Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/459

 Coloiw Symbolism. i 5 1

Osiris and the colours of deities closely associated with Osiris.

Sir James Frazer, the most notable exponent of the " Vegetation School," would have it that Osiris was coloured green because he was a corn god. I am afraid, however, that the colour symbolism of The Golden Bough is, especially in this connection, superficial and unconvincing, and that it decorates one of the " temporary bridges " which Sir James himself suggests may " sooner or later break down." ^

" Osiris," writes Sir James, " is often represented on the monuments as black, he is still more commonly depicted as green, appropriately enough for a corn god, who may be conceived of as black while the seed is underground, but as green after it has sprouted. So the Greeks recog- nised both a Green and a Black Demeter." -

Here the learned author of The Golden Bough is highly speculative and controversial. His " Green Demeter " is his own discovery and is undoubtedly hypothetical. If Osiris personified green corn when represented as a green god, he should have been green after he was black and before he became yellow. But, as a matter of fact, he is yellow before he becomes green. As a yellow god he lies on his bier in mummified form, and is reanimated by various deities until at length he rises up. The myth tells that Osiris afterwards became the Judge of the Dead, and in his Underworld he appears as a green god. In the Judgment scene of the Papyrus of Ani, Isis and Nephthys, who stand beside the Green Osiris, have yellow faces and hands.

Why, it may be asked, was Osiris depicted as a yellow god on his funerary bier } It was evidently not merely because he was a dead god. Sir James Frazer does not offer a explanation : he does not even mention the yellow Osiris. As the twin goddesses, Isis and Nephthys, have 1 The Golden Bough (3rd ed.), vol. i. pp. xix, xx. - Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild (3rd ed.), vol. i. p. 263.