The Myth of Osiris, Isis, and Set

The myth of Osiris, Isis, and Set is the central drama of ancient Egyptian religion. It explains the origin of the afterlife, the meaning of kingship, and the eternal struggle between order and chaos. Versions of the myth appear on the Shabaka Stone, in the Pyramid Texts, in the writings of the Greek historian Plutarch, and in dozens of literary, ritual, and funerary texts from across Egyptian history. No other myth had comparable theological weight. This page gathers the story in one place.

To set the scene, see the cluster page on Osiris and the Gods of the Afterlife. For what happens after Osiris enters the underworld, see Anubis and the Weighing of the Heart.

The Setting: The Great Gods Before the Afterlife

In the beginning, the great gods of the Ennead of Heliopolis lived on earth. The creator Atum had produced Shu and Tefnut, and they in turn had produced Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky. From Geb and Nut came four children: Osiris and his sister-wife Isis, and Set and his sister-wife Nephthys.

The four siblings shared the world between them. Osiris took the Nile Valley and brought civilization to its people. Set took the desert, the foreign lands, and the storms. Isis and Nephthys supported their husbands in their respective roles.

The Reign of Osiris

According to the myth, Osiris was the first great king of Egypt. He taught the people how to farm, how to make laws, how to honor the gods, and how to live in peace. He traveled the length of the Nile, bringing order to the wild places. The Greek writer Diodorus Siculus later wrote that Osiris was a great lawgiver, and that his kingdom was the first to abolish cannibalism and human sacrifice in Egypt. This presentation of Osiris as a civilizing king is one of the oldest foundation myths in the world.

Isis, his wife, was his partner. She taught the women to grind grain, spin flax, and weave cloth. She discovered many of the medicines and remedies still in use in the ancient world. She was the most powerful magician of the divine family, powerful enough to bring the dead back to life and to trick the sun god Ra into revealing his secret name.

The Jealousy of Set

Set was not content. The desert was a poor kingdom compared to the fertile Nile, and Set resented his brother’s success. The myth explains Set’s jealousy in several ways. In some versions, Set was jealous because Isis, his sister-wife, had been unfaithful with Osiris. In other versions, Set was jealous of Osiris’s power. In still other versions, Set simply embodied the chaotic and violent nature of the desert, and the conflict between Osiris and Set was a natural and eternal one.

The Greek writer Plutarch recorded the most detailed account of the myth in his work On Isis and Osiris, written around 100 CE. According to Plutarch, the seventy-two conspirators led by Set plotted their crime in the dark, away from the light of the sun.

The Feast of the Chest

The moment of the murder came at a great feast. Set had a chest made to the exact measurements of Osiris’s body, and brought it to the gathering. Set promised that the chest would go to whoever could fit inside it. The guests tried one by one, but none of them could fit. Finally, Osiris lay down in the chest, and Set’s conspirators slammed the lid shut, sealed it with lead, and threw it into the Nile.

The date of the murder was traditionally held to be the 17th day of the month of Athyr (November), and the Egyptians commemorated it with a festival of mourning.

The Search for the Body

Isis searched for the body of her husband across the length of the Nile. In some versions of the myth, she tore off her hair and wore black mourning clothes, wandering the marshes in distress. In other versions, she took the form of a kite (a kind of hawk) and flew over the land.

Finally, the chest was found in the marshes near Byblos, in modern Lebanon, where it had become entangled in a tamarisk tree. The tree had grown around the chest, and the king of Byblos had made it a pillar in his palace. Isis took the body back to Egypt, where she hid it in the marshes of the Nile Delta while she went to fetch her son.

The Murder in the Moonlight

Set, however, was hunting. One night, while Isis was away, Set came upon the chest in the marshes. In a rage, he tore the body of his brother into pieces and scattered them across Egypt.

The question of how many pieces has been a small scholarly industry in its own right. Plutarch (On Isis and Osiris 18) gives fourteen, and the standard reading is that this is a one-per-nome list. The late-period and Coptic sources sometimes inflate the number to sixteen or even forty-two, the latter presumably to match the forty-two assessor gods at the judgement, with the additional conceit that the pieces were scattered to one of every district of the underworld. There is no single canonical number. I think the fourteen-piece tradition is the older and the better-attested, and the larger numbers are theological elaborations rather than alternative traditions. But this is a small point on which the older textbooks are more confident than the evidence warrants.

Isis’s sister Nephthys, who had been the wife of Set, joined in the search. She helped Isis gather the pieces, and together they reassembled the body. The pieces that could not be found were either replaced with wooden replicas or buried where they lay, and many of the great temples of Egypt were said to contain a piece of Osiris.

The Invention of Mummification

Isis, with the help of Anubis, Thoth, and Nephthys, embalmed the body of Osiris. This was the first mummification, and the patterns set by this ritual would be followed by embalmers for more than three thousand years.

Isis then used her magic to revive Osiris long enough to conceive a son. That son, Horus, would be born in secret in the marshes of Chemmis and raised to avenge his father.

Osiris Descends to the Underworld

With his body preserved, Osiris descended to the underworld to become the king of the dead. He took his throne in the Hall of Two Truths, surrounded by the judges of the dead and by the forty-two assessors who would weigh the hearts of the deceased. From this point on, every Egyptian who passed the judgement would join Osiris in the afterlife.

The myth of Osiris’s death and resurrection became the model for the Egyptian afterlife. The mummification process, the funerary rituals, the heart-weighing ceremony, all of them were, in a sense, a repetition of what Isis and Anubis had done for Osiris.

The Battle of Horus and Set

While Osiris ruled the underworld, his son Horus grew up in secret in the marshes. As an adult, Horus claimed the throne of Egypt from Set, and the two began a long contest that ended in a tribunal before the Ennead.

The contest was both physical and legal. In the physical contests, Horus and Set fought in the forms of hippopotami, battled in the sky, and wrestled in single combat. In the legal contest, they argued before the council of the gods about who had the right to the throne.

Set, in a final desperate act, attempted to rape Horus. The assault was thwarted by Isis, who intervened with a magic fish hook. Set was shamed, and the Ennead awarded the throne to Horus. In some versions, the two were reconciled and made joint rulers, Set of the desert and Horus of the cultivated land.

Horus and the Living Pharaoh

The victory of Horus over Set became the mythological model for the king’s own claim to the throne. Every living pharaoh was a Horus, the defender of Ma’at and the opponent of chaos. After death, the king became an Osiris, joining his father in the underworld. This pairing, Horus in life, Osiris in death, appears in the royal titulary and on every royal monument in Egypt.

To see how this myth shaped royal architecture, see the Egyptian Pyramids page and the Temple of Karnak page. To see how the king took on the role of Horus in battle, see the Battle of Kadesh.

The Festival of the Mysteries

The Egyptians commemorated the myth of Osiris every year at the Mysteries of Osiris in Abydos. The festival involved re-enacting the death, the search, and the resurrection of the god. The Wepwawet-priests, named after the jackal god Wepwawet, played the part of the mourners; the image of Osiris was carried in procession; and a central dramatic cycle, the Osirian Mysteries proper, re-enacted the crowning of Osiris as king of the underworld.

The festival was so important that many Egyptians tried to be buried at Abydos, even if their real tombs were far away. The most famous ancient Egyptian pharaohs, including Seti I and Ramesses II, built their mortuary temples at Abydos to be near the sacred tomb.

The Spread of the Osiris Myth

The myth of Osiris, Isis, and Set was the most influential myth in ancient Egypt. It shaped Egyptian religion from the Old Kingdom to the Roman period, and it spread to Greece, where Osiris was identified with Dionysus, and to Rome, where Isis and her son Horus (named Harpocrates by the Greeks) became central gods of the mystery cults.

When the Ptolemies merged Osiris with the Apis bull of Memphis, the new god Serapis became one of the most popular deities of the Greco-Roman world, with temples in Alexandria, Athens, and Rome itself. To learn more about Egypt’s Greek and Roman period, see the Late Period and the Persian and Greek Influence page.