The Headless God

In Egypt, the corpse was dismembered in order to reassemble and embalm it only later¹. Even in recent times, the custom was not entirely forgotten, even if it may have been practiced less during the epoch of the pyramid builders. Corpses were found that had been beheaded before burial. And there were formulas in which the gods were requested to return his severed head to the deceased in the afterlife. This usage was closely connected with the dismemberment myth of Osiris. The corpse of the murdered god was scattered in many parts across Egypt by Seth and his accomplices: at Abydos, the head of Osiris was found and worshipped as a relic. According to one version of the legend, the god received his head back along with his limbs before Isis reanimated him.

But there was also an ancient legend that knew that every year, a head made of papyrus would come from Egypt in a god-steered sea voyage to Byblos. Lucian, who tells of the miracle in On the Syrian Goddess, Chap. 7, experienced it himself and viewed the papyrus head. According to Lucian, this floating head was the reason for some people from Byblos to assume that Osiris was buried in their city and that the Adonis festivals there were not dedicated to Adonis, but rather, without exception, to the Egyptian god. Apparently, nothing is reported of prophetic, speaking, or other miracles of this sanctuary as there is of the floating heads in similar legends of antiquity: in those, the head was the source of the miracle; in Egypt, the revived headless Osiris was the miracle².

1 A. Wiedemann, Der "Lebende Leichnam" im Glauben der alten Ägypter The "Living Corpse" in the Belief of the Ancient Egyptians. Zeitschrift des Vereins für rheinische und westfälische Volkskunde Journal of the Association for Rhenish and Westphalian Folklore, 14, 1917, pp. 3—36. A. Wainwright, The rite of dismemberment in Anc. Egypt. (The Labyrinth, 1912); Bull. de la Soc. arch. d'Alex. 3, 240 ff. (M. Ruffer-A. Rietti, Notes on two egyptian mummies).

2 H. Gressmann, Die Reliquien der kuhköpfigen Göttin in Byblos The Relics of the Cow-Headed Goddess in Byblos, Festschrift Ed. Hahn, Stuttgart 1917 (Studies and Researches on Anthropology 14) pp. 250—268, thinks of an Osiris crown made of reed leaves in the case of the papyrus head, "since heads made of papyrus do not exist" (256); "the reed crown represents the head of the god, just as the cow crown represents the head of the goddess." However, Lucian will have seen a proper head formed from papyrus. Nothing in his report points to a diadem. A contradiction that Gressmann stumbles upon (257) exists only apparently in the possibility of the severed floating head and the story of the evil deed of Typhon, who locked the brother into the coffin in an entire, intact form. The head comes from the section of the Osiris legend that reports on the dismemberment of the corpse by Seth. Tentatively, attention is drawn to the possi-