(_b_) A further type of symbolical conception is to be found in Isis and Osiris. Osiris is an object of procreation and birth, and is done to death by Typhon. Isis seeks for the scattered members, finds, collects, and buries them. This mythos of the god has, then, in the first place as its content purely _natural significance._ From one point of view, that is to say, Osiris is the sun, and his life-history stands as symbolic for his yearly course; from another, however, he signifies the rise and fall of the Nile, which is necessarily the source of all fruitfulness in Egypt. For in Egypt there may not be a drop of rain for years together, and it is the Nile which primarily waters the land by its floods. In winter time it flows but a shallow stream within its bed; then, however, with the summer-solstice ("Herod.," II, 19) it begins for a hundred days to rise, pours over its banks and streams far and wide over the land. Finally the water dries up beneath the sun's heat and the scorching desert winds, and once more retires to its course. Under such conditions the tillage of the soil is carried out with ease; the most luxurious vegetation springs up. Everything buds and ripens. The sun and Nile, and the way both of them become weak or strong, these are the conspicuous forces of Nature in this land, which the Egyptian has symbolically depicted under a human form in the myths of Isis and Osiris. To this type of symbolism, too, belongs the symbolical representation of the zodiac, which is associated with the year's course, just as the number of the twelve gods is bound up with the months. Conversely, however, Osiris typifies under another aspect the entirely _human._ He is held sacred as the founder of agriculture, of the division of the soil, property and laws, and his worship is consequently to an equal extent related to human activities, which are connected in the closest manner with ethical and judicial functions.
In the same way he is judge of the Dead, and secures as such a significance wholly released from the mere life of Nature, an import under which the symbolical tends to pass away for the reason that here the Inward and Spiritual is of itself content of the human form, which, under such a mode of relation, begins to conserve the Inward essentially belonging to it, one, that is, which through its external form signifies merely its own substance. This spiritual process, however, assumes again in equal measure as its content the external life of Nature, and, for example, in temples, number of steps, floors, and pillars, in labyrinths and their passages, windings and chambers, represents the same in an external manner. Osiris is thus quite as much the natural as he is the spiritual life in the different phases of his process[65] and its transformations; and his symbolical embodiments are partly symbolic of the elements of Nature; while again in part these changes of Nature are themselves merely symbols of spiritual activities and their various phases. For this reason, too, the human form persists here as no mere personification, such as we found to be the-case previously, because here the natural aspect, albeit from one point of view it appears as the real significance, yet from another is itself merely asserted as a symbol of the Spirit; and, generally speaking, at this stage of conception, where we find that the Inward struggles to come forth from the sense-vision of Nature, it is in a position of subordinance.