After Samhain, the world plunges into darkness. It's the witches' new year, but the time of the dead. Days grow shorter and shorter, wending to their ultimate pinch. Leaves scatter in the cold wind, and the rains come.
Then, on the winter solstice, we break from darkness to celebrate the return of the light: the return of the divine Child, born to the Mother, symbolism repeated throughout Western myth. Never so brightly does this symbol shine as in the myths of Dionysos, Greek god of wine, and Osiris, Egyptian god of vegetation and the dead, both said to be reborn at the winter solstice. Having experienced death, they returned, each born again of their mother and lover. Having experienced rebirth, in their mystery cults of antiquity they could promise rebirth to initiates, a template later borrowed for the promise of the risen Christ. Even easier than seeing the features of Christ in these two gods is seeing Dionysos' features in Osiris, and vice versa.
In fact, Dionysos and Osiris may have been the same deity, seen through the different lenses and cult practices of Greece and Egypt. The promises they made their mystery devotees seem to have been the same: eternal life, reached paradoxically by undergoing bodily death.
The Myths of Dionysos and Osiris
Dionysos' and Osiris' myths may not seem at first glance to have much in common, colored as they are by different personae and different placements of their heroes.
In Robert Graves' standard version in The Greek Myths - of which version there are many variants, some important to the god's connection with Osiris - Dionysos was the son of Semele, a Theban lover of Zeus who while pregnant asked the great thunder-god to come to her in his divine aspect. Zeus thereby burned Semele to ashes. Clever Hermes, messenger god, snatched up the unborn babe and sewed him into Zeus's thigh, from whence Dionysos was born again. Zeus's jealous wife, the goddess Hera, then bade the Titans rip Dionysos to shreds, but Zeus's goddess mother Rhea took up the pieces and reconstituted the godling.
After these three births, then, Hermes took Dionysos to the nymphs of Nysa to rear. When Dionysos reached manhood, Hera found him again and sent him mad. Mad he ranged the world, conquering it with an army of women followers, maenads, and of goat-foot satyrs. He spread the cultivation of the vine as he conquered, to Egypt, Libya, India, Phrygia and then back to Greece, where Rhea purified him of many murders. He continued teaching vine-tillage first in Thrace and then in Thebes, where he encountered resistance. He countered the resistance first gently, then with horrors, inducing Queen Agave to rip her king-son Pentheus limb from limb. Dionysos then swept through the Aegean, escaping from pirates on dolphin-back; on Naxos, he seduced and married the Cretan princess Ariadne, abandoned by the Athenian hero Theseus.
After these conquests, the Olympians admitted him to their number. Shining with godhead, Dionysos traveled then to Hades and with the help of the goddess Persephone released his mother from the dead.
Osiris too was concerned with the dead, but ended his passage as their lord. According to the outline of his myth transcribed by Greek first-century-B.C. writer Plutarch - probably from early Egyptian sources such as Pyramid Texts, according to J.E. Manchip White in Ancient Egypt: Its Culture and History - fertility-god Osiris was a wise king who civilized Egypt. He went on to conquer and civilize other lands, teaching them agriculture and metal-working, leaving his goddess-wife Isis as Egypt's regent.
Osiris' brother Seth, god of sterility, fell in love with Isis and with the help of 72 conspirators plotted Osiris' demise. On Osiris' return, Seth invited him to a great banquet and there displayed a beautifully wrought coffer, offering it to the guest whose proportions fit it most closely. When Osiris lay in the coffer, which of course he fit exactly, Seth and his henchmen slammed the chest closed, swathed it in lead and cast it into the Nile. It floated downstream past Tanis and out to sea.
At Byblos, on the coast of Syria, the chest washed ashore. Around it grew a tree. Interestingly enough, no two sources agree on this tree's species - we can choose from sycamore, tamarisk, persea or heath. The king of Byblos made the tree into a palace pillar, and lovely Isis, searching for her husband, found this pillar and begged it from Byblos' Queen Ishtar. But Seth found the recovered coffin and cut Osiris' corpse to pieces, which he strewed through Egypt.
The devoted goddess, renewing her search, recovered all the god's members except for his penis, devoured by an oxyrhychus fish. Putting the severed limbs together, Isis with her sister-goddess Nephthys (Seth's wife) magically returned the god to life. From the re-membered Osiris, Isis conceived her son Horus, who to avenge his father and assert his legitimacy fought King Seth. In the battle, Seth pulled out Horus' eye, traditionally the left or moon-eye; Horus in turn severed Seth's testicles and won the battle.
A tribunal of deities then proclaimed Horus legitimate and made him king of Egypt. The risen Osiris became Prince of the West, the place of the dead, and Prince of Those-who-are-in-the-West, the dead themselves.
A look at these myths reveals some common themes: dismemberment and rememberment, world conquest and the demonstration of agriculture, a sea journey, a tendency to incite others to dismember enemies and a visit to the land of the dead from whence the god returns. You might likewise itemize some differences: no rival god but a goddess persecuted Dionysos, he was never buried in a chest nor grew into a tree, and no son fought for Dionysos' honor. Neither Osiris' wife nor mother were mortal but rather goddesses both, he was never snatched from a burning womb, he never went mad, and his son dismembered a god not a mortal in his honor.
Similarly, the gods' chief attributes both overlap and differ. Both are considered to die and rise again and are gods of agriculture - Osiris ruled the vine as well as grain. Dionysos' agricultural rule is more limited. Nor is Dionysos associated with any river, as Osiris is with the rising and falling Nile as it fructifies Egypt. Further, in standard myth Dionysos is not King of the Dead.
This last difference, however, does not obtain when looking at the two gods' place in Greco-Roman mysteries and in their native cults.
Dionysos' Mysteries and Cult
The Eleusinian Mysteries, which in a town outside Athens in classical times reenacted the search of grain-mother Demeter for her lost daughter, Kore/Persephone, are probably the most famous of the Greco-Roman mystery cults. However, Dionysos was arguably the Greek deity most involved in mystery religion - so much so that he himself was considered an initiate of his own mysteries, under the name of Initiated (Mustes), as Marcel Detienne writes in "Dionysus," in Greek and Egyptian Mythologies, compiled by Yves Bonnefoy.
Ritualists not only performed maenadic mysteries in Dionysos' honor, gathering in amorphous groups led by roving hierophants to drink wine and sacrifice goats and fawns, but also made Dionysos a central figure in the teetotalist, vegetarian, anti-blood-sacrifice Orphic mysteries, which asked that mystics eschew the ways of the Titans and avoid animal dismemberment. Furthermore, Dionysos was also a player in the Eleusinian Mysteries.
This idea may seem strange. While Demeter seeks Kore, she refuses wine, saying in her Homeric Hymn that for her to drink wine would be contrary to the order of nature. But note that Kore was abducted on the Plain of Nysa - a plain with associations both to Dionysos, reared there, and to the death-god Hades, who in the standard cover-myth abducted Kore. An Orphic hymn says the lost Dionysos spent time with Persephone, according to Walter F. Otto in Dionysus: Myth and Cult. As Herakleitos of Ephesus wrote, Hades was Dionysos. It seems that, like Osiris, Dionysos proves a god of the dead.
Other evidence likewise links Dionysos to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Marchers to Eleusis called the name Iakchos, an epithet of Dionysos, and vases show this youth wearing Dionysian huntsman's boots. Another vase painting shows Demeter, Kore, and a hunting-booted youth on one side, on the other side Dionysos. The Lesser Mysteries that led up to the Great Mysteries of Eleusis were those of Dionysos, and the Great Mysteries themselves were performed at the wine harvest. It seems that Dionysos' presence in the Eleusinian Mysteries was what mythographer Carl Kerényi calls a "holy open secret." Very likely, Dionysos was the secret name of Persephone's seducer and husband, the god of death, and possibly figured also as her child.
Later evidence of specifically Dionysian mysteries, from the Italian colonies of Greece and the Roman world, underlines Dionysos' connection with death, and also with resurrection. Kerényi writes in Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life that Roman vases from Southern Italy often show a departure of the youthful dead, especially women, from the city to Dionysian nuptials — a marriage with death. In many funerary images, the mystery of death appears as a step toward ecstatic life in a divine marriage; Kerényi writes that a man's personal identification as Dionysos and a woman's as a bride of the god enabled the dying and their families to overcome death's terrors.
Walter Burkert in Ancient Mystery Cults also asserts that Dionysian imagery adorns Greek and Greco-Roman funerary vases, monuments and altars as well as the later Roman sarcophagi, but notes that such imagery does not prove that every so-decorated tomb or funerary vase held a Dionysian initiate. But he goes on to say:
There are constant references to Bacchic (that is, Dionysian) ecstasy in this kind of funerary art, above all through the recurrent appearance of the tympanon and the cymbals of the maenads. There are not infrequent indications of mysteries proper: the cista mystica (mystical covered basket) with the snake, the liknon (winnowing basket) with phallus. A few sarcophagi have explicit initiation scenes.... Even if we have no directly related text... there are at least literary testimonies concerning Bacchic rites performed right at the tombs of the deceased members of Bacchic associations; mourning and ecstasy somehow seem to fuse. (Ancient Mystery Cults, pp. 22_23.)
Despite the lack of absolute proof, Burkert makes it clear that specifically Dionysian mysteries and other mysteries in which Dionysos took part gave initiates a hope for life after death. He quotes Plutarch that many people "think that some sort of initiations and purifications will help: once purified, they believe, they will go on playing and dancing in Hades in places full of brightness, pure air and light." (Ancient Mystery Cults, p. 23) Of the Eleusinian Mysteries, Athenian playwright Sophocles said, "Thrice-blessed are those mortals who have seen these rites and thus enter into Hades: for them alone there is life, for the others all is misery." (Burkert, Greek Religion, p. 289) The Roman Cicero said, "We have been given a reason not only to live in joy but also to die with better hope." (Kerényi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter, p. 15)
Dionysos, then, may well have ruled death and rebirth both in his own mysteries and those of Eleusis. In his combined aspects of death's rulership and living ecstasy, he seems to have promised devotees rapture after death.
Osiris' Mysteries and Cult
Osiris, of course, straightforwardly appeared as a god of death and resurrection, both in his original Egyptian cult and in the Isis-Osiris mystery cult that grew up in the later Greco-Roman world. The Isis-Osiris mysteries seem to have been based on the Greek model of personal initiation. As Burkert writes, originally there were no such mysteries for Osiris, only outer-directed cult rites performed for all and secret initiations performed for priests. He continues:
Yet in the eyes of the Greeks, who admired the aboriginal age of Egyptian civilization, Egypt appeared to be the very homeland and origin of mysteries as such; this is in the teaching of both (much-initiated fifth-century-B.C. historian) Herodotus and Hecataeus of Abdera.... Curiosity and demand could well be met. Sanctuaries of Isis began to offer forms of personal initiation upon request, modeled after those of Eleusis and Dionysos, though in a style perfectly adapted to Egyptian forms of ritual and mythology. (Ancient Mystery Cults, pp. 40_41.)
The process of those initiations seem to have followed the death and resurrection of Osiris, or his Isis-cult double Serapis. So too did the festival of Isia, celebrated in November, leading up to Osiris' rebirth at the solstice.
Inscriptions and vase paintings support that Osiris, like Dionysos, may have given his Greco-Roman devotees mystic hopes of an afterlife. Burkert says that in one inscription for a burial according to Osiris' rites, a priest of Isis from Bithynia proclaims that because of the secret rites performed during life, now dead he travels not to dark Acheron but to the "harbor of the blessed." The inscription on a sarcophagus near Ravenna describes visionary hopes, though it doesn't say of what kind. Likewise, the iconography of a lock of hair identified boys died young with Horus.
Further, as Burkert notes, the original Egyptian cult rites of Osiris looked very much to the Greeks like mystery religion. In the great festival of Osiris in his sacred city of Abydos, where he was said to be buried, an eight-act drama was performed that followed the cycle of Osiris' life, death, mummification and enthronement, according to White. Similar performances honored the god and his family at Heliopolis, Buto, Letopolis, Bubastis, Busiris and Sais. In the Heb-Sed Feast, an Osiran rite considered to renew and rejuvenate the pharaoh, a sort of personal pharaonic initiation, the king clad in a winding sheet mimed the life and death of Osiris, then rose again in pristine vigor. Part of this rite was the raising of an Osiris pillar, a totem carved to resemble the lopped trunk of the tree that grew around the coffin at Byblos.
A similar ritual, performed for all the people, was the ceremony of raising the djed-tree. And, in another folk ritual recalling Osiris' death and life, in the month of Athyr Egyptian women made clay images of Osiris and threw them in the Nile to represent the god's drowning.
Osiris was also central to the death cult followed by individual Egyptians. At first, during the Old Kingdom (2778 to 2300 B.C.), only pharaohs were considered to ascend to heaven by the elaborate rituals of the Book of the Dead. Later, in the Middle Kingdom (2065 to 1785 B.C.), the secret formulas were revealed to all, though the rites were expensive enough they weren't adopted by poor Egyptians till Ptolemaic times (333 B.C. and later). But every man and woman who could afford the rituals could regard themselves as united with Osiris at death.
Reflecting this, both male and female Egyptian devotees customarily linked themselves to the god in funerary inscriptions; for example, writes Henri Frankfort in Ancient Egyptian Religion, the man Neferhotep calls himself Osiris-Neferhotep in an inscription, the woman Mutnofert Osiris-Mutnofert. Similarly, if one erected a stele at Osiris' burial ground in Abydos, one could imagine oneself to be joining the god at the beginning of his journey into the beyond. This coidentification helped make a pilgrimage to Abydos essential for rich, pious Egyptians.
Various parts of the ritual of the dead likewise recalled Osiris and his myth. When attendants laid a pharaoh to rest in his pyramid, they carried him over the Nile by royal barge to symbolize Osiris' water-journey to the underworld. A white Osiris charm was one of the most popular for mummies. The dead person was considered to ride with the god Ra in the sun-boat, going underground overnight. At the nadir of the journey, the dead person met Osiris, at which point he or she was reborn.
Osiris, a popular god among the commons, was seen as arguing for the ordinary person in the process of death. In Chapter 175 of the Book of the Dead, Phillipe Derchain writes in "Egyptian Cosmogony" in Greek and Egyptian Mythologies, a dialog occurs between Osiris and the creator-god Atum, reflecting Osiris' anguish in the face of death. Atum makes Osiris two promises: one, that Osiris' son will succeed him, and two, that as a creator identical with primal matter he organized, Atum will return to this matter, bringing Osiris with him. Thus both are reborn.
A connection also existed between the death-cult of vegetable Osiris and the cult at Byblos of Adonis, the dying and rising consort of Aphrodite — Byblos being the place where Osiris grew into a tree, and the ancient Phoenician homeland. White asserts that devotees may have incorporated the tree into the Osiris myth because of the association with Byblos. Tree worship formed an integral part of the cult of Adonis, as it did in other Mesopotamian agrarian cults, but neither sycamores nor tamarisks nor the other possibilities were indigenous to the treeless terrain of the Nile valley. Detienne writes in "Adonia of Byblos" in Greek and Egyptian Mythologies that the natives of Byblos considered Adonis the mask or local figurehead of Egyptian Osiris.
A Telling Point of Contact
One particular point of Osiran and Dionysian rituals, in the Dionysian case specifically mystery rituals, that scholars note as similar is that of the re-memberment, the reconstitution of the severed body parts of the god. One of the "holy open secrets" of the Osiris cult, according to Kerényi, is that Isis reawakened her husband by finding or creating anew his lost phallus, attaching it to his body and uniting with him in love. He quotes an Egyptian text:
To you (Osiris) comes your sister Isis, rejoicing for love of you. You have placed her on your phallus. Your seed flows into her... flows out of you as Horus. (Kerényi, Dionysos, note 175, p. 247_248)
To reenact this resurrection, the Egyptians used an artificial phallus in certain rites, or so Kerényi interprets Plutarch.
So, too, Kerényi argues, did devotees of Dionysos. As a classical quote says, "`the phallus was uprighted for Dionysos in accordance with a mystery.'" (Kerényi, Dionysos, p. 274.) He draws the connection between this erotic uprighting and Isis' reconstitution of Osiris, noting that Greek writer Diodoros has Demeter collect the parts of her son Dionysos. As early as Herodotus, Burkert asserts, Demeter and Isis were linked. Elsewhere the duty of collecting and awakening Dionysos belonged to Rhea, mother of the gods, but Kerényi notes that the connection between Rhea and Demeter was fluid and that one could represent the other. In an Orphic story, Athena preserves her brother Dionysos' heart in a basket — Orphic texts make clear the heart stands for the god's phallus. Kerényi sees this phallus as made of fig-wood, just like an object that Dionysos makes for ritual in Orphic myth, just like the object Kerényi says was found in the ceremonial liknon.
Every two years on Mount Parnassos near Delphi, a group of female ritualists called the Thyiades held a rite called the Awakening of the Liknites — the latter term indicating the god's being carried in the liknon, a winnow-basket used to carry babies mortal and divine. In the three months leading to the ritual, the Thyiades roamed icy Parnassos calling the god as an aroused lover might call her beloved. No source reveals what happened in the culminating Awakening, probably held in the Korykian Cave by torchlight, but Kerényi writes:
He who lay in the liknon... was treated by the women as an awakening child.... Here again, however, as in all the original mysteries of antiquity the "what" was a "holy open secret." Long before there were representations of the winnow with the phallus, the phallus was placed in the winnow. As the indestructible god's severed member it had lain in the winnow ever since the unrevealed symbolic actions by which the god was revived... became liknon ceremonies. (Kerényi, Dionysos, p. 225)
Every evidence points that, for Dionysos as well as for Osiris, the phallus was uprighted, and through erotic ritual the god was reborn. The Awakening also occurred on the very day the ritual queen of Athens consummated her sacred marriage to Dionysos.
The Deities' Other Connections
In other connections between the two gods' cults, Kerényi notes that a particular type of Dionysos idol, an unphallic pillar hung with a mask and garment, bears a close resemblance to the traditional pillar representing Osiris encoffined in a tree. Both such pillar idols could be regarded as the tomb of the god. In Dionysos' case, ritualists so represented the god while he was considered absent under the earth. Athenian priestesses of Dionysos ladled new wine before just such a pillar idol during the Lenaia, the solstice celebration of Dionysos' birthday and of the birth of the new vintage. The ladling priestesses probably numbered either 14 or 16 — recurrent gatherings of 14 or 16 women are found both in Dionysian and Osiran religion, Kerényi writes. Analogously, late Osiran religion celebrated the birth of Harpokrates, son of Isis and Osiris, during the time Osiris was simultaneously mourned as dead and greeted as if come back to life. In both cases, the birthday of the new, reborn god is celebrated in front of the idol of the dead god.
Connections can also be drawn between actions of the living gods, most especially between Osiris' and Dionysos' records of conquest. In Volume 2 of his epochal work Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Martin Bernal attributes to Diodoros the story that, according to the Egyptians, before his murder Osiris left Egypt with an army of musicians and dancers. After going through Ethiopia and India, he visited other nations of Asia, crossed to Europe at the Hellespont and in Thrace slew Lycurgus. At each place, he introduced the fruits most easily cultivated; if a country could not grow grapes, he planted barley for beer. A century after Diodoros, Plutarch repeated this tale, saying Osiris delivered Egypt from a brutish, destitute way of life and won other peoples by his charm, combined with music and song.
It is remarkable that Osiris' reputed battles followed almost exactly the same path as Dionysos'. Dionysos, notorious for his charm, also carried singers and dancers in his train; his maenads were renowned for music. And, of course, both gods taught the cultivation of the vine. Bernal theorizes that the origin for the conquest myth for both may be the empire-building Twelfth Dynasty pharaoh Senwosre I, known to the Greeks as Sesostris.
Characters of the myths besides the gods themselves can also be linked. In Volume 1 of Black Athena, Martin Bernal notes that in the Osiris myth Isis has a constant companion in her sister and double Nephthys, who with Isis searched and mourned for Osiris though she was married to his murderer, Seth. Bernal sees the duality of Nephthys as paralleling the duality of Kore/Persephone in her loving and hellish aspects. He emphasizes the connection between Nephthys, who was considered black and who was seduced by Osiris, and the dark goddess Persephone, who was seduced by Hades (Dionysos). Kerényi points out that Isis' search for Osiris is mirrored by the search of the Dionysian woman Erigone for the parts of her father. Erigone was daughter of the first man to whom Dionysos introduced wine-making; her father was torn to pieces by the first drunkards, who believed they'd been poisoned.
The connections between Osiris and Dionysos were not lost on the ancients. As Bernal writes, Plutarch identifies Osiris with Dionysos three times in his work On Isis and Osiris. The Greek god's mythos may even have influenced the Egyptian's. Kerényi writes that the motif of premature birth in Dionysian religion was so important that, on the basis of the well-known early bond between the two religions, later Egyptians took the motif into the myth of Osiris. Thus, Horus was said to have been born at the end of 81 or 87 days.
History Behind the Co-Identity of the Gods
Though the Greeks early on posited a bond between Dionysos and Osiris, modern scholars have been slow to see the connection. One reason for this tardiness is racism, pure and simple. In Black Athena, Volume 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785_1985, Bernal goes to studious lengths to show how German and other European scholars obscured and derided the Egyptian origins of Greek religion. They did so because they thought of the Egyptians as black, and they wanted a pure, Aryan background for the Greeks, whom they thought of as their forebears. The belief in "northern horsemen" as ancestors of Hellene culture became one of the shibboleths of anthropology, not systematically questioned till the past few years.
In the course of the first two volumes of the as-yet-incomplete Black Athena, Bernal spends significant time limning evidence that links Greek religion with Egyptian. He posits the first connection between the two as the Egyptian Eleventh Dynasty's bull cult of the god Mntw giving birth to the bull cult on Crete, Greece's cultural forebear. He points out that no Cretan bull cult existed before this time, that Crete is not natural cattle country, that archaeological evidence supports a connection at that time between Egypt and Crete and that certain legends reflect that connection. Bernal links the ancient Cretan lawgiver and conqueror Rhadamanthys with Mntw, deriving Rhadamanthys from the Egyptian "Rdi Mntw," or Mntw gives. Likewise, Rhadamanthys taught the hero Herakles archery, and Mntw was the god of archery. Mntw was associated with the goddess R't, whose name Mesopotamians apparently pronounced as Ria. Bernal taps R't or Ria as an obvious ancestress of Rhea, who played a central role in Cretan religion and the Dionysos cult.
Bernal also connects Cretan religion with Osiris. He notes that Dr. Lucy Goodison argues that Cretan cult imagery includes repeated pictures of vegetation's death and rebirth, recalling Osiris' seasonal death and resurrection, connected to food crops. Goodison argues that the "dancing floors" found near many Cretan tombs were sites for festivals of mourning, like that of Isis and Nephthys for Osiris. Goodison also sees the Egyptian sisters as possible candidates for the two women occasionally represented together on seals of the period. In the National Museum of Archaeology in Athens, one can similarly see two women represented in a ivory figurine that hails from the contemporary Greek city of Mycenae, in which two goddesses embrace as a young god climbs onto their laps. Scholars identify the three as Demeter, Persephone and the young Dionysos of the Eleusinian Mysteries — perhaps cognates of Isis, Nephthys and the child Horus, strongly identified with his father.
In later centuries, Crete proved a stronghold of Dionysian religion. Another such stronghold was Thrace. Herodotus and others wrote of cults of Dionysos among the remote Thracian tribal groups the Satrai and Bessoi. Bernal, whose first approach to Greek-Semitic studies was through linguistics, opines that Satrai may be derived from Egyptian verb sntr, consecrate, and that Bessoi can be derived from the Egyptian verb bs, initiate. Other Thracian divine names, such as Bendis and Sebazios, may also have originated in Egypt, and the Dionysian religion of Orphism has parallel origins in Egypt and Thrace — all of which, Bernal notes, other scholars have underlined as well.
Thrace was not the only Greek location to evince a Dionysos-Osiris connection. Thebes, another center of the Dionysos cult, had Egyptian links as well — hence its very name. Certainly the Greek Thebes would have been congenial for colonists from Egypt. Bernal writes Hellenistic and Roman writers such as Theophrastos, Pliny and Plutarch noted the similarities between the shores of the Nile and the shores of the Theban river Kopais, including similar floating islands, water plants and date palms and the manufacture of linen at both spots.
Egypt and Thebes also have strong mythological and legendary bonds. Cadmus, the founder of Thebes, had in legend an Egyptian father, and Graves gives his name as meaning "from the east." The clearly Egyptian Sphinx appears in the legend of Oedipus, of Thebes. The name of the Theban princess Semele, Dionysos' mother, can be argued to have Egyptian roots. Bernal writes that Semitist Michael Astour derives Semele's name from that of the West Semitic divinity Sml, the Mother of the Eagles. Some versions of Dionysos' story resemble that of Sml and Osiris/Dionysos' Ugaritic equivalent Ba'al, he notes, and the three gods' stories do share common features. Bernal feels, however, that the most likely derivation for Semele comes from Egyptian smt, wild cow, a name that to the cattle-loving Egyptians would have indicated a lady of wealth and beauty.
Bernal dates the first certain advent of Dionysos as an avatar of Osiris to the Osiris cult flourishing in the Egyptian Twelfth Dynasty. Visitors may have been brought this cult to Greece directly, or it may have been conveyed through the Phoenicians — mirroring the Egyptian-Phoenician-Greek mix of the religion of Adonis of Byblos.
Bernal sees another high tide of Egyptian influence on Greece as occurring in the mid-fifteenth century B.C., when the powerful Middle Eastern empire of Egypt's Eighteenth Dynasty received tribute from Aegean islands. Archaeologists have found that the Aegean isles of that time were sprinkled with Egyptian objects. From this and other evidence, Bernal sets the mid-fifteenth century B.C as the time the Dionysos cult, traditionally considered to be "late," was officially instituted from Egyptian sources into Greece — an assertion reflected in the ancient tradition that devotees founded the Eleusinian mystery cult during this period. One of many ways the Eleusinian cult was unique in Greece is that it was run by two families of priests, the Eumolpids and Kerykes, that in Hellenistic times claimed Egyptian connections. Athenians frequently boasted of the continuity and antiquity of their religious institutions, and the survival of an Egyptian cult at Eleusis fits very well with this boast.
Thus, perhaps Osiran religion had two or three major contacts with early Greece — during the early to middle period of Minoan civilization on Crete, around 2140 B.C.; a century and a half later, during early Mycenaean civilization, around 1979 B.C.; then four centuries later still, during Minoan-Mycenaean culture's fall, around 1567 B.C., at the roots of the Archaic period of Greece. The Archaic period is well-known among art historians for its "Orientalizing" tendencies in vase painting — especially paintings of sphinxes and sirens, which the Samhain Widdershins' lead article related to the Egyptian soul-form the ba. The Egyptian king Osiris, who conquered his enemies with charm, music and wine, who promised devotees life after death, was transformed over a millenium to the Greek initiate Dionysos, who conquered his followers with charm, music, wine and a promise of golden freedom from death's chains.
The single book most descriptive of mystery religion that comes to us from the ancient world is the Roman Apuleius' The Golden Ass, at the end of which the protagonist, having devoted his life to Isis, finds himself called to initiate to Osiris. Behind Apuleius' clearly fervent convictions lies, as Bernal says, the concept that Egyptian religion is the original and "true" religion. Not only did the Greco-Roman world see the gold and ebony splendor of Egypt shining behind their rites, mythological, linguistic and archaeological evidence supports that belief.
The Greeks and Romans saw Osiris in Dionysos, Dionysos in Osiris, and said so. Who are we to deny it?
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