Other explanations of the myth are given by Plutarch.  First, the geographical explanation.  According to this, Osiris is Water, especially the Nile.  Isis is Earth, especially the land of Egypt adjoining the Nile, and overflowed by it.  Horus, their son, is the Air, especially the moist, mild air of Egypt.  Typhon is Fire, especially the summer heat which dries up the Nile and parches the land.  His seventy-two associates are the seventy-two days of greatest heat, according to the Egyptian opinion.  Nepthys, his wife, sister of Isis, is the Desert outside of Egypt, but which in a higher inundation of the Nile being sometimes overflowed, becomes productive, and has a child by Osiris, named Anubis.  When Typhon shuts Osiris into the ark, it is the summer heat drying up the Nile and confining it to its channel.  This ark, entangled in a tree, is where the Nile divides into many mouths at the Delta and is overhung by the wood.  Isis, nursing the child of the king, the fragrance, etc., represent the earth nourishing plants and animals.  The body of Osiris, torn by Typhon into fourteen parts, signifies either the division of the Nile at its mouths or the pools of water left after the drying up of the inundation.

There is so much in this account which accords with the facts, that there can be no doubt of its correctness so far as it goes.  At the same time it is evidently an incomplete explanation.  The story means this, but something more.  Beside the geographical view, Plutarch therefore adds a scientific and an astronomical explanation, as well as others more philosophical.  According to these, Osiris is in general the productive, the creative power in nature; Isis, the female property of nature, hence called by Plato the nurse; and Typhon the destructive property in nature; while Horus is the mediator between creation and destruction.  And thus we have the triad of Osiris, Typhon, and Horus, essentially corresponding to the Hindoo triad, Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu, and also to the Persian triad, Ormazd, Ahriman, and Mithra.  And so this myth will express the Egyptian view of the conflict of good and evil in the natural world.

But it seems very likely that it was the object of the priests to elevate this Osiris worship to a still higher meaning, making it an allegory of the struggles, sorrows, and self-recovery of the human soul.  Every human soul after death took the name and symbols of Osiris, and then went into the under-world to be judged by him.  Connected with this was the doctrine of transmigration, or the passage of the soul through various bodies,—­a doctrine brought out of Egypt by Pythagoras.  These higher doctrines were taught in the mysteries.  “I know them,” says Herodotus, “but must not tell them.”  Iamblicus professes to explain them in his work on the Mysteries.  But it is not easy to say how much of his own Platonism he has mingled therewith.  According to him, they taught in the mysteries that before all things was one God immovable in the solitude of unity.  The One was to be venerated in silence.  Then Emeph, or Neph, was god in his self-consciousness.  After this in Amun, his intellect became truth, shedding light.  Truth working by art is Pthah, and art producing good is Osiris.