April 26, 2025 • 46 mins
In this classic episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the Ancient Egyptian deity Osiris, an underworld fertility god and judge of the dead. (originally published 4/4/2024)
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We are
heading into the vault for an older episode of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind. This is part two of our
series on Osiris. This episode originally published April fourth, twenty
twenty four.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
All right, let's jump bright in.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two of our discussion of Osiris, the ancient Egyptian
god of fertility, an embodiment of kingship, especially dead kingship
and the lord and judge of the dead.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Yeah, also in agricultural god. There's there's a lot of
complexity to Osiris, and so in the last episode we
basically talked about who this figure of Osiris is, where
and when he emerges from as much as we can
answer that question, and the basic canon of myths surrounding him.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
And the fact that you were inspired to do this
topic because we covered the movie Doctor Phibes Rises again.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, yeah, like seventy five percent Doctor Five's maybe twenty
five percent Easter. So props to Doctor Phibes and Jesus
for inspiring this episode. Now, before we get into some
we are going to get into some additional questions that
we tease last time about comparisons to be made between
the figure of Osiris and other deities and other religions.
(01:47):
But before we do that, I want to come back
to a deity that I mentioned in the last episode
towards the end of it, and that is the Greco
Egyptian syncretic deity Serapists. This is the deity that is
established under the rule of the Ptolemies in Egypt, a
god that combines elements of Osiris and APIs the Sacred Bull.
(02:10):
These are both again Egyptian deities, along with various Greek
deities like Zeus and Hades. So I just wanted to
add a little more context on this because I don't
think I explained the scenario as well as I could have,
or didn't go into as much detail as I could
have in a way that I think benefits our understanding.
Because we get into this idea again of kind of
(02:31):
like an amalgam god that is to a certain degree,
kind of built by committee with a certain purpose in mind.
And that purpose is not just like, oh, I have
to figure out who you know, what God is real,
and I must convene with it and get its blessings.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Robin our outline. You have attached a photo of a
sculpture of Serapis seated on a throne or at least
on a chair, sort of dressed in a robe and
holding up some kind of wand or maybe a scroll
of a toon of some some sort of cylindrical object.
But under his other hand, Oh, there's a very good boy.
It is the three headed hound of Hades, Cerberus.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
That's right, looking very loyal and very domesticated right there
by his side. There are various You can easily do
a Google search on Sirapis that's se r A Pi
s and you'll find various images that basically fit this.
Sometimes it's just the head, sometimes you see the full body.
Sometimes Cerberus is there, sometimes not. But I do have
(03:29):
to drive home like the utter greekness of this image,
because this will be important to come back to later,
Like this is a very Greek looking god. If you
didn't know exactly what deity this is or what figure
this is. You wouldn't have to know much at all
about iconography and sculpture and depictions of the divine to say, oh,
this looks very Greek to me.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, it's certainly a Greek art style.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah, and of course ye. And then the three headed
dog right out of Greek mythology. So come back to
Sirapis here in a set. But just to back up
a little bit, I do want to drive home that
Egypt experienced foreign rule at various points throughout its long history.
There were the Hixos, which I believe we've talked about
a little bit on the show before. This is a
(04:14):
term that means rulers of foreign lands, and they controlled
the Delta region of Egypt during the seventeenth century BCE.
These were the first foreigners to rule over part of Egypt,
and there's much that's not known about them, with various
theories about their exact origin, though it seems that some
sort of Canaanite origin is possible, and there has also
been some evidence to suggest that it was perhaps not
(04:38):
an outward invasion but an uprising of peoples who had
previously immigrated to the region. So there's a lot of
scholarly dispute on exactly who these people were and what
this time period consisted of. Now, subsequent invasions by the Nubians,
the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks also occurred, but
pertinent to our discussion here is that in three point
(05:00):
thirty two BCE, Macedonian King Alexander the Great conquered Egypt
from the Persians, and after his death. After Alexander's death
in three twenty three BCE, likely by either poison or disease,
he was only thirty two at the time, so there's
a lot of a lot of arguments for the poison
theory here. But after he dies, a Macedonian general that
(05:23):
had served under Alexander by the name of Ptolemy, declared
himself ruler of Egypt, and the Ptolemy family would rule
Egypt for three centuries. So in her book Egyptian Mythology
that I cited in the last episode, Jeraldin Pinch writes
a little bit about this and points out that the
Ptolemy's ruled from Alexandria, and that is of course where
they built the Great Library of Alexandria. Though most of
(05:44):
its contents, she points out would not have concerned Egyptian culture,
Egyptian history, and Egyptian mythology. You know, Greek culture was
very much the focal point of the lost contents of
this place. Most of the Ptolemies apparently never learned to
speak Egyptian, but the they did, she says, recognize the
challenges of governing a multicultural society and keeping powerful Egyptian
(06:07):
factions content. And this is ultimately where the invention of
Sirapis comes into play, which she describes as quote a
symbol of cultural fusion. So Sirapis is often described as
a patron deity for the Ptolemy capital of Alexandria, so
again a unifying entity. And also in combining all these elements,
(06:27):
Serapis becomes a god of not only fertility and the underworld,
which if you were already loaded in our concept of Osiris,
but also he becomes the god of the sun in
the sky, and he sometimes credited in this role as
Zeus Serapis. And it's interesting that by absorbing these various powers,
he essentially becomes a god of everything, sort of a
(06:50):
monotheism by monopoly or something like.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
That, one god among many, increasingly absorbing more and more responsibilities.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Yeah, Like I was trying to think of it in
terms of, like what's a secular example of like have
have have team mascots ever been merged into single mascots
for you know, like the unification of sports teams. Have
the mascots of of uh? Oh, I don't I don't
know fast food chains ever been utilized in this fashion,
like well, you know, the shones has been taken over
(07:22):
by McDonald's, and now the Shonese boy or the Shoneese
Bear must be combined with elements of of uh, you know,
the Ronald McDonald or Grimace or something.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
You know like that that is funny, but that that
does kind of imply a necessary competition, like between sports
teams or between competitors within a market space, whereas that
wasn't always the case for gods. I mean, like you could,
you know, worship multiple gods and that wasn't usually a problem.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yeah, But but here we see this this intentional attempt
to create a deity and create a followship of this
deity that has stabilizing political objectives behind it. Oh and
real quick, just because this plays in something we talk
about in the last episode is we're stressing that Isis
(08:10):
remains a separate entity, So it's not like they just
took everything and threw it into this concept of the god.
That would be too much, I imagine, But distinct gods
are combined into this entity now. According to Lauren Murphy
and Beware Greeks bearing God's Serapis as a cross cultural deity,
published in the journal Amphora in twenty twenty one, the
(08:32):
invented God doesn't seem to have unified the people in
any meaningful way as far as we can tell, but
it does stand as an example of the diversity that
was present in Egypt at the time. But it was
the religion of the ruling class of foreigners and those
wishing to mix with that ruling class of foreigners. And
also it seems like there were possible connections to an
(08:53):
inspiration via a pre Ptolemaic cult of Osiris APIs Is.
One can see in images of Serapis, he's predominantly depicted
as a Greek deity. But it does sound like there
might have already been some fusion of Osiris and APIs previously.
This would not it would seem not be out of
(09:14):
character with Egyptian religion. Prior to outside influence. Now, the
Ptolemaic line would of course end with its last ruler,
Cleopatra in thirty BCE, as it was, and after this
point it was absorbed by the Roman Empire. Worship of
Serapis lived on under Roman rule, but experienced eventual decline
(09:34):
with the spread of Christianity during the fourth century CE.
I should say like the top down mandated spread of
Christianity in particular is the death blow to the cult
of Serapis. So if Serapis is a kind of monotheism
by monopoly, he's eventually replaced by actual monotheism. And I
(09:54):
think there's some discussion of whether the worship of a
figure like Siapis helped pave the way for the of Christianity.
I've seen that discussed, But at the very least, it
seems like there are other factors involved here within the
Roman Empire and regions affected by the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
But anyway, that's enough on si Rapist. Let's get back
to the original deity, but then also into some of
these conversations about Osiris's possible connection with other cultural traditions.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Let's return to Osiris right, So, rob when we were
Initially looking at this topic, I was asking is there
anything you wanted me to look into? And what you
suggested was a question that I had read a little
bit about before, but I was quite intrigued to go
deeper into. And this is a question that has been
(10:51):
widely explored in the comparative study of religion, the connecting
principle or lack thereof, between Osiris and other gods from
the ancient world, most controversially the Christian Jesus, who are
believed to in some way die and then rise again,
so resurrected gods. This question will take us back to
(11:15):
our old friend James G. Fraser and his incredibly popular,
influential and controversial work The Golden Boo, which this was
a book published in several volumes over the course of
a couple of decades beginning in eighteen ninety. Fraser was
a Scottish scholar of religion in folklore who lived eighteen
fifty four to nineteen forty one, and The Golden Bao
(11:37):
is his best known work. In this book, Fraser catalogs
and analyzes a huge number of myths, rituals, and magical
beliefs from cultures around the world. So He sources these
observations both from like records of things believed in the
ancient world and you know, ancient myths and practices in
(11:58):
the Greco Roman world and so forth. All so he
sources this from ethnographic observations that people have made of
just beliefs and magical practices in cultures all around the globe,
using these observations ultimately to support his broader thesis, which
include the idea that the ritual and mythic elements shared
(12:20):
by most ancient religions point back to an originating cult
practice that involved the ritual sacrifice of a holy king
or guardian figure, often when his fertility was waning, and
the linkage of that practice to the seasonal rebirth of
nature and the crops. So his framework has a core
(12:43):
of this sacrifice of a divine figure, often a divine king,
and a cycle of death and rebirth that has some
implications for nature. You can see why this would be
relevant to the question at hand. Now, before we get
into the specifics of Resz directed gods, a couple of
general notes on Fraser and the Golden Bough. I am
(13:05):
not at all an expert in religious anthropology, but my
personal take on The Golden Bough is that it is
on one hand worth reading because it's important in understanding
the history of Western scholarship on comparative religion, and it's
also just a very absorbing and fascinating text. But on
the other hand, this is like one hundred tow one
(13:28):
hundred and thirty year old book making the case for
a sweeping theory of world religions, and it should be
read with the caution you might expect for that kind
of work. So I would not take any of its claims,
specific or general, at face value without checking for confirmation
and other sources. I would also be skeptical of his
(13:49):
core theoretical framework, and I would just warn that from
research we have done on this book in the past,
I recall discovering that some of Fraser's presentation of ethnographic
information about religious practices seems often tailored or cherry picked
to fit his theories. Now the next general note, I
don't know if what I'm about to say is completely fair,
(14:12):
because Fraser doesn't say the following exactly, but I think
one of the informal conclusions that a reader is likely
to take away from The Golden Bough is that when
it comes down to it, all religions are basically the
same and the differences between them are incidental and superficial,
which I would argue is not correct. And even if
(14:33):
that's just an unintended takeaway that people would get from
this book, I think that's a thing that's a conclusion
that I would really stress people should resist. I do
think there are common themes that you will find popping
up again and again in many religions, but not all.
And I also think that the differences between religious beliefs
(14:54):
and practices around the world and throughout history do go
quite deep. Those differences are significan They're not just superficial
variations on the same thing, and some religions end up
serving profoundly different purposes. So personally, I wonder if the
desire to locate so much sameness or commonality between different
(15:15):
religions is something that really is. It is not something
that comes out of the religions themselves, but more emerges
from the need of scholars to have a theory that
explains how religions work and where they come from, when
in fact, it's a very just like, messy, complicated, variegated
phenomenon that you know, lots of different factors are at work,
(15:36):
and so it's hard to have a very simple theory
that explains where they come from.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Yeah, I mean, even like the discussion we just had
about Serapis and Serapis's origins and all. I mean, that
doesn't fully capture what this entity may have meant and
the various additional complexities that may have been involved in
the genesis of this figure. So, yeah, when you get
into religion, when you get into belief, and you get
in to these into a process that often you know,
(16:03):
you're talking about a tradition that goes for centuries and
therefore has all sorts of room for change and alteration
and transformation and so forth.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
That's right, exactly exactly. But anyway, to come back to
these resurrected gods, A big part of Fraser's model was
that many religions of the ancient world commonly shared a
dying and reviving god, usually a male deity associated with fertility,
who undergoes a divine marriage to a fertility goddess, who
(16:35):
is then killed or sacrificed sometimes when his fertility wanes
in some way, and then rises from death to live again.
And this resurrection is linked to cycles of loss and
return in the natural and political world, such as the seasons,
the death of plants in winter and the rebirth in
spring and summer, the seasonal inundation of the nile, and
(16:56):
other natural cycles and political cycles, the death of kings
and the coronation of their errs. So the question is
do we really find these dying and rising gods all
throughout the ancient religions. Unfortunately, if you look into this question,
I think you find the topic horribly polluted by a
(17:17):
lot of motivated argumentation, primarily tracing back to the question
of whether Jesus of Nazareth should be thought of as
one of these dying and rising deities. So this topic
is infected by both Christian apologetics and anti Christian polemics.
So you've got, you know, people who don't like Christianity,
(17:37):
anti Christian polemicists arguing, look, see how stupid Christianity is.
Jesus is just a copy of these other dying and
rising deities. And then you've got Christian apologists arguing that no,
Christianity is totally unique, it is unlike any other religion
on earth because it is the one true religion and
all such comparisons are spurious, so caveat that there is
(17:59):
a lot of that kind of garbage floating around in
both directions. I'm trying to do my best to put
together a clear and what seems to me relatively unbiased
answer to the question of what similarities exist between these
alleged dying and rising gods and to what extent Osiris
and Jesus fit into that mold.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Yeah, the real tragedy is that it just makes it
almost impossible for these two to ever hang out.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah. Well, all of Jesus's friends are saying Osiris is
just trying to be like Jesus, and all of Jesus
Osirius's friends are saying Jesus is just trying to be
like him.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Will the accusations of copying never stop? But anyway, So,
of course, the dying and reviving Deity's framework was popular
with Fraser and his allies, so I think in the
early twentieth century were sort of associated with Cambridge University.
So I want to go through a couple of the
examples that Fraser cites and then we'll get into critiques
of them. So one example is the god Adonis, a
(18:57):
figure in Greek myth thought to have been derived from
other ancient Near Eastern deities, such as the Mesopotamian god
of agriculture, Tamus or Demuzi. Adonis, in many tellings, began
as a mortal man famed for his beauty. He was
sort of the pinnacle of hotness, and he was so
handsome that when he was young, the goddesses Aphrodite and
(19:20):
Persephone fought bitterly over whether he would live with one
of them or the other. More on that myth in
a minute. But then another story is that later in
his life Adonis was the lover of Aphrodite until he
was tragically impaled by a wild bore wild hunting, so
it gets the tusk right in the guts, and so
(19:41):
he's out there dying in the in the wilderness on
the hunt, and the goddess Aphrodite comes and weeps over
his body, and as her tears fall and Adonis's blood
runs down into the earth, the ground produces delicate flowers.
Sometimes a specific type of flower is named, so like
you know you've got. In some understandings of the story,
the body fluids of these divine lovers combine upon the
(20:05):
young man's death and bring forth the fruits of the earth,
and to try to understand the significance of this figure,
Fraser starts looking at celebrations of the death of Adonnas.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
There was a.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Festival or a commemoration of the death of Adonnas that
was celebrated in the summertime, and Fraser looks at accounts
of this ritual. So Fraser says, quote, at Alexandria, images
of Aphrodite and Adonis were displayed on two couches. Beside
them were set ripe fruits of all kinds, cakes, plants
(20:38):
growing in flower pots, and green bowers twined with Annis.
The marriage of the lovers was celebrated one day, and
then on the morrow, women attired as mourners, with streaming
hair and bared breasts, bore the image of the dead
Adonnas to the seashore and committed it to the waves.
Yet they sorrowed not without hope, for they sang that
(20:59):
the lost would come back again. And after describing more
of these rituals, Fraser says, summarizing quote, we may therefore
accept as probable an explanation of the Adonis worship, which
accords so well with the facts of nature and with
the analogy of similar rights in other lands. Moreover, the
explanation is countenanced by a considerable body of opinion amongst
(21:23):
the ancients themselves, who again and again interpreted the dying
and reviving God as the reaped and sprouting grain. Fraser
also cites Temus, the Mesopotamian god from which Adonis is
probably derived. Tamus was the consort of the goddess Inana
and was also linked to crop cycles and apparently images
(21:45):
of death and rebirth. Among many gods Fraser offers as
displaying death and resurrection. He also cites the Egyptian god Osiris. Now,
of course, we already went over the basic myth of Osiris,
But what does Fraser have to say about the meaning
of Osiris here? So I'm going to read a couple
of lengthier quotes from Fraser here on Osiris.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
In the resurrection of Osiris, the Egyptians saw the pledge
of a life everlasting for themselves beyond the grave. They
believed that every man would live eternally in the other
world if only his surviving friends did for his body
what the gods had done for the body of Osiris. Hence,
the ceremonies observed by the Egyptians over the human dead
(22:27):
were an exact copy of those which Annibis, Horus and
the rest had performed over the dead god. And then
he goes on. At every burial there was enacted a
representation of the divine mystery which had been performed of
old over Osiris, when his son, his sisters, his friends
were gathered round his mangled remains and succeeded by their
(22:48):
spells and manipulations in converting his broken body into the
first mummy, which they afterwards reanimated and furnished with the
means of entering on a new individual life beyond the grave.
The mummy of the deceased was Osiris. The professional female
mourners were his two sisters, Isis and Nepthis Annibis Horas,
(23:09):
all the gods of the Osirian legend gathered about the corpse.
In this way, every dead Egyptian was identified with Osiris
and bore his name. From the Middle Kingdom onwards, it
was the regular practice to address the deceased as Osiris
so and so, as if he were the god himself,
and to add the standing epithet true of speech, because
(23:31):
true speech was characteristic of Osiris. The thousands of inscribed
and pictured tombs that have been opened in the Valley
of the Nile prove that the mystery of the resurrection
was performed for the benefit of every dead Egyptian. As
Osiris died and rose again from the dead, so all
men hoped to arise like him from death to life eternal.
(23:52):
So there's a kind of in what Fraser is implying here,
there's a kind of special role for Osiris, especially when
compared to some of these other examples of allegedly dying
and reviving gods, where Osiris not only in Fraser's mind,
dies and then is brought to life again, but by
re enacting what happens to Osiris, he shows the way
(24:16):
the people that regular mortals can also be revived again
after death, though we will add some qualifications to in
what sense they should be thought of as revived. So
one thing that of course causes controversy is that among
many of these examples, Fraser also brings up the example
of Christ, the Christian Jesus, drawing direct connection between the
(24:39):
Easter resurrection of Christ and say, the rituals of Adonis.
This drew scorn from conservative Christians, of course, but you
might expect that, but the question would remain, were these
comparisons sound comparisons between all these different figures? And I think,
after doing some additional reading, I think the answer is
(25:01):
a little bit but mostly no.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
So.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Later in the twentieth century, Fraser's category of dying and
reviving gods came under what seems to me like quite
legitimate criticism by other major scholars. One notable name here
is the American historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith, who
was affiliated with the University of Chicago and directly addressing
(25:25):
this question of dying and reviving gods. Smith wrote a
highly cited entry in the Encyclopedia of Religion edited by Eliade.
The entry was called Dying and Rising Gods, and in
this chapter Smith showed that really the category of dying
and Rising gods is not much of a category, in
(25:47):
that most of the items Fraser and others placed within
the class are quote based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly
late or highly ambiguous texts. In other words, this this
category emerges from reliance on questionable sources and on tortured
readings of legitimate source materials to try to fit them
(26:09):
into the resurrected god box. So how would that be
given what we just looked at. It seemed like Fraser
presented some good examples.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Well.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Smith says that actually, if you look at the examples
Fraser sites, there aren't any fully dying and rising gods. Instead,
you have two distinct categories. One is dying gods. These
are gods that die but are not said to rise
again from death. And the other is disappearing gods. Gods
(26:39):
that disappear and then in some cases reappear, sometimes quote
with monotonous frequency. But the disappearance is not death and
the reappearance is not resurrection.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Okay, well we may have to have some examples of this.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Okay, Well, adnnask has got you covered here, so I'm
going to look in detail at the example of Adonnas.
Smith says, there are two main myths of Adonnas that
we know from our sources. One is the one I
mentioned earlier, where Adonis is killed by a bore and
his lover Aphrodite weeps over his body and creates a
fragile flower. So in this myth, Adonnis dies but he
(27:17):
does not rise. Fraser sort of allides this by connecting
the story to the mourning celebration of Adonnas's death with
sort of the involvement of summer crops and plants and
stuff like that. But in the story, Adonnas just dies.
We'll get to the rituals in a second. But in
the story there's no resurrection, and the festival created by
(27:40):
Aphrodite to commemorate his death is a festival of mourning.
The other Adonnas myth to quote Smith here tells of
quote a quarrel between two goddesses, Aphrodite and Persephone, for
the affections of the infant Adonis Zeus or Calliope decrees
that Adonnas should spend part of the in the upper
(28:00):
world with one I assume with Aphrodite, and part of
the year in the lower world with the other. I
assume that would be Persephone. This tradition of by location
similar to that connected with Persephone and perhaps DEMUSI has
no suggestion of death and rebirth, So you could argue
maybe that going into the underworld and then coming back
(28:22):
to the upper world has like resonance with the idea
of resurrection. There's some kind of symbolic linkage. It's thematically similar,
but it is not literally the same thing.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Right, And I think that that becomes obvious when you
look at any number of stories about characters venturing into
the underworld, it generally has the flavor of a physical journey.
And we see that even carried on into literary traditions,
like even in Dante's Inferno, Like Dante does not die
and to send into the Inferno. No, he travels there.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Yeah, in some important senses he is changed, but he doesn't.
He doesn't like have to go through bodily death.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
But okay, So Fraser was also looking not just at
like written versions of the Adonna Smith, but also at
rituals to see what people believed about him. So what
about evidence for the resurrection of Adonnas in ritual? In
terms of ritual, there are later sources possibly linking Adonnas
to resurrection, but these sources are problematic. According to Jonathan Smith,
(29:32):
there is one allegedly second century source by Lucien that
in a pretty sketchy and ambiguous way, describes rituals which
could be interpreted as celebrating the resurrection of Adonnas, but
it's not clear at all that this is what Lucian
is describing. To quote from Smith's summary, Lucian says, quote,
(29:53):
on the third day of the ritual, a statue of
Adonnas is quote brought out into the light and quote
dressed as if alive. And I was thinking, wait a minute,
but aren't many cult statues addressed as if alive?
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Yeah? Yeah, and yeah. You get into a complex area
of interpretation when you figure out, like what does it
mean for someone to address a statue of a deity?
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Right, So, a cult statue may have some kind of
eternal existence that it is connected to, even if it
is an image of a god who has died, But
that doesn't necessarily mean if you're like talking to the
statue that you believe that the god was resurrected again
from death.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
And then Smith says that there are other descriptions of
these rituals which do make unambiguous reference to the resurrection
of Adonnas, but they only show up later in the
Roman period, after the spread of Christianity, and they are
written by Christians in a way that raises questions about them, Like,
so if Christians are saying that worshippers of Adonnas are
(30:57):
saying Adonis was raised from the dead, is the resurrected
God theme of Christianity perhaps having some influence on the
myth of Adonis by this point, or is the resurrected
God theme of Christianity influencing the way Christian observers interpret
the rituals of Roman pagans.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Hmm, yeah, that's a very good point.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
So Smith says, quote this pattern will recur for many
of the figures considered an indigenous mythology and ritual focusing
on the deities death and rituals of lamentation, followed by
a later Christian report adding the element nowhere found in
the earlier native sources that the God was resurrected. I
think that is a very interesting pattern. So like Christian
(31:42):
observers look at other religions and they see a dead God,
and it's quite possible they just assume that a dead
God is supposed to rise again and kind of read
that into the ritual.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Yeah. Yeah, I think then there's probably a case to
be made, even like the spread of Christianity and like
the reinterpretation often with you know, an agenda of of tradition,
local traditions, taking existing religious traditions and sort of reframing
them in the light of the Christian religion exactly.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
So, but what about the thing about symbolic rebirth. What
about the the ritual and mythic association that Fraser seems
to allege between Adonnas and plant life, which you know
dies in the winter and is quote resurrected in spring.
Well Smith says, if you look at ancient sources, even
these symbolic associations are not present in the worship of Adonnas.
(32:37):
Smith writes, quote, the frequently cited gardens of Adonnas the
Kepoi were proverbial illustrations of the brief, transitory nature of
life and contain no hint of rebirth. The point is
that the young plant shoots rapidly, wither and die, not
that the seeds have been reborn when they sprout. So
(32:59):
I thought that was also really interesting, because I would
just so easily and so naturally look at a sort
of plant based ritual celebration and assume it had something
to do with cycles of death and rebirth. But that's
an assumption that might not be what the people doing
that practice think it means. So Smith is saying what
(33:20):
ancient people said about these gardens was not that they
were to emphasize the theme of resurrection, but to emphasize
the theme once again of mourning and loss of the
beautiful youth who died too soon, just like these young
plant shoots that come up and then wither rapidly. I
feel like this kind of thing makes me a little
more cautious about my my myth interpretation goggles that.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Yeah, I mean absolutely. It even goes back to some
of the ways that we discussed and cited discussions of
Osiris in the first episode, you know, thinking about how
this basic myth matches up with you know, cyclical life
and death and the agricultural cycles as well.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
But okay, that's a donnas. What about Osiris? It seems
to me that of all the examples that Smith looks at,
Osiris comes the closest to being genuinely killed and resurrected
on a plane reading of the myth. But is he
really resurrected? Smith argues, no, Osiris is not actually resurrected,
(34:22):
because remember, of course, Osiris in the story is killed
and dismembered by Seth or set and then the pieces
of his body are put back together again and he
is rejuvenated, but not in this world. Instead, he goes
on living in the other place, in the underworld, the
realm of the dead, where he is empowered to become
(34:44):
the master and judge of the wandering dead. So he
does not rise from the dead. He goes on living
in the afterlife. So it almost seems to me that
his resurrection in the afterlife could be seen as kind
of anonymous with his enthronement as the lord of the
dead and his empowerment to serve the role of judgment.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Absolutely, And regarding the ritual reenactment of the story in
osiris worship practices, Smith says, quote the repeated formula rise up,
you have not died, whether applied to Osiris or a
citizen of Egypt, signaled a new permanent life in the
realm of the dead.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
That's right. Going back to what we said about the
idea that Osiris is ultimately kind of the opener of
the way that democratizes or helps propel the already existing
democratization of the afterlife. It's no longer just for kings.
It is now something that everyone has access to, provided
you can have the right mummification procedures performed on your
(35:47):
body exactly.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
And so this is something that Fraser was saying, where
I think he was sort of on the right track
in the case of Osiris. Smith argues that in the
case of Osiris, there is a clear link between myth
and ritual. There's the strong connection, which is something that
Fraser is always trying to emphasize, is the link between
myth and ritual and myths sort of being the story
(36:11):
like that the ritual re enacts the myth, and the
myth in Fraser's telling is often derived from the ritual.
It's like a narrativizing of the ritual. But whatever the
actual chain of events there is in this case, there
is clearly a strong link between the myth and the ritual.
In that the mythical description of the recovery and reassembly
(36:32):
of the pieces of the body of Osiris, I believe
this is by Isis and his allies. This is a
clear parallel of the funeral rits of Egypt. Smith lists
these funeral rites quote the vigil over his corpse, then
the hymns of lamentation, the embalmment usually performed by Annibis,
the washing and purification of the corpse, the undertaking of
(36:55):
the elaborate ritual of the opening of the mouth with
its one hundred and seven separate operations, as well as
other procedures for reanimation, the dressing of the body and
the pouring out of libations. So in a way, the
dead Egyptian would, in a sense, through having the funeral
rites performed upon their body, become Osiris, and just like Osiris,
(37:18):
though dead to this world, they would awaken to a
new life in another world. Smith writes, quote the myth
and ritual of Osiris emphasizes the message that there is
life for the dead, although it is of a different
character than that of the living. What is to be
feared is in a quote from the Book of Going
forth by Day. I think this is another name for
(37:39):
what is sometimes called the Book of the Dead quote
dying for a second time in the realm of the dead.
And there are ways that, according to the story, this
can happen to you, for example, being devoured by the lion, hippopotamus,
crocodile monster am it in the underworld.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Yeah, I know, we've talked a little bit about the
complexity of the ancient Egyptian afterlife before, where it's it's
it's not just a it's it's it's not something you
could compare just sort of like the sort of mainstream
vision of a Christian heaven. It is a place where
you're probably gonna need your spells, you're gonna need your followers,
You're gonna need tools and a plan in order to
(38:19):
make the best go of.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
It, exactly right, you have to prepare. It's not just
that you have to be worthy of the good afterlife,
but like in in some visions, it takes like work
to get there.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Yeah, and this is of course, this is not just
an ancient Egyptian religion. There are various examples we can
turn to where like that journey between this life and
the next is one that is perilous and has to
go just right an other in order to work right.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
So it seems to me that of the examples Fraser
brings up o Cyrus maybe comes the closest, or is
one of the closer ones to being a true dying
and reviving God. But even in his case, there's a
pretty strong conceptual distinction of what the new life is
that makes calling this a resurrection somewhat strained. So, after
(39:07):
analyzing all of the most prominent cases of alleged dying
and reviving gods. Smith concludes as follows quote. As the
above examples make plain, the category of dying and rising
deities is exceedingly dubious. It has been based largely on
Christian interest and tenuous evidence. As such, the category is
of more interest to the history of scholarship than to
(39:31):
the history of religions. And you know, so that might
kind of make you think like, ah, well, then who cares?
But I think it is actually very illustrative that you
can see this category sort of emerge, where with scholars
trying to make sense of all these different stories and
rituals and stuff, and putting all these gods and figures
from myths into the category, and ultimately, if you look
(39:55):
really close, it's not a super cohesive category, and a
lot of the things, maybe all the things put into
it don't really fit and don't have as much in
common as the scholar is claiming they do. And if
Smith is correct here, I find his case pretty convincing.
If he's correct about this being largely based on Christian
(40:15):
interest by scholars from Christian cultures, I think that's also
illuminating that like dominant sort of story themes within your
culture that seem very familiar to you, just kind of
naturally manifest when looking at ambiguously similar things in other
cultural contexts.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Yeah, yeah, and I mean at times it can be
a very useful exercise and either helping us to get
a leg up on understanding another culture or another system
of beliefs. It can also be a frame of commonality.
It can be very positive in terms of like seeing
the similarities rather than differences. But yeah, when you get
into like this deeper attempt to understand the religion, you
could see where some of it could cast too much
(40:56):
of a shadow on your interpretation of this other way
of looking at the cosmos.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
I think that's right. But then on the other hand,
I want to come back and say we shouldn't stop
looking at similarities between religions because there are similarities. Like
Smith says, Yeah, this dying and reviving god category doesn't
make a whole lot of sense, But there are these
other patterns you can see, like dying gods. There are
a bunch of dying god myths that have interesting things
(41:23):
in common, and you could kind of look at, like,
why do they have these things in common that that's
worth studying. You also have this pattern of the disappearing
and sometimes reappearing God myth. What does that tell us
about religions? You can look at these similarities, and so
it's also not unreasonable to look at similarities between Christianity,
(41:43):
a religion that certainly does have a dying and reviving God,
with some of these other religions. And so one source
that came across that I thought made a very interesting
point A was a chapter called Resurrection in Ancient Egypt
by the German egypt ptologist jan Osman, who has plenty
of his own ideas he's pushing about, like the lineage
(42:06):
of certain types of resurrection beliefs. I think ultimately he
thinks that a lot of these beliefs have an original
source in Egyptian religion and then spread out to other places.
But regardless of whether he's correct about that, I think
he makes a very good point about a similarity between
belief in Christ and the earlier belief in Osiris, which,
(42:28):
on one hand, you have plenty of differences, like the
death of Jesus is a one time event that is
situated within history. It said, like, you know, well, he's
a man who existed at a certain time and place
in history, and so it's like his death is a
historical event, not something that takes place within a kind
of mythic time or a within a mythic landscape. But
(42:48):
on the other hand, you could look at the deaths
and revivals of these two god figures, is having a
lot in common in that, as Osman says quote, through
his death and resurrection, Christ has paved the way to
Paradise or Elysium in a way not altogether dissimilar from
that of Osiris, who also threw his victory over seth
(43:09):
opened a realm beyond the realm of death. The decisive
common denominator of Christianity and ancient Egyptian religion is the
idea of redemption from death, that beyond the realm of death,
there is an Elysian realm of eternal life in the
presence of the divine. So in both cases you can
look at these gods as gods who were killed and
(43:31):
then in some sense revived. Christ is said to be
revived onto earth and then ascends into heaven. Osiris is
revived and made lord, a lord of the underworld and
judge of the dead. But in both cases they open
the way for people to have a sort of heaven again.
Want to put the star on heaven there and say
(43:52):
it means different things in the two different concepts, but
it is a positive afterlife that is now available to
the people.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Yeah. Absolutely. In both cases, the individual is the opener
of the way, you know, and the Ptolemies might come
along and say, you know, we have this guy named
Serapis and he does all.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Of this as well, perfect give me all three. Yeah,
well he's got a dog. Wait now, was he often
depicted as having Cerberus by his side, like having a
three headed pup or is that just a unique feature
of that sculpture.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
I mean, based on the remaining images of Serapis, it
does seem like it seems like he is sometimes depicted
with Cerberus, and I believe that that is simply because, Yeah,
if you are going to take this character of Osiris,
who is a god of the underworld, and you are
going to spin him into this this very Greek themed model,
(44:46):
well then you're going to drag in Hades, and you're
going to drag in like this key example of sort
of in a way summing up this idea of the
taming of death. Right. So that's my understanding of it.
But I I certainly have seen other depictions of him
that don't have the dog present. All right, Well, on
that note, I believe we're going to go ahead and
close the book on Osiris here with the caveat that
(45:11):
I'm not sure what the next core episode is going
to be, but we were throwing around the idea of
doing something that was still kind of Osiris, but is
not Osiris Part three, So just I don't know. You'd
have to see what happens, and we shall see what
happens as well.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
In the meantime, we'd love to hear from everyone out
there if you have thoughts on this two parter, if
you have thoughts on past episodes or potential future episodes
right in we would love to hear from you. Just
a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily
a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursdays, but on Mondays we do listener mail, on
Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and on Fridays
we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
(45:49):
a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
us to topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
And I am Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. We are
heading into the vault for an older episode of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind. This is part two of our
series on Osiris. This episode originally published April fourth, twenty
twenty four.
Speaker 1 (00:23):
All right, let's jump bright in.
Speaker 3 (00:28):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My
name is Robert.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Lamb and I am Joe McCormick, and we're back with
part two of our discussion of Osiris, the ancient Egyptian
god of fertility, an embodiment of kingship, especially dead kingship
and the lord and judge of the dead.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
Yeah, also in agricultural god. There's there's a lot of
complexity to Osiris, and so in the last episode we
basically talked about who this figure of Osiris is, where
and when he emerges from as much as we can
answer that question, and the basic canon of myths surrounding him.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
And the fact that you were inspired to do this
topic because we covered the movie Doctor Phibes Rises again.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, yeah, like seventy five percent Doctor Five's maybe twenty
five percent Easter. So props to Doctor Phibes and Jesus
for inspiring this episode. Now, before we get into some
we are going to get into some additional questions that
we tease last time about comparisons to be made between
the figure of Osiris and other deities and other religions.
(01:47):
But before we do that, I want to come back
to a deity that I mentioned in the last episode
towards the end of it, and that is the Greco
Egyptian syncretic deity Serapists. This is the deity that is
established under the rule of the Ptolemies in Egypt, a
god that combines elements of Osiris and APIs the Sacred Bull.
(02:10):
These are both again Egyptian deities, along with various Greek
deities like Zeus and Hades. So I just wanted to
add a little more context on this because I don't
think I explained the scenario as well as I could have,
or didn't go into as much detail as I could
have in a way that I think benefits our understanding.
Because we get into this idea again of kind of
(02:31):
like an amalgam god that is to a certain degree,
kind of built by committee with a certain purpose in mind.
And that purpose is not just like, oh, I have
to figure out who you know, what God is real,
and I must convene with it and get its blessings.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Robin our outline. You have attached a photo of a
sculpture of Serapis seated on a throne or at least
on a chair, sort of dressed in a robe and
holding up some kind of wand or maybe a scroll
of a toon of some some sort of cylindrical object.
But under his other hand, Oh, there's a very good boy.
It is the three headed hound of Hades, Cerberus.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
That's right, looking very loyal and very domesticated right there
by his side. There are various You can easily do
a Google search on Sirapis that's se r A Pi
s and you'll find various images that basically fit this.
Sometimes it's just the head, sometimes you see the full body.
Sometimes Cerberus is there, sometimes not. But I do have
(03:29):
to drive home like the utter greekness of this image,
because this will be important to come back to later,
Like this is a very Greek looking god. If you
didn't know exactly what deity this is or what figure
this is. You wouldn't have to know much at all
about iconography and sculpture and depictions of the divine to say, oh,
this looks very Greek to me.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, it's certainly a Greek art style.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah, and of course ye. And then the three headed
dog right out of Greek mythology. So come back to
Sirapis here in a set. But just to back up
a little bit, I do want to drive home that
Egypt experienced foreign rule at various points throughout its long history.
There were the Hixos, which I believe we've talked about
a little bit on the show before. This is a
(04:14):
term that means rulers of foreign lands, and they controlled
the Delta region of Egypt during the seventeenth century BCE.
These were the first foreigners to rule over part of Egypt,
and there's much that's not known about them, with various
theories about their exact origin, though it seems that some
sort of Canaanite origin is possible, and there has also
been some evidence to suggest that it was perhaps not
(04:38):
an outward invasion but an uprising of peoples who had
previously immigrated to the region. So there's a lot of
scholarly dispute on exactly who these people were and what
this time period consisted of. Now, subsequent invasions by the Nubians,
the Assyrians, the Persians, and the Greeks also occurred, but
pertinent to our discussion here is that in three point
(05:00):
thirty two BCE, Macedonian King Alexander the Great conquered Egypt
from the Persians, and after his death. After Alexander's death
in three twenty three BCE, likely by either poison or disease,
he was only thirty two at the time, so there's
a lot of a lot of arguments for the poison
theory here. But after he dies, a Macedonian general that
(05:23):
had served under Alexander by the name of Ptolemy, declared
himself ruler of Egypt, and the Ptolemy family would rule
Egypt for three centuries. So in her book Egyptian Mythology
that I cited in the last episode, Jeraldin Pinch writes
a little bit about this and points out that the
Ptolemy's ruled from Alexandria, and that is of course where
they built the Great Library of Alexandria. Though most of
(05:44):
its contents, she points out would not have concerned Egyptian culture,
Egyptian history, and Egyptian mythology. You know, Greek culture was
very much the focal point of the lost contents of
this place. Most of the Ptolemies apparently never learned to
speak Egyptian, but the they did, she says, recognize the
challenges of governing a multicultural society and keeping powerful Egyptian
(06:07):
factions content. And this is ultimately where the invention of
Sirapis comes into play, which she describes as quote a
symbol of cultural fusion. So Sirapis is often described as
a patron deity for the Ptolemy capital of Alexandria, so
again a unifying entity. And also in combining all these elements,
(06:27):
Serapis becomes a god of not only fertility and the underworld,
which if you were already loaded in our concept of Osiris,
but also he becomes the god of the sun in
the sky, and he sometimes credited in this role as
Zeus Serapis. And it's interesting that by absorbing these various powers,
he essentially becomes a god of everything, sort of a
(06:50):
monotheism by monopoly or something like.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
That, one god among many, increasingly absorbing more and more responsibilities.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Yeah, Like I was trying to think of it in
terms of, like what's a secular example of like have
have have team mascots ever been merged into single mascots
for you know, like the unification of sports teams. Have
the mascots of of uh? Oh, I don't I don't
know fast food chains ever been utilized in this fashion,
like well, you know, the shones has been taken over
(07:22):
by McDonald's, and now the Shonese boy or the Shoneese
Bear must be combined with elements of of uh, you know,
the Ronald McDonald or Grimace or something.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
You know like that that is funny, but that that
does kind of imply a necessary competition, like between sports
teams or between competitors within a market space, whereas that
wasn't always the case for gods. I mean, like you could,
you know, worship multiple gods and that wasn't usually a problem.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yeah, But but here we see this this intentional attempt
to create a deity and create a followship of this
deity that has stabilizing political objectives behind it. Oh and
real quick, just because this plays in something we talk
about in the last episode is we're stressing that Isis
(08:10):
remains a separate entity, So it's not like they just
took everything and threw it into this concept of the god.
That would be too much, I imagine, But distinct gods
are combined into this entity now. According to Lauren Murphy
and Beware Greeks bearing God's Serapis as a cross cultural deity,
published in the journal Amphora in twenty twenty one, the
(08:32):
invented God doesn't seem to have unified the people in
any meaningful way as far as we can tell, but
it does stand as an example of the diversity that
was present in Egypt at the time. But it was
the religion of the ruling class of foreigners and those
wishing to mix with that ruling class of foreigners. And
also it seems like there were possible connections to an
(08:53):
inspiration via a pre Ptolemaic cult of Osiris APIs Is.
One can see in images of Serapis, he's predominantly depicted
as a Greek deity. But it does sound like there
might have already been some fusion of Osiris and APIs previously.
This would not it would seem not be out of
(09:14):
character with Egyptian religion. Prior to outside influence. Now, the
Ptolemaic line would of course end with its last ruler,
Cleopatra in thirty BCE, as it was, and after this
point it was absorbed by the Roman Empire. Worship of
Serapis lived on under Roman rule, but experienced eventual decline
(09:34):
with the spread of Christianity during the fourth century CE.
I should say like the top down mandated spread of
Christianity in particular is the death blow to the cult
of Serapis. So if Serapis is a kind of monotheism
by monopoly, he's eventually replaced by actual monotheism. And I
(09:54):
think there's some discussion of whether the worship of a
figure like Siapis helped pave the way for the of Christianity.
I've seen that discussed, But at the very least, it
seems like there are other factors involved here within the
Roman Empire and regions affected by the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Interesting.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
But anyway, that's enough on si Rapist. Let's get back
to the original deity, but then also into some of
these conversations about Osiris's possible connection with other cultural traditions.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Let's return to Osiris right, So, rob when we were
Initially looking at this topic, I was asking is there
anything you wanted me to look into? And what you
suggested was a question that I had read a little
bit about before, but I was quite intrigued to go
deeper into. And this is a question that has been
(10:51):
widely explored in the comparative study of religion, the connecting
principle or lack thereof, between Osiris and other gods from
the ancient world, most controversially the Christian Jesus, who are
believed to in some way die and then rise again,
so resurrected gods. This question will take us back to
(11:15):
our old friend James G. Fraser and his incredibly popular,
influential and controversial work The Golden Boo, which this was
a book published in several volumes over the course of
a couple of decades beginning in eighteen ninety. Fraser was
a Scottish scholar of religion in folklore who lived eighteen
fifty four to nineteen forty one, and The Golden Bao
(11:37):
is his best known work. In this book, Fraser catalogs
and analyzes a huge number of myths, rituals, and magical
beliefs from cultures around the world. So He sources these
observations both from like records of things believed in the
ancient world and you know, ancient myths and practices in
(11:58):
the Greco Roman world and so forth. All so he
sources this from ethnographic observations that people have made of
just beliefs and magical practices in cultures all around the globe,
using these observations ultimately to support his broader thesis, which
include the idea that the ritual and mythic elements shared
(12:20):
by most ancient religions point back to an originating cult
practice that involved the ritual sacrifice of a holy king
or guardian figure, often when his fertility was waning, and
the linkage of that practice to the seasonal rebirth of
nature and the crops. So his framework has a core
(12:43):
of this sacrifice of a divine figure, often a divine king,
and a cycle of death and rebirth that has some
implications for nature. You can see why this would be
relevant to the question at hand. Now, before we get
into the specifics of Resz directed gods, a couple of
general notes on Fraser and the Golden Bough. I am
(13:05):
not at all an expert in religious anthropology, but my
personal take on The Golden Bough is that it is
on one hand worth reading because it's important in understanding
the history of Western scholarship on comparative religion, and it's
also just a very absorbing and fascinating text. But on
the other hand, this is like one hundred tow one
(13:28):
hundred and thirty year old book making the case for
a sweeping theory of world religions, and it should be
read with the caution you might expect for that kind
of work. So I would not take any of its claims,
specific or general, at face value without checking for confirmation
and other sources. I would also be skeptical of his
(13:49):
core theoretical framework, and I would just warn that from
research we have done on this book in the past,
I recall discovering that some of Fraser's presentation of ethnographic
information about religious practices seems often tailored or cherry picked
to fit his theories. Now the next general note, I
don't know if what I'm about to say is completely fair,
(14:12):
because Fraser doesn't say the following exactly, but I think
one of the informal conclusions that a reader is likely
to take away from The Golden Bough is that when
it comes down to it, all religions are basically the
same and the differences between them are incidental and superficial,
which I would argue is not correct. And even if
(14:33):
that's just an unintended takeaway that people would get from
this book, I think that's a thing that's a conclusion
that I would really stress people should resist. I do
think there are common themes that you will find popping
up again and again in many religions, but not all.
And I also think that the differences between religious beliefs
(14:54):
and practices around the world and throughout history do go
quite deep. Those differences are significan They're not just superficial
variations on the same thing, and some religions end up
serving profoundly different purposes. So personally, I wonder if the
desire to locate so much sameness or commonality between different
(15:15):
religions is something that really is. It is not something
that comes out of the religions themselves, but more emerges
from the need of scholars to have a theory that
explains how religions work and where they come from, when
in fact, it's a very just like, messy, complicated, variegated
phenomenon that you know, lots of different factors are at work,
(15:36):
and so it's hard to have a very simple theory
that explains where they come from.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
Yeah, I mean, even like the discussion we just had
about Serapis and Serapis's origins and all. I mean, that
doesn't fully capture what this entity may have meant and
the various additional complexities that may have been involved in
the genesis of this figure. So, yeah, when you get
into religion, when you get into belief, and you get
in to these into a process that often you know,
(16:03):
you're talking about a tradition that goes for centuries and
therefore has all sorts of room for change and alteration
and transformation and so forth.
Speaker 2 (16:13):
That's right, exactly exactly. But anyway, to come back to
these resurrected gods, A big part of Fraser's model was
that many religions of the ancient world commonly shared a
dying and reviving god, usually a male deity associated with fertility,
who undergoes a divine marriage to a fertility goddess, who
(16:35):
is then killed or sacrificed sometimes when his fertility wanes
in some way, and then rises from death to live again.
And this resurrection is linked to cycles of loss and
return in the natural and political world, such as the seasons,
the death of plants in winter and the rebirth in
spring and summer, the seasonal inundation of the nile, and
(16:56):
other natural cycles and political cycles, the death of kings
and the coronation of their errs. So the question is
do we really find these dying and rising gods all
throughout the ancient religions. Unfortunately, if you look into this question,
I think you find the topic horribly polluted by a
(17:17):
lot of motivated argumentation, primarily tracing back to the question
of whether Jesus of Nazareth should be thought of as
one of these dying and rising deities. So this topic
is infected by both Christian apologetics and anti Christian polemics.
So you've got, you know, people who don't like Christianity,
(17:37):
anti Christian polemicists arguing, look, see how stupid Christianity is.
Jesus is just a copy of these other dying and
rising deities. And then you've got Christian apologists arguing that no,
Christianity is totally unique, it is unlike any other religion
on earth because it is the one true religion and
all such comparisons are spurious, so caveat that there is
(17:59):
a lot of that kind of garbage floating around in
both directions. I'm trying to do my best to put
together a clear and what seems to me relatively unbiased
answer to the question of what similarities exist between these
alleged dying and rising gods and to what extent Osiris
and Jesus fit into that mold.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Yeah, the real tragedy is that it just makes it
almost impossible for these two to ever hang out.
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yeah. Well, all of Jesus's friends are saying Osiris is
just trying to be like Jesus, and all of Jesus
Osirius's friends are saying Jesus is just trying to be
like him.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:33):
Will the accusations of copying never stop? But anyway, So,
of course, the dying and reviving Deity's framework was popular
with Fraser and his allies, so I think in the
early twentieth century were sort of associated with Cambridge University.
So I want to go through a couple of the
examples that Fraser cites and then we'll get into critiques
of them. So one example is the god Adonis, a
(18:57):
figure in Greek myth thought to have been derived from
other ancient Near Eastern deities, such as the Mesopotamian god
of agriculture, Tamus or Demuzi. Adonis, in many tellings, began
as a mortal man famed for his beauty. He was
sort of the pinnacle of hotness, and he was so
handsome that when he was young, the goddesses Aphrodite and
(19:20):
Persephone fought bitterly over whether he would live with one
of them or the other. More on that myth in
a minute. But then another story is that later in
his life Adonis was the lover of Aphrodite until he
was tragically impaled by a wild bore wild hunting, so
it gets the tusk right in the guts, and so
(19:41):
he's out there dying in the in the wilderness on
the hunt, and the goddess Aphrodite comes and weeps over
his body, and as her tears fall and Adonis's blood
runs down into the earth, the ground produces delicate flowers.
Sometimes a specific type of flower is named, so like
you know you've got. In some understandings of the story,
the body fluids of these divine lovers combine upon the
(20:05):
young man's death and bring forth the fruits of the earth,
and to try to understand the significance of this figure,
Fraser starts looking at celebrations of the death of Adonnas.
Speaker 1 (20:16):
There was a.
Speaker 2 (20:17):
Festival or a commemoration of the death of Adonnas that
was celebrated in the summertime, and Fraser looks at accounts
of this ritual. So Fraser says, quote, at Alexandria, images
of Aphrodite and Adonis were displayed on two couches. Beside
them were set ripe fruits of all kinds, cakes, plants
(20:38):
growing in flower pots, and green bowers twined with Annis.
The marriage of the lovers was celebrated one day, and
then on the morrow, women attired as mourners, with streaming
hair and bared breasts, bore the image of the dead
Adonnas to the seashore and committed it to the waves.
Yet they sorrowed not without hope, for they sang that
(20:59):
the lost would come back again. And after describing more
of these rituals, Fraser says, summarizing quote, we may therefore
accept as probable an explanation of the Adonis worship, which
accords so well with the facts of nature and with
the analogy of similar rights in other lands. Moreover, the
explanation is countenanced by a considerable body of opinion amongst
(21:23):
the ancients themselves, who again and again interpreted the dying
and reviving God as the reaped and sprouting grain. Fraser
also cites Temus, the Mesopotamian god from which Adonis is
probably derived. Tamus was the consort of the goddess Inana
and was also linked to crop cycles and apparently images
(21:45):
of death and rebirth. Among many gods Fraser offers as
displaying death and resurrection. He also cites the Egyptian god Osiris. Now,
of course, we already went over the basic myth of Osiris,
But what does Fraser have to say about the meaning
of Osiris here? So I'm going to read a couple
of lengthier quotes from Fraser here on Osiris.
Speaker 1 (22:05):
Quote.
Speaker 2 (22:06):
In the resurrection of Osiris, the Egyptians saw the pledge
of a life everlasting for themselves beyond the grave. They
believed that every man would live eternally in the other
world if only his surviving friends did for his body
what the gods had done for the body of Osiris. Hence,
the ceremonies observed by the Egyptians over the human dead
(22:27):
were an exact copy of those which Annibis, Horus and
the rest had performed over the dead god. And then
he goes on. At every burial there was enacted a
representation of the divine mystery which had been performed of
old over Osiris, when his son, his sisters, his friends
were gathered round his mangled remains and succeeded by their
(22:48):
spells and manipulations in converting his broken body into the
first mummy, which they afterwards reanimated and furnished with the
means of entering on a new individual life beyond the grave.
The mummy of the deceased was Osiris. The professional female
mourners were his two sisters, Isis and Nepthis Annibis Horas,
(23:09):
all the gods of the Osirian legend gathered about the corpse.
In this way, every dead Egyptian was identified with Osiris
and bore his name. From the Middle Kingdom onwards, it
was the regular practice to address the deceased as Osiris
so and so, as if he were the god himself,
and to add the standing epithet true of speech, because
(23:31):
true speech was characteristic of Osiris. The thousands of inscribed
and pictured tombs that have been opened in the Valley
of the Nile prove that the mystery of the resurrection
was performed for the benefit of every dead Egyptian. As
Osiris died and rose again from the dead, so all
men hoped to arise like him from death to life eternal.
(23:52):
So there's a kind of in what Fraser is implying here,
there's a kind of special role for Osiris, especially when
compared to some of these other examples of allegedly dying
and reviving gods, where Osiris not only in Fraser's mind,
dies and then is brought to life again, but by
re enacting what happens to Osiris, he shows the way
(24:16):
the people that regular mortals can also be revived again
after death, though we will add some qualifications to in
what sense they should be thought of as revived. So
one thing that of course causes controversy is that among
many of these examples, Fraser also brings up the example
of Christ, the Christian Jesus, drawing direct connection between the
(24:39):
Easter resurrection of Christ and say, the rituals of Adonis.
This drew scorn from conservative Christians, of course, but you
might expect that, but the question would remain, were these
comparisons sound comparisons between all these different figures? And I think,
after doing some additional reading, I think the answer is
(25:01):
a little bit but mostly no.
Speaker 3 (25:03):
So.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Later in the twentieth century, Fraser's category of dying and
reviving gods came under what seems to me like quite
legitimate criticism by other major scholars. One notable name here
is the American historian of religions Jonathan Z. Smith, who
was affiliated with the University of Chicago and directly addressing
(25:25):
this question of dying and reviving gods. Smith wrote a
highly cited entry in the Encyclopedia of Religion edited by Eliade.
The entry was called Dying and Rising Gods, and in
this chapter Smith showed that really the category of dying
and Rising gods is not much of a category, in
(25:47):
that most of the items Fraser and others placed within
the class are quote based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly
late or highly ambiguous texts. In other words, this this
category emerges from reliance on questionable sources and on tortured
readings of legitimate source materials to try to fit them
(26:09):
into the resurrected god box. So how would that be
given what we just looked at. It seemed like Fraser
presented some good examples.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
Well.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
Smith says that actually, if you look at the examples
Fraser sites, there aren't any fully dying and rising gods. Instead,
you have two distinct categories. One is dying gods. These
are gods that die but are not said to rise
again from death. And the other is disappearing gods. Gods
(26:39):
that disappear and then in some cases reappear, sometimes quote
with monotonous frequency. But the disappearance is not death and
the reappearance is not resurrection.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
Okay, well we may have to have some examples of this.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Okay, Well, adnnask has got you covered here, so I'm
going to look in detail at the example of Adonnas.
Smith says, there are two main myths of Adonnas that
we know from our sources. One is the one I
mentioned earlier, where Adonis is killed by a bore and
his lover Aphrodite weeps over his body and creates a
fragile flower. So in this myth, Adonnis dies but he
(27:17):
does not rise. Fraser sort of allides this by connecting
the story to the mourning celebration of Adonnas's death with
sort of the involvement of summer crops and plants and
stuff like that. But in the story, Adonnas just dies.
We'll get to the rituals in a second. But in
the story there's no resurrection, and the festival created by
(27:40):
Aphrodite to commemorate his death is a festival of mourning.
The other Adonnas myth to quote Smith here tells of
quote a quarrel between two goddesses, Aphrodite and Persephone, for
the affections of the infant Adonis Zeus or Calliope decrees
that Adonnas should spend part of the in the upper
(28:00):
world with one I assume with Aphrodite, and part of
the year in the lower world with the other. I
assume that would be Persephone. This tradition of by location
similar to that connected with Persephone and perhaps DEMUSI has
no suggestion of death and rebirth, So you could argue
maybe that going into the underworld and then coming back
(28:22):
to the upper world has like resonance with the idea
of resurrection. There's some kind of symbolic linkage. It's thematically similar,
but it is not literally the same thing.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
Right, And I think that that becomes obvious when you
look at any number of stories about characters venturing into
the underworld, it generally has the flavor of a physical journey.
And we see that even carried on into literary traditions,
like even in Dante's Inferno, Like Dante does not die
and to send into the Inferno. No, he travels there.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Yeah, in some important senses he is changed, but he doesn't.
He doesn't like have to go through bodily death.
Speaker 1 (28:59):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
But okay, So Fraser was also looking not just at
like written versions of the Adonna Smith, but also at
rituals to see what people believed about him. So what
about evidence for the resurrection of Adonnas in ritual? In
terms of ritual, there are later sources possibly linking Adonnas
to resurrection, but these sources are problematic. According to Jonathan Smith,
(29:32):
there is one allegedly second century source by Lucien that
in a pretty sketchy and ambiguous way, describes rituals which
could be interpreted as celebrating the resurrection of Adonnas, but
it's not clear at all that this is what Lucian
is describing. To quote from Smith's summary, Lucian says, quote,
(29:53):
on the third day of the ritual, a statue of
Adonnas is quote brought out into the light and quote
dressed as if alive. And I was thinking, wait a minute,
but aren't many cult statues addressed as if alive?
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Yeah? Yeah, and yeah. You get into a complex area
of interpretation when you figure out, like what does it
mean for someone to address a statue of a deity?
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Right, So, a cult statue may have some kind of
eternal existence that it is connected to, even if it
is an image of a god who has died, But
that doesn't necessarily mean if you're like talking to the
statue that you believe that the god was resurrected again
from death.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
And then Smith says that there are other descriptions of
these rituals which do make unambiguous reference to the resurrection
of Adonnas, but they only show up later in the
Roman period, after the spread of Christianity, and they are
written by Christians in a way that raises questions about them, Like,
so if Christians are saying that worshippers of Adonnas are
(30:57):
saying Adonis was raised from the dead, is the resurrected
God theme of Christianity perhaps having some influence on the
myth of Adonis by this point, or is the resurrected
God theme of Christianity influencing the way Christian observers interpret
the rituals of Roman pagans.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Hmm, yeah, that's a very good point.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
So Smith says, quote this pattern will recur for many
of the figures considered an indigenous mythology and ritual focusing
on the deities death and rituals of lamentation, followed by
a later Christian report adding the element nowhere found in
the earlier native sources that the God was resurrected. I
think that is a very interesting pattern. So like Christian
(31:42):
observers look at other religions and they see a dead God,
and it's quite possible they just assume that a dead
God is supposed to rise again and kind of read
that into the ritual.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
Yeah. Yeah, I think then there's probably a case to
be made, even like the spread of Christianity and like
the reinterpretation often with you know, an agenda of of tradition,
local traditions, taking existing religious traditions and sort of reframing
them in the light of the Christian religion exactly.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
So, but what about the thing about symbolic rebirth. What
about the the ritual and mythic association that Fraser seems
to allege between Adonnas and plant life, which you know
dies in the winter and is quote resurrected in spring.
Well Smith says, if you look at ancient sources, even
these symbolic associations are not present in the worship of Adonnas.
(32:37):
Smith writes, quote, the frequently cited gardens of Adonnas the
Kepoi were proverbial illustrations of the brief, transitory nature of
life and contain no hint of rebirth. The point is
that the young plant shoots rapidly, wither and die, not
that the seeds have been reborn when they sprout. So
(32:59):
I thought that was also really interesting, because I would
just so easily and so naturally look at a sort
of plant based ritual celebration and assume it had something
to do with cycles of death and rebirth. But that's
an assumption that might not be what the people doing
that practice think it means. So Smith is saying what
(33:20):
ancient people said about these gardens was not that they
were to emphasize the theme of resurrection, but to emphasize
the theme once again of mourning and loss of the
beautiful youth who died too soon, just like these young
plant shoots that come up and then wither rapidly. I
feel like this kind of thing makes me a little
more cautious about my my myth interpretation goggles that.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
Yeah, I mean absolutely. It even goes back to some
of the ways that we discussed and cited discussions of
Osiris in the first episode, you know, thinking about how
this basic myth matches up with you know, cyclical life
and death and the agricultural cycles as well.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
But okay, that's a donnas. What about Osiris? It seems
to me that of all the examples that Smith looks at,
Osiris comes the closest to being genuinely killed and resurrected
on a plane reading of the myth. But is he
really resurrected? Smith argues, no, Osiris is not actually resurrected,
(34:22):
because remember, of course, Osiris in the story is killed
and dismembered by Seth or set and then the pieces
of his body are put back together again and he
is rejuvenated, but not in this world. Instead, he goes
on living in the other place, in the underworld, the
realm of the dead, where he is empowered to become
(34:44):
the master and judge of the wandering dead. So he
does not rise from the dead. He goes on living
in the afterlife. So it almost seems to me that
his resurrection in the afterlife could be seen as kind
of anonymous with his enthronement as the lord of the
dead and his empowerment to serve the role of judgment.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Absolutely, And regarding the ritual reenactment of the story in
osiris worship practices, Smith says, quote the repeated formula rise up,
you have not died, whether applied to Osiris or a
citizen of Egypt, signaled a new permanent life in the
realm of the dead.
Speaker 1 (35:25):
That's right. Going back to what we said about the
idea that Osiris is ultimately kind of the opener of
the way that democratizes or helps propel the already existing
democratization of the afterlife. It's no longer just for kings.
It is now something that everyone has access to, provided
you can have the right mummification procedures performed on your
(35:47):
body exactly.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
And so this is something that Fraser was saying, where
I think he was sort of on the right track
in the case of Osiris. Smith argues that in the
case of Osiris, there is a clear link between myth
and ritual. There's the strong connection, which is something that
Fraser is always trying to emphasize, is the link between
myth and ritual and myths sort of being the story
(36:11):
like that the ritual re enacts the myth, and the
myth in Fraser's telling is often derived from the ritual.
It's like a narrativizing of the ritual. But whatever the
actual chain of events there is in this case, there
is clearly a strong link between the myth and the ritual.
In that the mythical description of the recovery and reassembly
(36:32):
of the pieces of the body of Osiris, I believe
this is by Isis and his allies. This is a
clear parallel of the funeral rits of Egypt. Smith lists
these funeral rites quote the vigil over his corpse, then
the hymns of lamentation, the embalmment usually performed by Annibis,
the washing and purification of the corpse, the undertaking of
(36:55):
the elaborate ritual of the opening of the mouth with
its one hundred and seven separate operations, as well as
other procedures for reanimation, the dressing of the body and
the pouring out of libations. So in a way, the
dead Egyptian would, in a sense, through having the funeral
rites performed upon their body, become Osiris, and just like Osiris,
(37:18):
though dead to this world, they would awaken to a
new life in another world. Smith writes, quote the myth
and ritual of Osiris emphasizes the message that there is
life for the dead, although it is of a different
character than that of the living. What is to be
feared is in a quote from the Book of Going
forth by Day. I think this is another name for
(37:39):
what is sometimes called the Book of the Dead quote
dying for a second time in the realm of the dead.
And there are ways that, according to the story, this
can happen to you, for example, being devoured by the lion, hippopotamus,
crocodile monster am it in the underworld.
Speaker 1 (37:57):
Yeah, I know, we've talked a little bit about the
complexity of the ancient Egyptian afterlife before, where it's it's
it's not just a it's it's it's not something you
could compare just sort of like the sort of mainstream
vision of a Christian heaven. It is a place where
you're probably gonna need your spells, you're gonna need your followers,
You're gonna need tools and a plan in order to
(38:19):
make the best go of.
Speaker 2 (38:20):
It, exactly right, you have to prepare. It's not just
that you have to be worthy of the good afterlife,
but like in in some visions, it takes like work
to get there.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Yeah, and this is of course, this is not just
an ancient Egyptian religion. There are various examples we can
turn to where like that journey between this life and
the next is one that is perilous and has to
go just right an other in order to work right.
Speaker 2 (38:46):
So it seems to me that of the examples Fraser
brings up o Cyrus maybe comes the closest, or is
one of the closer ones to being a true dying
and reviving God. But even in his case, there's a
pretty strong conceptual distinction of what the new life is
that makes calling this a resurrection somewhat strained. So, after
(39:07):
analyzing all of the most prominent cases of alleged dying
and reviving gods. Smith concludes as follows quote. As the
above examples make plain, the category of dying and rising
deities is exceedingly dubious. It has been based largely on
Christian interest and tenuous evidence. As such, the category is
of more interest to the history of scholarship than to
(39:31):
the history of religions. And you know, so that might
kind of make you think like, ah, well, then who cares?
But I think it is actually very illustrative that you
can see this category sort of emerge, where with scholars
trying to make sense of all these different stories and
rituals and stuff, and putting all these gods and figures
from myths into the category, and ultimately, if you look
(39:55):
really close, it's not a super cohesive category, and a
lot of the things, maybe all the things put into
it don't really fit and don't have as much in
common as the scholar is claiming they do. And if
Smith is correct here, I find his case pretty convincing.
If he's correct about this being largely based on Christian
(40:15):
interest by scholars from Christian cultures, I think that's also
illuminating that like dominant sort of story themes within your
culture that seem very familiar to you, just kind of
naturally manifest when looking at ambiguously similar things in other
cultural contexts.
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Yeah, yeah, and I mean at times it can be
a very useful exercise and either helping us to get
a leg up on understanding another culture or another system
of beliefs. It can also be a frame of commonality.
It can be very positive in terms of like seeing
the similarities rather than differences. But yeah, when you get
into like this deeper attempt to understand the religion, you
could see where some of it could cast too much
(40:56):
of a shadow on your interpretation of this other way
of looking at the cosmos.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
I think that's right. But then on the other hand,
I want to come back and say we shouldn't stop
looking at similarities between religions because there are similarities. Like
Smith says, Yeah, this dying and reviving god category doesn't
make a whole lot of sense, But there are these
other patterns you can see, like dying gods. There are
a bunch of dying god myths that have interesting things
(41:23):
in common, and you could kind of look at, like,
why do they have these things in common that that's
worth studying. You also have this pattern of the disappearing
and sometimes reappearing God myth. What does that tell us
about religions? You can look at these similarities, and so
it's also not unreasonable to look at similarities between Christianity,
(41:43):
a religion that certainly does have a dying and reviving God,
with some of these other religions. And so one source
that came across that I thought made a very interesting
point A was a chapter called Resurrection in Ancient Egypt
by the German egypt ptologist jan Osman, who has plenty
of his own ideas he's pushing about, like the lineage
(42:06):
of certain types of resurrection beliefs. I think ultimately he
thinks that a lot of these beliefs have an original
source in Egyptian religion and then spread out to other places.
But regardless of whether he's correct about that, I think
he makes a very good point about a similarity between
belief in Christ and the earlier belief in Osiris, which,
(42:28):
on one hand, you have plenty of differences, like the
death of Jesus is a one time event that is
situated within history. It said, like, you know, well, he's
a man who existed at a certain time and place
in history, and so it's like his death is a
historical event, not something that takes place within a kind
of mythic time or a within a mythic landscape. But
(42:48):
on the other hand, you could look at the deaths
and revivals of these two god figures, is having a
lot in common in that, as Osman says quote, through
his death and resurrection, Christ has paved the way to
Paradise or Elysium in a way not altogether dissimilar from
that of Osiris, who also threw his victory over seth
(43:09):
opened a realm beyond the realm of death. The decisive
common denominator of Christianity and ancient Egyptian religion is the
idea of redemption from death, that beyond the realm of death,
there is an Elysian realm of eternal life in the
presence of the divine. So in both cases you can
look at these gods as gods who were killed and
(43:31):
then in some sense revived. Christ is said to be
revived onto earth and then ascends into heaven. Osiris is
revived and made lord, a lord of the underworld and
judge of the dead. But in both cases they open
the way for people to have a sort of heaven again.
Want to put the star on heaven there and say
(43:52):
it means different things in the two different concepts, but
it is a positive afterlife that is now available to
the people.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Yeah. Absolutely. In both cases, the individual is the opener
of the way, you know, and the Ptolemies might come
along and say, you know, we have this guy named
Serapis and he does all.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Of this as well, perfect give me all three. Yeah,
well he's got a dog. Wait now, was he often
depicted as having Cerberus by his side, like having a
three headed pup or is that just a unique feature
of that sculpture.
Speaker 1 (44:24):
I mean, based on the remaining images of Serapis, it
does seem like it seems like he is sometimes depicted
with Cerberus, and I believe that that is simply because, Yeah,
if you are going to take this character of Osiris,
who is a god of the underworld, and you are
going to spin him into this this very Greek themed model,
(44:46):
well then you're going to drag in Hades, and you're
going to drag in like this key example of sort
of in a way summing up this idea of the
taming of death. Right. So that's my understanding of it.
But I I certainly have seen other depictions of him
that don't have the dog present. All right, Well, on
that note, I believe we're going to go ahead and
close the book on Osiris here with the caveat that
(45:11):
I'm not sure what the next core episode is going
to be, but we were throwing around the idea of
doing something that was still kind of Osiris, but is
not Osiris Part three, So just I don't know. You'd
have to see what happens, and we shall see what
happens as well.
Speaker 2 (45:26):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
In the meantime, we'd love to hear from everyone out
there if you have thoughts on this two parter, if
you have thoughts on past episodes or potential future episodes
right in we would love to hear from you. Just
a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily
a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursdays, but on Mondays we do listener mail, on
Wednesdays we do a short form episode, and on Fridays
we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about
(45:49):
a weird movie on Weird House Cinema.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
us to topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
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