This reprint by Forgotten Books is interesting because of its subject. It is not enough for you to understand the whole complex family business that Egyptian Gods are. The texts are not clearly referring to the various myths about the main gods according to the cities where these gods were worshipped. That is of course a shortcoming today. It was not in the old days. That book was written for an elite at the beginning of the 20th century, the elite of the people learned in Egyptian history and culture, even language. Today this has changed.

The second shortcoming is of course the endnotes that are irritating because uneasy to use. I am fanatically for footnotes because we can read the notes without having to turn the pages.

For specialists, as well as for curious people this book will give a good sample of those Egyptian gods. Yet it will explain very little and the last section which is Plutarch's long text on Osiris and Isis is not at all the original but the edited rewriting of the original by Wallis Budge. This practice is definitely unacceptable today, though in Budge's time the whole elite that has access to this book read Latin and Ancient Greek, hence Plutarch had no secrets for them. Presently unluckily -- though many will say luckily, though I will not be part of this opinion -- this has changed.

Plutarch's explanations are by far not enough to really understand these Gods. Let me give one example about which the information is all in the present book but not the explanation.

The ternary nature of Gods.

Ra, the basic God, the old one as he is called from time to time since he is the first generation with his son Shu and his daughter Tefnu, which makes three, has three names: Khepera at sunup, Ra at noon and Temu at sundown. And we know his name because Isis managed to trap him into telling to be saved from poison, and he has quite a number of names.

These son and daughter Shu and Tefnu give the second generation the son Keb and the daughter Nut. And these two will give rise to the third generation of Gods, those who will rule over Egypt properly. More about these five in a minute. A remark is essential here. Ra gives birth to a son and a daughter without any wife. He uses his hand to produce and receive his seed, in other words he self-serves his sexual desire and his seed gives rise to his son and his daughter. The myth of the self creating god is found here since Ra created himself and the myth of the virginal creation of the children of gods is also found here in a more realistic description than an archangel, but it is deeply the same though the Semitic God of the Christians will need a woman to procreate without sexual intercourse.

A second remark is necessary here about the incestuous nature of the procreative activities of gods. And that's only the beginning.

Five children, brothers and sisters mostly as we are going to see, will be born. In order Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis and Nephthys. Osiris and Isis will sexually join within the womb of their mother and procreate within this womb and before being properly born their son Horus. Seth and Nephthys will unite in a normal way and produce Anubis. The incestuous nature of these unions is maintained but what is important is the ternary and extraordinary nature of Osiris-Isis-Horus who are going to be the triad or trinity of Gods dominating Egypt. Not the side trinity of three males as opposed to two females.

But there is so much more to say about these three basic gods (Osiris-Isis-Horus. Seth, the younger brother (in the Jewish and Christian tradition Cain is the older son) is jealous of his brother Osiris and so traps him, kills him and sends him down the Nile in a sarcophagus or box. Isis will find the sarcophagus in a tree in the delta of the Nile, where the Nile is fragmented into numerous sections, and will bring him back but then Seth will capture the dead body and will cut it up into fourteen pieces and scatter them all over Egypt. Isis will find thirteen of them but she will never find the penis. She will thus reconstitute her brother and husband and with magic re-endow him with a penis.

Horus then has to fight against Seth and he wins the first battle but Seth cheats. Then Horus wins two more battles and Seth is finally gotten out of the way. Another ternary element.

The final element in that line is that Osiris is supposed to be the centre of festivals in Pamylia, and according to Wallis Budge he is represented by a statue with three penises. Though I have not been able to confirm this element (except with the Roman poly-phallic Mercury in Pompeii), we can note the ternary nature of this representation.

Wallis-Budge retains five explanations given by Plutarch but all of them are totally unscientific though some definitely tend to go in some kind of anthropological direction. They consider the allegorical or metaphorical value of Osiris and Seth mainly, the Nile and the Sea essentially, the rich water of the Nile and the sterile and destructive water of the sea, moisture and its fertile power on one hand and the drought and all desiccating, scorching, burning destructive power on the other hand. Plutarch and Wallis Budge treat these gods as a mythology that reflects the real life and real history of people the way they remember it and live it over millennia. It is interesting to note the Nile starts south and ends north, hence starts on the right if you look east (for sunrise in a sun-centred civilization) and ends on the left, just like Osiris. In the same way there is a parallel between this story of gods and the 28 days of a lunar cycle and its various phases with special mention of 7 (first quarter), 14 (full moon) and 17 (beginning of the waning phase).

But the whole book remains silent on the meaning of the ternary motif, and yet the creation of the world by, in one version, the sexual intercourse of Ra with his shadow is close to God and his spirit over the chasm of a not yet created world in Genesis. In the same way the ternary nature of Egyptian Gods is negated in the old Testament with the binary nature of god and his spirit, of the two luminaries, with a minor side mention of the stars, with Abel and Cain and so many other fights of one man, at times a woman, against another man. Though the most interesting evolution is what happened after the conquest of Israel by the Romans and the destruction of the Temple by Titus in 70 AD. On one hand the emergence of the Christian faith entirely built on a trinity that would have been considered as pagan or un-Jewish, on the other hand the birth of Islam entirely based on the unitary nature of God, like for the zealots of the Dead Sea Scrolls. But today we have advanced a lot on the line of the ternary structural functioning of the human brain and central nervous system, hence of the basic human mind. These old mythologies were closer to nature than the subsequent religions.

We are today a lot more advanced in these matters but Wallis Budge remains a presentable and quotable source.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU