eyeofhorus33 wrote:

> I thought Osiris in his earliest form was a vegetation deity,
> associated with death in Nature and the annual inundation of
> the river Nile.
>
> The great mystery festival which began at Abydos was also the
> same day that grain was planted in the ground.
>
> Osirian seed beds - a perfect example being found in Tut's tomb
> by Carter - attest to this cult practice,
>
> The germination of the seed symbolised the 'resurrection' of
> Osiris or life-in-Nature.
>
> Osiris and the myths surrounding him seem to have appeared
> quite suddenly and fully formed.
>
> I thought Egyptologists contend that the Osiris associated with
> human death and spiritual resurrection was a later incarnation
> of the vegetation deity Khenti Amentiu.
>
> The mortuary texts from the fourth dynasty do not seem to
> associate Osiris with the dead for their "htp di nsw" offerings
> are to "Inpw" and not to "Asir". It is only by the end of the
> fifth dynasty that the mortuary offerings are made to Osiris,
> thereby demonstrating that his role evolved and he supplanted
> Anubis as the deity associated with human death and spiritual
> resurrection.


You may well be correct across the board. Most of it is over my head.

But keep in mind almost nothing at all other than the PT exists from before 2000 BC so everything believed about earlier events ansd beliefs are mostly based on the Pyramid Texts and extrapolation. Certainly Egyptologists know a great deal more about the specific facts related to "Osiris" than I do or ever will. But this isn't the point. The point is that their understanding is based on the PT and that understanding is wholly dependent on an interpretation. It is wholly dependent on understanding the word "neter" to mean an "imaginary entity that affected people's lives"; a "god".

In the PT "osiris" is most assuredly associated with the dearly departed. He is a "funerary entity" if not a god of death. I believe he has arisen to replace "atum" but in any case the dead king is equated to "osiris".

Earlier forms of "osiris" if they exist are simply not "osiris" by definition. Osiris is a mummiform god who was born dead and has nice smelling corpse drippings that smell like the eye of his son, horus. This is simply what the PT say and words you use to relate this are irrelevant. This is what they translated. It is gobbledty gook but they shrug it off as a religion and magic. Even though Osiris dawns high and mighty this isn't often mentioned;

1520a. To say: Osiris dawns, pure, mighty; high, lord of truth
1520b. on the first of the year; lord of the year.

But this is still what Egyptologists translated the ancients to have said. This is Egyptological belief as based on a book of gobbledty gook.

One might argue the Egyptians said things they didn't believe and that we need to pick and choose which ones we think they believed. To some extent this seems to be what Egyptologists do. They use these lines to reinfoirce their understanding of the belief system of the authors of the book of the dead. They have simply changed the PT into the book of the dead through interpretation and translation but it remains gobbledty gook. It contradicts itself and says the strangest things.

2015b. let him unite with the two mt-lakes of ḳbḥ.w;
2015c. purify his mouth with natron on the lap of Mḫnti-’irti;

Here he's supposed to go swimming in two lakes and then purify his mouth on the lap of an hermaphroditic god"dess"!!! No matter how strange and impossible these ancient beliefs there will be a stranger and more impossible characteristic in the next utterance.

Egyptological opinion originates in the PT. Their understanding, their translation of the Pyramid Texts is their definition of "osiris". I believe they are fundamentally wrong across the board and it all went wrong a very long time ago.