The Encyclopedia of World Religions

Otto, Rudolf S 329

ander of Macedon’s conquests (Alexander the Great, 336–323 B . C . E .), the cult of Osiris combined with that of Apis, a sacred bull that was kept in Memphis; when the bull died, it was mummified and a new bull was chosen. The result was a god known as Serapis. The worship of this god spread throughout the Mediterranean world as one of the MYSTERY RELIGIONS . Artwork often shows Osiris as a mummy with arms crossed. Despite the connection with the bull, the later Serapis was imaged as a seated, majestic male, modeled on the image of Zeus. The most popular Osiris temple was at the Egyptian town of Abydos. There the road along which a procession traveled during the Osiris festival became a popu lar place to be buried. Further reading: Ruth Schumann Antelme and Stéphane Rossini, Becoming Osiris: The Ancient Egyptian Death Experience, trans. Jon Graham (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 1998); Plutarch, Moralia, vol. 5, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960); Ian Shaw, Ancient Egypt: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Otto, Rudolf (1869–1937) influential German theologian, philosopher, and historian of religions Otto taught Protestant theology at the universities of Göttingen, Breslau, and Marburg. His major con cern was to analyze the experiences that, he said, made all religion possible. He did so, especially in his best-selling book, The Idea of the Holy (1917). According to Otto, religion depends upon a human experience that is unlike any other. To refer to this experience, he coined the word “numinous.” Otto analyzed the numinous experience in terms of three moments. As mysterium, it totally transcends human understanding and evokes a response of silent dumbfoundedness. As tremendum, it appears as overpowering and majestic and evokes a response of trembling and a feeling of creatureliness. As fasci nans, the numinous appears as gracious and merci ful and evokes a response of love.

to his dead wife, Orpheus rejected advances made by women of Thrace known as Bassarae. He died when, in wild rituals devoted to Dionysos, the Bas sarae ripped him to pieces. The Orphics also told a story about the origins of human beings. The Titans, who were wicked, ate the god Dionysos. In anger Z EUS slew the Titans with his thunderbolt and made human beings from the ashes. This story teaches that human beings have a divine core (Dionysos) trapped by evil (the Titans). Indeed, according to Plato the Orphics taught that the body was the prison of the soul. They may have also believed in rebirth. Orphic religious practices seem to have aimed at freeing the soul from its prison and at avoiding punish ments in the underworld after death. Osiris A god of ancient Egypt identified with the dead Pharaoh or king. The worship of Osiris goes back to the third millennium (3000–2001) B . C . E . Our best account of the stories of Osiris comes from the Greek writer Plutarch, who lived in the late first to early second century C . E . According to him, Osiris’s wicked brother and rival, Seth, tricked Osiris, killed him, and eventually cut his body into 14 pieces, which he scattered here and there. Osiris’s wife, Isis, searched for and man aged to find all of the pieces except for the sexual organs. She reassembled them and brought Osiris back to life as the god of the underworld. Then the assembly of the gods decided that H ORUS , the son of Osiris, should be king in his place. In accor dance with the wishes of Isis, however, they did not put Seth to death. In the earliest times that we know of, Osiris was identified with the dead king and so was the ruler of the dead. By about the year 2000 B . C . E ., large numbers of Egyptians came to believe that ordinary dead people could also become Osiris and attain immortality after death. To do so, they had to perform the right RITUALS . These rituals pre pared them for a test after death, when their hearts would be weighed in a balance against a feather, which stood for truth. Much later still, after Alex