inds the coffin, brings it back to
Egypt, opens it in seclusion and gives way to her tender feelings and
sorrow for him. Thereupon she hides the coffin with the body in a thicket
in the forest in a lonely place. A hunt which the wild hunter Typhon
arranges, discovers the coffin. Typhon cuts the body into fourteen pieces.
Isis soon discovers the loss and searches in a papyrus canoe for the
dismembered body of Osiris, traveling through all the seven mouths of the
Nile, till she finally has found thirteen pieces. Only one is lacking, the
phallus, which had been carried out to sea and swallowed by a fish. She
put the pieces together and replaced the missing male member by another
made of sycamore wood and set up the phallus for a memento (as a
sanctuary). With the help of her son Horus, who, according to later
traditions, was begotten by Osiris after his death, Isis avenged the
murder of her spouse and brother. Between Horus and Set, who originally
were brothers themselves, there arises a bitter war, in which each tore
from the other certain parts of the body as strength-giving amulets. Set
knocked an eye out of his opponent and swallowed it, but lost at the same
time his own genitals (testicles), which in the original version were
probably swallowed by Horus. Finally Set was overcome and compelled to
give up Horus' eye, with the help of which Horus again revivified Osiris
so that he could enter the kingdom of the dead as a ruler.

The dismemberment, with final loss of the phallus, will be clearly
recognized as a castration. The tearing out of the eye is similarly to be
regarded as emasculation. This motive is found as self-punishment for
incest, at the close of the OEdipus drama. On the dismemberment of Osiris
as a castration, Rank writes (Inz. Mot., p. 311): "The characteristic
phallus consecration of Isis shows us that her sorrow predominantly
concerns the loss of the phallus, (and it also is expressed in the fact
that according to a later version, she is none the less in a mysterious
manner impregnated by her emasculated spouse), so on the other hand the
conduct of the cruel brother shows us that in the dismemberment he was
particularly interested in the phallus, since that indeed was the only
thing not to be found, and had evidently been hidden with special
precautionary measures. Indeed both motivations appear closely united in a
version cited by Jeremias (Babylonisches in N. T., p. 721), according to
which Anubis, the