and
dissolving that worship and persuasion that hath entered almost all men's
constitutions from their very birth, and opening vast doors to the
atheists' faction, who convert all divine matters into human." "Others,"
he says, "consider these beings as demons intermediate between gods and
men. And Osiris afterwards became Serapis, the Pluto of the under-world."

Other explanations of the myth are given by Plutarch. First, the
geographical explanation. According to this, Osiris is Water, especially
the Nile. Isis is Earth, especially the land of Egypt adjoining the Nile,
and overflowed by it. Horus, their son, is the Air, especially the moist,
mild air of Egypt. Typhon is Fire, especially the summer heat which dries
up the Nile and parches the land. His seventy-two associates are the
seventy-two days of greatest heat, according to the Egyptian opinion.
Nepthys, his wife, sister of Isis, is the Desert outside of Egypt, but
which in a higher inundation of the Nile being sometimes overflowed,
becomes productive, and has a child by Osiris, named Anubis. When Typhon
shuts Osiris into the ark, it is the summer heat drying up the Nile and
confining it to its channel. This ark, entangled in a tree, is where the
Nile divides into many mouths at the Delta and is overhung by the wood.
Isis, nursing the child of the king, the fragrance, etc., represent the
earth nourishing plants and animals. The body of Osiris, torn by Typhon
into fourteen parts, signifies either the division of the Nile at its
mouths or the pools of water left after the drying up of the inundation.

There is so much in this account which accords with the facts, that there
can be no doubt of its correctness so far as it goes. At the same time it
is evidently an incomplete explanation. The story means this, but
something more. Beside the geographical view, Plutarch therefore adds a
scientific and an astronomical explanation, as well as others more
philosophical. According to these, Osiris is in general the productive,
the creative power in nature; Isis, the female property of nature, hence
called by Plato the nurse; and Typhon the destructive property in nature;
while Horus is the mediator between creation and destruction. And thus we
have the triad of Osiris, Typhon, and Horus, essentially corresponding to
the Hindoo triad, Brahma, Siva, and Vishnu, and also to the Persian triad,
Ormazd, Ahriman, and Mithra. And so this myth will express the Egyptian
view of the c