aily ceremony closed with ablutions, anointings and
a bountiful feast of bread, geese, beer and oxen; having taken his fill
of these, the god returned to his shrine until the next morning, when
the ritual was renewed. The words that accompanied the manual gestures
are, in the rituals that have come down to us, wholly dominated by the
myth of Osiris: it is often hard to discern much connexion between the
acts and the formulae recited, but the main thought is clearly that the
priest represents Horus, the pious son of the dead divinity Osiris. That
this conception is very old is proved by the fact that even in the
Pyramid texts "the eye of Horus" is a synonym for all offerings: an
ancient tale of which only shreds have reached us related how Seth had
torn the eye of Horus from him, though not before he himself had
suffered a still more serious mutilation; and by some means, we know not
how, the restoration of the eye was instrumental in bringing about the
vindication of Osiris. As to the manual rites of the daily cult, all
that can here be said is that incense, purifications and anointings with
various oils played a large part; the sacrifices consisted chiefly of
slaughtered oxen and geese; burnt offerings were a very late innovation.

At an early date the rites practised in the various temples were
conformed to a common pattern. This holds good not only for the daily
ritual, but also for many festivals that were celebrated on the same day
throughout the whole length of the land. Such were the calendrical
feasts, called "the beginnings of the seasons," and including, for
example, the monthly and half-monthly festivals, that of the New Year
and that of the rising of Sirius (Sothis). But there were also local
feast days like that of Neith in Sais (Hdt. ii. 62) or that of Ammon in
southern Opi (Luxor). These doubtless had a more individual character,
and often celebrated some incident supposed to have occurred in the
lifetime of the god. Sometimes, as in the case of the feast of Osiris in
Abydos, a veritable drama would be enacted, in which the whole history
of the god, his sufferings and final triumph were represented in mimic
form. At other times the ceremonial was more mysterious and symbolical,
as in the feast of the raising of the Ded-column [HRG] when a column of
the kind was drawn by cords into an upright position. But the most
common feature of these holy days was the procession of the god, when he
was carried on the s