"_The suffering and death of Osiris_," says Sir G. Wilkinson, "_were
the great mystery of the Egyptian religion_, and some traces of it
are perceptible among other people of antiquity. His being the divine
goodness, and the abstract idea of good; his _manifestation upon
earth_, his _death_ and _resurrection_, and his office as judge of
the dead in a future state, look like the early revelation of a
future manifestation of the Deity, converted into a mythological
fable."[2]

Osiris--the sun--had a war with Seb, or Typho, or Typhon, and was
killed in the battle; he was subsequently restored to life, and
became the judge of the under-world.[3]

Seb, his destroyer, was a son of Ra, the ancient sun-god, in the
sense, perhaps, that the comets, and all other planetary bodies, were
originally thrown out from the mass of the sun. Seb, or Typho, was
"the personification of all evil." He was the destroyer, the enemy,
the evil-one.

Isis, the consort of Osiris, learns of his death, slain by the great
serpent, and ransacks the world in search of his body. She finds it
mutilated by Typhon. This is the same mutilation which we find
elsewhere, and which covered the earth with fragments of the sun.

Isis was the wife of Osiris (the dead sun) and the mother of Horus,
the new or returned sun; she seems to represent a civilized people;
she taught the art of cultivating wheat and barley, which were always
carried in her festal processions.

When we turn to the Greek legends, we shall find