called Netat, which seems to have been near Abydos. In the Egyptian hymn and lament that Erman retells, Geb gave Osiris “the government over the two Egypts”, and after his death the sun god Re sent Anubis down from heaven to bury him. Anubis joined the body together and wrapped it in bandages, and Isis made breath enter it with her wings. Osiris could not return to life on earth, but he could live a second existence, and from king of men he became king of the dead.
Why is Osiris green?
Green was the colour of growth. The Global Egyptian Museum says his green skin refers to his fertility, and explains the code of Egyptian painting: green stood for freshness and growth, Osiris as god of regeneration, and black for both the fruitful earth and death, Osiris as god of the underworld, so he can be painted either colour. The museum assumes that he began as a god of fertility whose duty was a good harvest, and as such related to the Nile flood, before he quickly became the god of resurrection too.
Abydos and Busiris
Erman names his two great sanctuaries as Busiris (Dedu) in the Delta and Abydos. At Abydos the tomb of King Djer, of the Protodynastic Period, was later taken to be the tomb of Osiris and became a place of pilgrimage. The town claimed his head, and its emblem shows that head wearing his double-plumed crown. Every Egyptian wanted to be buried there, the Global Egyptian Museum says; those who could not built a cenotaph or at least set up a stela, so as to be there in name, and thousands have been found from about the Middle Kingdom on. Busiris claimed his backbone, and there he was worshipped as a pillar, the djed. Erman asks whether it began as an old wooden fetish of Busiris or was, as Egyptian theologians held, the backbone of the god buried there.
Every dead person an Osiris
In the Old Kingdom the dead king was identified with Osiris and his successor with Horus, and by the time of the Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead every dead person was an Osiris, the Global Egyptian Museum explains. The Pyramid Texts are cooler about his kingdom: there, life in the sky with the sun god Re was the ideal. In the judgment scene of the Book of the Dead, as Erman describes it, Osiris sits enthroned in a chapel with the symbol of Anubis before him, and in front of him stands the great balance in which the heart of the dead is weighed. Kemetic Orthodoxy keeps his festival, the Mysteries of Wesir, in the last week of November or first week of December, and the Raising of the Djed Pillar in early January.
Read next
- Next in Egyptian gods and their symbolsIsisIsis’s symbol is the throne, the hieroglyph that writes her name, which she wears on her head. From the New Kingdom she also wears the cow’s horns and sun disc she took from Hathor, and the knot amulet called the tyet was read as her blood.
- The crook and whip Osiris received as prince of gods and men, held crossed in his handsCrook and flailThe shepherd’s crook and the flail, emblems of rule that a hymn to Osiris says the god received as prince of gods and men.
See also
Djed pillar, Dionysus, Gods of death, Horus, Set, Anubis.
Sources
- Osiris, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Osiris
- Atef-crown, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Atef-crown
- Abydos, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Abydos
- Colours, Global Egyptian Museum glossary, The Global Egyptian Museum, Glossary: Colours
- The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume II, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), Vol. II, ch. VI, Osiris, pp. 113–115; Vol. II, ch. XVI (animals), p. 366
- Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1899, Project Gutenberg, Chapter on Osiris (hymns)
- A Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Adolf Erman, translated by A. S. Griffith, 1907, Archibald Constable, London (Internet Archive), pp. 16, 32–35, 101–102
- Isis and Osiris, Plutarch, Moralia vol. V, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt (Loeb Classical Library, 1936), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), §§ 13, 15, 18
- Legends of the Gods: The Egyptian Texts, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1912, Project Gutenberg, Isis and Osiris
- Frequently Asked Questions, Carlisle Transportation Products (The Carlstar Group), FAQ text
- What is Kemetic Orthodoxy?, Kemetic Orthodox Religion, House of Netjer (Kemetic Orthodoxy), What is Kemetic Orthodoxy?
- Dictionary.com: Osiris, Dictionary.com, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, Dictionary.com
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 10, 2026. How we research
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