ABSTRACT
Interestingly, and coterminous with the publication of Beloved, Martin Bernal elaborates Black Athena (1987),1 essentially decrying the tendency in academe to ignore the Egyptian roots of Classical Greek Mythology.2 Aside from his detailed studies of linguistic similarities and etymological origins of certain words, Bernal reinstates Herodotus’s original discussions of the Egyptian foundations of Greek history and myth and draws a direct relationship between Demeter and her rites at Eleusis and Isis, goddess of grain, fertility, and regeneration just like her counterpart,3 even to the point of sharing some of the exact same stories. In Demeter’s anguished search for Persephone, she stops to stay with adepts of her cult without revealing to her hosts who exactly she is. Every night she places their very young child into the open fl ames of the hearth, attempting to make the child immortal, until the horrifi ed mother stops her, upon which Demeter angrily reveals herself as the goddess. This same story in ancient Egypt was attributed to Isis, who roams the earth looking for Osiris, tricked by Seth and his cohorts into lying in a chest, which they then locked shut. The chest was carried out by the sea and brought to rest in a tamarisk tree, which grew enormously. Subsequently, the king of the country, admiring its beauty, cut the tree down to use as a pillar for his house. “These things happened on the seventeenth day of the month Hathor, when Osiris was in the twentyeighth year either of his reign or of his age” (Budge 1895: xlix-l). Discovering the location of the chest in Byblos, Isis arrives at the home of the king pretending to be a nurse. Each night she bathes their youngest in the fi re in order to make him immortal, until discovered by the queen, who is horrifi ed. Angry, Isis reveals herself as the goddess and implores the king to give
her the pillar, “which she cut open, and took out the chest and her husband’s body” (Budge 1895: xlix), returning with it to Egypt where she hid it. But Seth found the chest, recognized the body, and “tore it into fourteen pieces, which he scattered up and down throughout the land.” When Isis learned of this, she built a boat of papyrus and gathered the fragments of Osiris’s body; and legend has it that she found all the parts except the phallus. Even so, in some versions Isis conceives Horus, who grew up to battle Seth in revenge for the butchering of his father; in two major battles Horus was the victor (see Budge 1895: l-li).
