Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/464

156 Sea and river deities outside Egypt were like Osiris wholly or partly green. The god of the Tiber had "green vestments" when he appeared to Æneas in a dream; the British mermaids had sometimes green hair; the Slavic "water-man" or "water grandfather" (the Roman name), who lives under the water, sits on a mill-wheel on occasion "combing his long green hair." The "beautiful green disk " of the Egyptians, which symbolized creative power existed in the primordial waters in the night of Eternity. The sun of the Underworld was green, and the newly-risen sun was red or golden. Herodotus refers to the solar pillars of gold and emerald in the temple of Heracles at Tyre (bk. ii. chap. 44). On the pectoral of Senusert III. in Cairo museum the dead are coloured green and blue. In the Underworld the greenness of Osiris was the greenness of his life-substance and of the primeval green sun.

Before dealing with the problem of the mysterious green substance that was to the ancient Egyptians the very essence of life, it is necessary first of all to summarize the drama of the Nile with which Osiris was so closely associated, (I refer, of course, to Nilotic phenomena before the construction of the Aswan barrage.)

During the period of the Low Nile, Egypt is swept, dried and blistered by the Hamseen, or sand wind, of fifty days' duration. Every green thing is coated with dust. Then a change comes. The cool north wind (the Etesian wind of the Greeks) begins to blow and the sand is cleared from the verdure. The almost stagnant Nile commences to rise. For three or four days it runs green. This is the "Green Nile." As the river rises it becomes red as blood. This is the "Red Nile." The inundation follows. When the Nile subsides within its banks it remains muddy for a time before it becomes blue again.

"Perhaps," wrote Osborn, in the days before the Nile