Note 387 — Chapter IV · PRE-CHRISTIAN GNOSTICS: THE ORPHICI

Such ideas may, however, have been current in the religions of the Eastern Mediterranean long before Orphic times. Dr Budge in his book Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, I. p. 28, reiterates what he has before stated elsewhere, i.e. that Osiris was to his worshippers “the god-man, the first of those who rose from the dead,” and that his death and resurrection were therefore supposed to be in some way beneficial to mankind. This is very likely, but I know of no Egyptian text that in any way connects the creation of man with the death of Osiris. On the contrary, a text which Dr Budge has himself published makes men and women to come into being from the tears which came forth from the eye of the god Khepera, here probably to be identified with Nu, the primaeval Ocean or Deep. See Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, vol. I. p. 299. The Zoroastrian religion, in the late form in which we have it in the Bundahish (see West, S.B.E. Oxford, 1880, Pahlavi Texts, pt I.), does indeed make man spring from the death of Gayomort, the First or Primaeval Man, slain by Ahriman. If we choose to suppose that this conception went back to the times of Zoroaster himself, that is to say, about 700 B.C., Onomacritos might easily have found this part of the story at the Court of Susa. Cf. Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, Göttingen, 1907, pp. 215-223. It is significant that, according to Pausanias, Bk VIII. c. 37, it was Onomacritos who first made the Titans evil powers, or as he says “contributing to the sufferings of Dionysos.”