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The legend of Isis and Osiris
 Osiris’s bride and sister. To her goes the institution of the family and
the teaching to the women of the weaving and of the embroidering. The two
consorts reigned happily over Egypt. But fate had a surprise for them. Their
evil brother Seth, jealous of their success had plooted a deceit against his
brother Osiris. He had prepared a rich casket, promising to donate it to anyone
who, going inside it, would have filled it completely with his body. The casket
had Osiris’s exact measurement. Osiris fell in the trick and went in the
trap-casket prepared for him. Immediately Seth and his accomplices closed the
cover and threw it in the Nile. At this point Isis’s peregrinations to find her
husband’s body began. During one of her journeys she learned that the casket had
been transported by the stream from the Nile to the sea. Here, as it reached
Biblo, it was stranded near a bush. The bush, as for an incantation, was
transformed into a beautiful acacia. Holding the casket in its trunk. The king
of Biblo had seen the tree and had ordered to cut it, making a column of it for
his palace. Isis, who had reached Biblo, every night transformed herself in a
swallow and flying around the column screamed desperately but nobody took notice
of her. Afterwards, when she was the king’s little boy’s governess, she was able
to have the casket as a gift. Once opened, she tried to give life back to her
husband, but in vain. This is the moment she was fecundated by Osiris, when, as
a hawk, she gave wind with her wings on her lifeless husband’s body. So she hid
the coffin in Buto, a marshy place. But the evil Seth, while he was hunting,
found his brother’s coffin and tore his body in fourteen pieces which he
scattered. So Isis’s search for her husband’s pieces began. They were all found,
except for the male sexual organ, eaten by the ossirinco of the Nile. In each
city where Osiris’s pieces were found, a temple was built. When Osiris’s body
was recomposed, it was tried to give him life back. The attempt was only partly
successful because Osiris began to reign again but no longer on earth, but on
the “Site beyond the west”, the afterlife.
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