One account of the myth of Osiris relates a sequence of events which involve the following:
THE OSIRIS MYTH
Osiris was killed in a crafty manner by the god of the underworld, Set (Typhon in Greek) who locked him in a chest
CW5 ¶ 350The chest was thrown into the Nile and carried out to sea
CW5 ¶ 350But in the underworld Osiris mated with his second sister, Nephthys
CW5 ¶ 350After completing the night sea journey, the coffer containing Osiris was cast ashore at Byblos and came to rest in the branches of a cedar-tree which shot up and enclosed the coffer in its trunk (fig. 023)
CW5 ¶ 353146 CW5 Ser: 6 Par 353 (d) FigNo 023
The king of the country, admiring the splendid tree, caused it to be cut down and made into a pillar supporting the roof of his housea time that coincides with the age-old lament for the dead god
CW5 ¶ 353Set later dismembered the body of Osiris and scattered the pieces over the world
CW5 ¶ 354Isis collected the pieces together again with the help of the jackal-headed Anubis. Here the dogs and jackals, devourers of corpses by night, assist in the reconstitution or reproduction of Osiris. To this necrophagous function the Egyptian vulture probably owes its symbolic mother significance
CW5 ¶ 354Although Isis had managed to collect the pieces of the body, its resuscitation was only partially successful because the phallus could not be found; it had been eaten by the fishes, and the reconstituted body lacked vital force
CW5 ¶ 356The phantom Osiris lay once more with Isis, but the fruit of their union was Harpocrates [the young Horus] who was weak “in the lower limbs,”i.e., in the feet
CW5 ¶ 356Osiris, although only a phantom, now makes the young sun (his son Horus), ready for battle with Set, the evil spirit of darkness
CW5 ¶ 356Osiris and Horus represent the father-son symbolism mentioned at the beginning. Osiris is thus flanked by the comely Horus and the misshapen Harpocrates, who is mostly shown as a cripple, sometimes distorted to the point of freakishness
CW5 ¶ 356OSIRIS' FATE
Osiris' fate may be explained in the following way:
CW5 ¶ 361He enters into the mother's womb, into the coffin, the sea, the tree, the Astarte column
CW5 ¶ 361He is then dismembered, put back together again, and reappears in his son Horpi-chrud (Horus)
CW5 ¶ 361EDINGER'S COMMENTARY
TO ANALYSTS IN TRAINING
The Osiris myth is one of the central process myths which are particularly relevant in Jungian analysis, and I want to go through some of its images briefly. In its bare-bones form, the myth is this: Osiris was a mythical king of Egypt and a culture hero. He had an evil brother or uncle whose name was Set, whom the Greeks called Typhon. Set lured Osiris into a chest, snapped it shut and threw it into the sea. After floating through the sea for a long time, Osiris finally washed ashore at Byblus, a city in Phoenicia, where a tree grew up around the chest. Isis, his sister-wife, went in search of him and discovered him there, retrieving the chest from the tree. Then the whole thing repeats in a different fashion
TOL ¶ 0MYTH AS A KIND OF DOUBLE EVENT
It is a kind of double event that probably did not happen sequentially, but simultaneously, if you can imagine this. The alternative sequence tells that Osiris is dismembered by Set into fourteen pieces. His sister-wife wanders about the earth, the same way Demeter wandered about the earth looking for Persephone, gathering up the various pieces of Osiris. She found them all except the phallus which had been swallowed by a fish. So she put him back together again with her magic and substituted a wooden phallus for the missing one. That wooden phallus succeeded in conceiving Horus, the son
TOL ¶ 0Osiris then became the god and judge of the underworld; he became the conveyer of immortality, so that the deceased individual would take on the attributes of Osiris and would be called Osiris. If I were to die, then in the text that would be spoken about me, I would be called Osiris-Edinger to indicate that I was now merged with the Osiris figure
TOL ¶ 0FOUR CENTRAL IMAGES
CRUCIAL TO THE ANALYTIC PROCESS
There are four central images here that are crucial to the analytic process. When you are thoroughly familiar with this imagery, you will recognize the references when they come up in dreams. If you do not know the imagery, the examples may be right in front of you and you'll pass them by. You will not be able to get below the personal interpretation of dreams until you have some familiarity with mythological imagery and can recognize it when you see it. You cannot do archetypal interpretation until you have that knowledge in your tool kit, so to speak
TOL ¶ 0FIRST IMAGE:
THE THEME OF MISFORTUNE
The first image is the theme of misfortune, illustrated here by an encounter with the evil one, Set. The ego experiences this as a defeat or mishap of some kind
TOL ¶ 0THE SECOND IMAGE:
THE CHEST
The second image is the chest; the chest that drifts in the sea, a night sea journey
TOL ¶ 0THIRD IMAGE:
EMBEDDED IN THE TREE
The third image is that of being embedded in the tree; that associates with the imagery of the column, the pillarin Egypt it would be called the Djed pillar. The Egyptian obelisk is another version of the same symbolism
TOL ¶ 0FOURTH IMAGE:
DISMEMBERMENT
The fourth image is dismemberment. It is a solutio image in which Isis collects Osiris and puts him back together again. She performs the first embalming ceremony; she is the first embalmer, creating an immortal body out of the broken mortal remains of Osiris
TOL ¶ 0MYTH TAKEN AS A WHOLE
The myth as a whole is a transformation mystery. It is a symbolic description of the transformation process, because Osiris is reconstituted and then with his wooden phallus he conceives a son
TOL ¶ 0That is a kind of crude expression for the idea that creative libido has shifted from the concrete, physical, biological level of functioning to the psychic symbolic level
TOL ¶ 0The symbolic image is a creative entity, rather than the flesh and blood of the organ. It is an expression of the death and rebirth archetype that, when it completes itself, transforms libido from one level to another
TOL ¶ 0IMAGE OF DISMEMBERMENT
NOT UNCOMMON IN DREAMS
You will encounter all these various images in dreams now and then. Dismemberment, for example, is not at all uncommon in dreams. Whenever that happens, you should immediately think of the Osiris myth. That image also shows up in alchemy. An example from the alchemical treatise Splendor Solisshows a man with a sword who has just dismembered a body. It is quite an ugly picture and dreams, not infrequently, have rather ugly images like this. But in the majority of cases, they do not refer to grisly, murderous impulses in the unconscious
TOL ¶ 0Rather, it is the unconscious as a piece of nature describing what is happening to an unconscious complex. It is being dismembered by the discriminating sword of consciousness and undergoing a process of assimilation
TOL ¶ 0Dismemberment, as an image, ordinarily refers to the process of assimilation of a complex. You do have to pay some attention to the affective tone that is in the image
TOL ¶ 0