Isis became the wife of Osiris, who went through the world taming it by means of oratory, poetry, and music.  When he returned, Typhon took seventy-two men and also a queen of Ethiopia, and made an ark the size of Osiris’s body, and at a feast proposed to give it to the one whom it should fit.  Osiris got into it, and they fastened down the lid and soldered it and threw it into the Nile.  Then Isis put on mourning and went to search for it, and directed her inquiries to little children, who were hence held by the Egyptians to have the faculty of divination.  Then she found Anubis, child of Osiris, by Nepthys, wife of Typhon, who told her how the ark was entangled in a tree which grew up around it and hid it.  The king had made of this tree a pillar to support his house.  Isis sat down weeping; the women of the queen came to her, she stroked their hair, and fragrance passed into it.  She was made nurse to the queen’s child, fed him with her finger, and in the night-time, by means of a lambent flame, burned away his impurities.  She then turned herself into a swallow and flew around the house, bewailing her fate.  The queen watched her operations, and being alarmed cried out, and so robbed her child of immortality.  Isis then begged the pillar, took it down, took out the chest, and cried so loud that the younger son of the king died of fright.  She then took the ark and the elder son and set sail.  The cold air of the river chilled her, and she became angry and cursed it, and so dried it up.  She opened the chest, put her cheek to that of Osiris and wept bitterly.  The little boy came and peeped in; she gave him a terrible look, and he died of fright.  Isis then came to her son Horus, who was at nurse at Buto.  Typhon, hunting by moonlight, saw the ark, with the body of Osiris, which he tore into fourteen parts and threw them about.  Isis went to look for them in a boat made of papyrus, and buried each part in a separate place.

After this the soul of Osiris returned out of Hades to train up his son.  Then came a battle between Horus and Typhon, in which Typhon was vanquished, but Isis allowed him to escape.  There are other less important incidents in the story, among them that Isis had another son by the soul of Osiris after his death, who is the god called Harpocrates, represented as lame and with his finger on his mouth.[192]

Plutarch declares that this story is symbolical, and mentions various explanations of the allegory.  He rejects, at once, the rationalistic explanation, which turns these gods into eminent men,—­sea-captains, etc.  “I fear,” says he, “this would be to stir things that are not to be stirred, and to declare war (as Simonides says), not only against length of time, but also against many nations and families of mankind, whom a religious reverence towards these gods holds fast bound like men astonished and amazed, and would be no other than going about to remove so great and venerable names from heaven to earth, and thereby shaking and dissolving that worship and persuasion that hath entered almost all men’s constitutions from their very birth, and opening vast doors to the atheists’ faction, who convert all divine matters into human.”  “Others,” he says, “consider these beings as demons intermediate between gods and men.  And Osiris afterwards became Serapis, the Pluto of the under-world.”