Herodotus (fifth century BC) reported that the Apis was ‘the calf of a cow which is incapable of conceiving another offspring; and the Egyptians say that lightning descends upon the cow from heaven, and that from thence it brings forth the Apis. This calf, which is called Apis, has the following marks: it is black, and has a square spot of white on the forehead; and on the back the figure of an eagle.’
26
Several centuries later Plutarch (first century AD) wrote that ‘the Apis, they say, is the animate image of Osiris, and he comes into being when a fructifying light thrusts forth from the moon and falls upon a cow in her breeding-season’.
27
Now the cow was a symbol of the goddess Isis, who also donned the moon disc between the cow horns on her headdress. The identification of the Apis to Osiris is also given by Diodorus (first century BC), who was probably an eye-witness to a funeral of the Apis bull:
After the splendid funeral of Apis is over those priests who have charge of the business seek out another calf as like the former as they can possibly find, and when they have found one an end is put to all the mourning and lamentation, and such priests as are appointed for that purpose lead the young bull through the city of Nile and feed him forty days. Then they put him into a barge wherein is a golden cabin and so transport him as a god to Memphis . . . For the adoration of the bull they give this reason: they say that the soul of Osiris passes into a bull and therefore whenever the bull is dedicated, to this very day the spirit of Osiris is infused into one bull after another for posterity.
28
All Egyptologists agree that the living king was seen as the incarnation of Horus, son of Osiris and Isis, but when he died he became identified with Osiris. It thus follows that if the dead Apis is identified with Osiris, then the living Apis must also be regarded as the living Horus-king. This is made obvious by one of the titles for Apis, ‘Son of Osiris’, i.e. Horus.
29
Also, as George Hart explains:
The pharaoh identifies closely with Apis-bull imagery (with its inherent notion of strength and fertility) being an ancient characteristic in the propaganda of the god-king, as can be seen from carved slate palettes and in one of the names used in the royal protocol ‘victorious bull’. Celebrating his jubilee festival, a ceremony concerned with the rejuvenation of the monarch’s power, the pharaoh strides briskly alongside the galloping Apis bull. The ritual which took place at Memphis is vividly portrayed in a relief on a block from a dismantled chapel in the temple of Karnak at Thebes.
30
Jane B. Sellers was also of the opinion that the sacrifice of the Apis bull may have had a connection with the
heb-sed
festival of the pharaoh and that it was used perhaps as a substitute for his regicide: ‘. . . If a substitute were needed (for the regicide) could the Apis have stood in the king’s stead? Could this kind of “ritual regicide” explain the enigmatic occurrences of empty sarcophagi, or the strange custom of duplicating tombs for the rulers of early dynastic Egypt?’
31
Sellers’ idea seems to have backing from several ancient authorities - Plutarch and Ammianus Marcellinus among them - who reported that the Apis bull was only allowed to live a certain number of years and was then put to death, usually by drowning.
32
The Roman historian Pliny reported that the Apis was put to death when it exceeded a number of years, and was killed by being drowned in the Nile.
33
This is clearly meant as a parallel to the death of Osiris, for we know from the Pyramid Texts that he too was drowned in the Nile, at a place called Nedyt, which is conspicuously near Memphis and Saqqara, the main cult centres of the Apis bull. Indeed, Saqqara, in fact, is where the Apis bulls were buried, in the stone sarcophagi of the huge subterranean maze. It is thus relevant that the region of Saqqara (the Memphite Necropolis) was known as ‘the burial place of Osiris’.
34
There are, too, the so-called sun temples at Abu Ghorab, near Saqqara, to consider in the context of a possible sacrificial killing of the king or the Apis bull. These temples belong to kings of the Fifth Dynasty, and as we have already seen in Chapter Three, they contain reliefs showing scenes of the
heb-sed
festival.
35
Intriguingly, the sun temples included a ‘slaughterhouse’ as well as a huge sacrificial stone altar which may have existed for the purpose of ritual killings. According to Richard Wilkinson, the sun temples may have been oriented ‘towards stars that would have risen above the predawn horizon around 2400 BC. If the latter is true, it may indicate that Userkaf’s valley temple functioned as a kind of astronomical clock for sacrifices which were made at dawn.’
36
According to George Hart ‘an average lifespan for Apis was fourteen years [twice seven?] . . . On the death of Apis Egypt mourned as if for the loss of the pharaoh himself.’
37
All this evidence, when put together, provides us with a disturbing picture of a time when the king or a totem animal substitute may have been ritualistically put to death based on a ‘law’ or sky religion involving the stars and other celestial bodies. But if this is true, then who performed this sinister task of killing the king? Who were the royal executioners?
The Priests of Seth
According to Wainwright, the cult of Seshat was so ancient ‘as to be already dying out in the Old Kingdom’.
38
This thus takes Seshat back to a time when the kings of Egypt were closely identified not only with Horus but also to Seth. In the Pyramid Texts the goddess Seshat was closely associated to Nephtys, the wife of Seth and the sister of Osiris and Isis. Indeed, Nephtys is given the title ‘In Her name of Seshat, Lady of Builders’.
39
The complete text which concerns the resurrection of the Osiris-king reads:
Horus has mustered the gods for you (Osiris-king), and they will never escape from you in the place where you have drowned. Nephtys has collected all your members for you in this her name of ‘Seshat, Lady of Builders’. She has made them hale for you, you having been given to your mother Nut in her name of ‘Sarcophagus’; she has embraced you in her name of ‘Coffin’, and you have been brought to her in her name of ‘Tomb’. Horus has reassembled your members for you, and he will not let you perish; he has put you together, and nothing shall be disturbed in you. Horus has set you up, and there shall be no unsteadiness. O Osiris-king, lift up your heart, be proud, open your mouth, for Horus has protected you and he will not fail to protect you. O Osiris-king, you are a mighty god, and there is no god like you. Horus has given you his children that they may bear you up . . . Live, that you may go to and fro every day; be a spirit in your name of ‘Horizon from which Re goes up’; be strong, be effective, be a soul, and have power forever and ever.
40
The above passage presents us with a dramatic scene of the death of the ‘Osiris’ king and tells how his ‘resurrection’ was attended by his son or successor, the new king identified as Horus. The material components of the rebirth rites such as the pyramid tomb itself, and the sarcophagus and coffin, are symbols of the sky-goddess Nut. Mark Lehner has an interesting interpretation of this particular passage of the Pyramid Texts:
The king’s tomb was also a cosmic womb, an idea articulated in the Pyramid Texts (616d-f): ‘You are given to your mother, Nut, in her identity of the coffin; She has gathered you up, in her identity of the sarcophagus; You ascend to her in her identity of the tomb.’ This suggests that the sloping pyramid passages descending to the burial chamber was seen in fact as ‘ascending’ to Nut in the Netherworld. The word for Netherworld was the Duat, often written with a star in a circle, a reference to Orion, the stellar expression of Osiris, in the Underworld. Osiris was the ‘Lord of the Duat’, which, like the celestial world (and the real Nile Valley) was both a water world and an earthly realm.
The lines which state that ‘Horus has reassembled your members for you, and he will not let you perish; he has put you together, and nothing shall be disturbed in you. Horus has set you up, and there shall be no unsteadiness’ are very suggestive of a mutilation ritual performed on the king’s body perhaps in re-enactment of the mutilation of Osiris’s body by Seth as reported in other narratives of this god’s death.
41
Margaret Murray
42
was convinced that the myth of Osiris was constantly re-enacted by the pharaohs, and that was ‘perhaps the most perfect example of that belief which is found in so many countries viz. that God is incarnated in man, which belief is usually accompanied by the rite of killing the Divine Man’.
43
According to Murray:
The chief centres of Osiris-worship were Abydos in the south and Busiris in the north; the difference in rituals shows that at Abydos the emphasis was laid on the death of the god, at Busiris on the resurrection. At Abydos there seems to have been a mystery play, showing forth the passion, death, burial, and resurrection of Osiris. In Ptolemaic times this was a puppet play, but under the pharaohs the performers were living actors and there is little doubt that in early times the men who took the parts of Osiris and Setekh [Seth] were actually sacrificed . . . in the beginning it was the ruler who suffered, later a substitute was put to death.
44
. . . Seth was one of the most important gods of Egypt . . . his worship seems to have been very primitive, and includes human sacrifice, probably the sacrifice of the king . . . Seth is closely connected with the sacrifice of the king. That strange priest, Kha-bau-Seker, who appears to have been the chief officiant in the shrine of Anubis, also held high office in the shrine of Seth; on both accounts I take him to be the executioner of the king or of the royal substitute. He belonged to the Third Dynasty . . . possibly . . . the priest of Seth was the appointed executioner to the divine king.
45
Intriguingly, Murray discusses the role of Seshat in the ‘Stretching of the Cord’ ceremony, and adds that:
Another of her [Seshat’s] function functions was to record the name of the king on the leaves of the Tree of Life,
46
so that his name might remain for evermore. But as her earliest known priest, the sinister Kha-bau-Seker of Memphis, was also the priest of Anubis and Seth and therefore connected with the death of the Incarnated God (the king), it is possible that Seshat was the deity who calculated the length of the king’s life.
47
One role for Seshat was that she be ‘the deity who calculated the length of the king’s life’; the other was helping the king in ‘stretching the cord’ to align his tomb towards the circumpolar stars and specifically the constellation of the bull’s thigh (the Plough). This constellation, as we have seen in Chapter Three, is the ‘Thigh of Seth’
48
and has seven bright stars. According to Wainwright, the pharaoh were originally allocated by Seshat reigns of seven years or increments thereof. It would be somewhat perverse not to see in the seven stars of the Plough some common denominator between the two roles of Seshat. Be that as it may, Murray’s views that Seshat was the ‘deity who calculated the length of the king’s life’ and consequently fixed the time of his death is also shared by Wainwright, who wrote that:
. . . as religious ideas developed and anthropomorphic [human shaped] gods in heaven emerged, the priest or king becomes the incarnated god here on earth, where he acts for his heavenly prototype. But here a difficulty supervenes, for man, even the most divine, is but mortal. Hence the divinity within him would grow old and feeble as its human shrine became more decrepit and infirm. As this cannot be allowed, the holder should lay down his life whilst still in his prime, so as to pass on the power to his successor in its full vigour . . . The manner and period of the divine death vary greatly. Very often the king had to commit suicide at the appointed time . . . In Egypt it will be seen that Seth, the Storm-God, had been liable to death, and tradition states that the death had been by fire. But in historic times he, and the pharaoh his representative, were able to escape . . .
49
Wainwright believed that many of these older sky gods ‘were so ancient that they were lost during historic times’, and that among the few that did survive were Horus, Seth and Seshat.
50
In Utterances 570-1 of the Pyramid Texts, the king claims that,
I escape my day of death just as Seth escaped his day of death. I escape my half-month of death just as Seth escaped his half-month of death. I escape my month of death just as Seth escaped his month of death. I escape my year of death just as Seth escaped his year of death. Do not break up the ground, O you arms of mine which lift up the sky as Shu [the air-god]; my bones are iron and my limbs are the Imperishable Stars. I am a star which illumines the sky, I mount up to the god that I may be protected, for the sky will not be devoid of me and this earth will not be devoid of me for ever. I live beside you, you gods of the Lower Sky, the Imperishable Stars . . .
51
I am the redness which came forth from Isis, I am the blood which issued from Nephtys. I am firmly bound up at the waist, and there is nothing which the gods can do for me, for I am the representative of Re, and I do not die. Hear, O Geb [earth-god], chief of the gods, and equip me with my shape; hear O Thoth, in who is the peace of the gods. Open, O Horus; stand guard, O Seth, that I may rise in the eastern side of the sky like Re who rises in the eastern side of the sky.
52