Plut. Mor., Isis and Osiris 73 — Of Isis and Osiris, or of the Ancient Religion and Philosophy of Egypt

Plut. Mor., Isis and Osiris 73 — Of Isis and Osiris, or of the Ancient Religion and Philosophy of Egypt, Plutarch; served verbatim

And whereas there are many that say that the soul of Typhon himself took its flight into these animals, this tale may be looked upon to signify that every irrational and brutal nature appertains to the share of the evil Daemon. And therefore, when they would pacify him and speak him fair, they make their court and addresses to these animals. But if there chance to happen a great and excessive drought which, above what is ordinary at other times, brings along with it either wasting diseases or other monstrous and prodigious calamities, the priests then conduct into a dark place, with great silence and stillness, some of the animals which are honored by them; and they first of all menace and terrify them, and if the mischief still continues, they then consecrate and offer them up, looking upon this as a way of punishing the evil God, or at least as some grand purgation in time of greatest disasters. For, as Manetho relateth, they were used in ancient times to burn live men in the city of Ilithyia, entitling them Typhonian; and then they made wind, and dispersed and scattered their ashes into the air. And this was done publicly, and at one only season of the year, which was the dog-days. But those consecrations of the animals worshipped by them which are made in secret, and at irregular and uncertain times of the year as occasions require, are wholly unknown to the vulgar sort, except only at the time of their burials, at which they produce certain other animals, and in the presence of all spectators throw them into the grave with them, thinking by this means to vex Typhon and to abate the satisfaction he received by their deaths. For it is the Apis, with a few more, that is thought sacred to Osiris; but the far greater part are assigned to Typhon. And if this account of theirs be true, I believe it explains the subject of our enquiry as to such animals as are universally received and have their honors in common amongst them all; and of this kind is the ibis, the hawk, the cynocephalos, and the Apis himself; for so they call the goat which is kept at Mendes.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

← Plut. Mor., Isis and Osiris 72 contents Plut. Mor., Isis and Osiris 74 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Apis — a candidate entry Daemon — a candidate entry Osiris — a life Typhon — a candidate entry

Of Isis and Osiris, or of the Ancient Religion and Philosophy of Egypt, Plutarch — translated by William Baxter (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)