The Worship of Saturn Saturn, so active in the cosmic changes, was regarded by all mankind as the supreme god. Seneca says that Epigenes, who studied astronomy among the Chaldeans, “estimates that the planet Saturn exerts the greatest influence upon all the movements of celestial bodies.” (1) On becoming a nova, it ejected filaments in all directions and the solar system became illuminated as if by a hundred suns. It subsided rather quickly and retreated into far-away regions. Peoples that remembered early tragedies enacted in the sky by the heavenly bodies asserted that Jupiter drove Saturn away from its place in the sky. Before Jupiter (Zeus) became the chief god, Saturn (Kronos) occupied the celestial throne. In all ancient religions the dominion passes from Saturn to Jupiter.(2) In Greek mythology, Kronos is presented as the father and Zeus as his son who dethrones him. Kronos devours some of his children. After this act Zeus overpowers his father, puts him in chains, and drives him from his royal station in the sky. In Egyptian folklore or religion the participants of the drama are said to be Osiris-Saturn, brother and husband of Isis-Jupiter. The cult of Osiris and the mysteries associated with it dominated the Egyptian religion as nothing else. Every dead man or woman was entombed with observances honoring Osiris; the city of Abydos in the desert west of the Nile and north-west of Thebes was sacred to him; Sais in the Delta used to commemorate the floating of Osiris’ body carried by the Nile into the Mediterranean. What made Osiris so deeply ingrained in the religious memory of the nation that his cult pervaded mythology and religion? Osiris’ dominion, before his murder by Seth, was remembered as a time of bliss. According to the legend Seth, Osiris’ brother, killed and dismembered him, whereupon Isis, Osiris’ wife, went on peregrinations to collect his dispersed members. Having gathered them and wrapped them together with swathings, she brought Osiris back to life. The memory of this event was a matter of yearly jubilation among the Egyptians.(3) Osiris became lord of the netherworld, the land of the dead. A legend, a prominent part of the Osiris cycle, tells that Isis gave birth to Horus, whom she conceived from the already dead Osiris,(4) and that Horus grew up to avenge his father by engaging Seth in mortal combat. In Egyptology the meaning of these occurrences stands as an unresolved mystery. The myth of Osiris “is too remarkable and occurs in too many divergent forms not to contain a considerable element of historic truth,” wrote Sir Alan Gardiner, the leading scholar in these fields;(5) but what historical truth is it? Could it be of “an ancient king upon whose tragic death the entire legend hinged” ? wondered Gardiner.(6) But of such a king “not a trace has been found before the time of the Pyramid texts,” and in these texts Osiris is spoken of without end. There he appears as a dead god or king or judge of the dead. But who was Osiris in his life? asked Gardiner. At times “he is represented to us as the vegetation which perishes in the flood-water mysteriously issuing from himself. . . .” (7) He is associated with brilliant light.(8) After a life of studying Egyptian history and religion Gardiner confessed that he remained unaware of whom Osiris represented or memorialized: “The origin of Osiris remains from me an insoluble mystery.” (9) Nor could others in his field help him find an answer. The Egyptologist John Wilson wrote that it is an admission of failure that the chief cultural content of Egyptian civilization, its religion, its mythological features again and again narrated and alluded to in texts and represented in statues and temple reliefs, is not understood.(10) The astral meaning of Egyptian deities was not realized and the cosmic events their activities represent were not thought of. * * * The prophet Ezekiel in the Babylonian exile had a vision—the likeness of a man, but made of fire and amber who lifted him by the lock of his hair and brought him to some darkened chamber where the ancients of the house of Israel with censers in their hands were worshipping idols portrayed upon the wall round about. Then the angel of the vision told him: “Thou shalt see greater abominations that they do"—and he brought the prophet to the door of the gate of the Lord’s house—"and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.” Next he showed him also Jews in the inner court of the Lord’s house “with their back toward the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east.” (11) The worship of the sun and the planets was decried by Jeremiah, a contemporary of Ezekiel. But what was this weeping for Tammuz? Tammuz was a Babylonian god; one of the months of the year, approximately coinciding with July, in the summer, was named in his honor; and by this very name it is known in the present-day Hebrew calendar. Tammuz was a god that died and was then hidden i...