As the first illustration, let us select the Mysteries of Osiris, as they were practised in Egypt, the birthplace of all that is wonderful in the arts or sciences, or mysterious in the religion, of the ancient world.

It was on the Lake of Sais that the solemn ceremonies of the Osirian initiation were performed.  “On this lake,” says Herodotus, “it is that the Egyptians represent by night his sufferings whose name I refrain from mentioning; and this representation they call their Mysteries.” [17]

Osiris, the husband of Isis, was an ancient king of the Egyptians.  Having been slain by Typhon, his body was cut into pieces[18] by his murderer, and the mangled remains cast upon the waters of the Nile, to be dispersed to the four winds of heaven.  His wife, Isis, mourning for the death and the mutilation of her husband, for many days searched diligently with her companions for the portions of the body, and having at length found them, united them together, and bestowed upon them decent interment,—­while Osiris, thus restored, became the chief deity of his subjects, and his worship was united with that of Isis, as the fecundating and fertilizing powers of nature.  The candidate in these initiations was made to pass through a mimic repetition of the conflict and destruction of Osiris, and his eventual recovery; and the explanations made to him, after he had received the full share of light to which the painful and solemn ceremonies through which he had passed had entitled him, constituted the secret doctrine of which I have already spoken, as the object of all the Mysteries.  Osiris,—­a real and personal god to the people,—­to be worshipped with fear and with trembling, and to be propitiated with sacrifices and burnt offerings, became to the initiate but a symbol of the

    “Great first cause, least understood,”

while his death, and the wailing of Isis, with the recovery of the body, his translation to the rank of a celestial being, and the consequent rejoicing of his spouse, were but a tropical mode of teaching that after death comes life eternal, and that though the body be destroyed, the soul shall still live.

“Can we doubt,” says the Baron Sainte Croix, “that such ceremonies as those practised in the Mysteries of Osiris had been originally instituted to impress more profoundly on the mind the dogma of future rewards and punishments?” [19]

“The sufferings and death of Osiris,” says Mr. Wilkinson,[20] “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 (like an Indian god), 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.”