er Earth to her children,
so Osiris was the first offspring of the Egyptian Celestial Virgin to
mankind. He was the new sun which through the winter months had been
"buried," but which in process of time arose to gladden all the earth.
He was also the new Sun of Righteousness which was to renew the world,
or redeem mankind from sin.

The female principle for the time being cast out of the Deity, Osiris,
the male element, now outwardly assumes the position of supreme God. It
was, however, reserved for a later and more sensuous age to permanently
adopt an absurdity so opposed to all established ideas relative to
a creative force in Nature and in man. Seth, the Destroyer, had been
deposed, but, so deeply rooted in the human mind had become the idea
of a female Creator, that Isis, the Queen of Heaven, a somewhat lower
conception of Muth, or of universal womanhood, soon assumed the place
of Seth beside Osiris. Later in the history of Egypt, when the gods have
become greatly multiplied, and the original significance of the deity
obscured, Horus, the child and the third member in the later Egyptian
triad, not unfrequently appears in her place as one of the eight great
gods.

The fact is observed that the history of Osiris is not alone the
"history of the circle of the year, or of the sun dying away and
resuscitating itself again, but that it is also the history of the
cycle of 600." It has been said that of the component elements of his
hieroglyphical name, Isis is the first, and that the name Osiris really
signifies the "Eye of Isis."

According to Plutarch, Isis and Muth are identical, but from the
evidence at hand it is plain that Muth comprehends divine womanhood,
or the female principle as it was regarded at an earlier stage of human
growth. Muth is not only the parent of the sun, or the force which
produces the sun, but she is also Wisdom, the first emanation from the
Deity, at the same time that she comprehends all the possibilities of
Nature. Isis seems to represent the Deity at a time when the higher
truths known to a more ancient people were beginning to lose their hold
upon the race.

Renouf informs us that the word Maat, or Muth, means Law, "not in that
forensic sense of command issued either by a human sovereign authority,
or by a divine legislator, like the laws of the Hebrews, but in the
sense of that unerring order which governs the universe, whether in its
physical or its moral aspect."(89) The same write