A7: Dionysus and Osiris

By the Greeks and Romans, Osiris was considered just another manifestation of Dionysus, and the Renaissance followed suit, as we saw in the rather free mixing of the two in Pico's Oration. An ancient example is the text by Cicero quoted by Andrea that Ernesti later edited.  As part of Cicero's collected works, it was printed by Sweinheim and Pannaratz in 1471. An edition in Venice followed the same year and again in 1494 (Pease p. 90); Milan followed in 1498. It was often included with Cicero's De divinatione, from which I have already quoted.

In this work, De Natura Deorum, Cicero says explicitly that the two deities, Dionysus and Osiris, are one and the same, Book III p. 58 (http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/nd3.shtml, translated at http://www.theoi.com/Olympios/DionysosGod.html):

Dionysos multos habemus: primum Iove et Proserpina natum; secundum Nilo, qui Nysam dicitur interemisse; tertium Cabiro patre, eumque regem Asiae praefuisse dicunt, cui Sabazia sunt instituta; quartum Iove et Luna, cui sacra Orphica putantur confici; quintum Nyso natum et Thyone, a quo trieterides constitutae putantur.
    (We have a number of Dionysi. The first is the son of Jupiter and Proserpine; the second of Nile--he is the fabled slayer of Nysa. The father of the third is Cabirus; it is stated that he was king over Asia, and the Sabazia were instituted in his honour. The fourth is the son of Jupiter and Luna; the Orphic rites are believed to be celebrated in his honour. The fifth is the son of Nisus and Thyone, and is believed to have established the Trieterid festival.)

The one "of the Nile" is the Egyptian Osiris. Cicero would have learned about him from Herodotus, Book II of his Histories. There Herodotus says (http://classics.mit.edu/Herodotus/history.2.ii.html).

Such Egyptians as possess a temple of the Theban Jove, or live in the Thebaic canton, offer no sheep in sacrifice, but only goats; for the Egyptians do not all worship the same gods, excepting Isis and Osiris, the latter of whom they say is the Grecian Bacchus.

Herodotus also describes their rites in a way that shows us something about the Greek ones. (If it sounds familiar, it is because I quoted part of this passage in section 4.)

To Bacchus, on the eve of his feast, every Egyptian sacrifices a hog before the door of his house, which is then given back to the swineherd by whom it was furnished, and by him carried away. In other respects the festival is celebrated almost exactly as Bacchic festivals are in Greece, excepting that the Egyptians have no choral dances. They also use instead of phalli another invention, consisting of images a cubit high, pulled by strings, which the women carry round to the villages. A piper goes in front, and the women follow, singing hymns in honour of Bacchus.

Herodotus was translated into Latin as part of the great translation project initiated by Pope Nicholas V. The Latin translation of Herodotus' Histories was printed in 1474, first by Pannartz in Rome and again in the same year in Venice, according to WorldCat.

A well-known account of Roman Osiris rituals in Latin was in Apuleius's Metamorphoses, popularly known as The Golden Ass. It was first printed in 1469, one of the first books published in Italy, by Sweynheym and Pannartz. Other editions followed, in 1488 Vicenza, 1493 Venice, and 1500 Bologna. Matteo Boiardo translated it into Italian around 1480 (Fiorenza, Dosso Dosso, p. 46). In it we see similar parallels between the two cults, Isis and Dionysus. In her initial appearance to Lucius, Isis announces who she is known by names; some of them are also mentioned elsewhere as mothers of Dionysus (in Marvin Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries, in Google Books, p. 179; it is Book 11 p. 5):

The three-tonged Sicilians call me Stygian Proserpine. The Eleusinians call me the ancient goddess Ceres.

 The Isis procession that follows the next day, as predicted by the goddess in Lucius's dream, has much in common with Dionysian processions as seen on Roman sarcophagi and described in accounts of Dionysus. They make a noisy racket, although with sistra rather than pipes and cymbals. They carry vessels. There is a "winnowing fan" and "an amphora", both seen on sarcophagi (p. 182 in Meyer, Book 11 p. 10). And most tellingly (also p. 182, but p. 11 of the Latin text),

Another man carried the chest that contained the Secret Things of her unutterable mystery.

Clement of Alexandria, in an essay designed to ridicule the "mysteries", described a chest in the Greek mysteries; containing the "virilia of Dionysus".  Here is what Clement says (http://www.theoi.com/Text/ClementExhortation1.html):

The Corybantes ...got possession of the chest in which the virilia of Dionysus were deposited, and brought it to Tyrrhenia [Lemnos], traders in glorious wares! There they sojourned, being exiles, and communicated their precious teaching of piety, the virilia and the chest, to Tyrrhenians for purposes of worship. For this reason not unnaturally some wish to call Dionysus Attis, because he was mutilated.

 According to WorldCat, Clement's work, including the text relevant here (Exhortation to the Greeks), was published in Latin in 1502. It would have existed in Greek manuscript before that.

Again, in the eyes of the Renaissance, we have a case of the same god worshiped in similar fashion in two countries. If not from Herodotus, they knew from Diodorus what Isis held sacred (Book IV, p. 6). I put in bold print the most important words on this question:

  ...in ancient times the Titans formed a conspiracy against Osiris and slew him, and then, taking his body and dividing it into equal parts among themselves, they slipped them secretly out of the house, but this organ alone they threw into the river, since no one of them was willing to take it with him. But Isis tracked down the murder of her husband, and after slaying the Titans and fashioning the several pieces of his body into the shape of a human figure, she gave them to the priests with orders that they pay Osiris the honours of a god, but since the only member she was unable to recover was the organ of sex she commanded them to pay to it the honours of a god and to set it up in their temples in an erect position.

On the identity of the two gods, there was also Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 35 (http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Isis_and_Osiris*/B.html):

That Osiris is identical with Dionysus who could more fittingly know than yourself, Clea?

Clea is the priestess at Delphi to whom Plutarch is addressing the work. He then compares the two: in the procession to bury the Apis bull, observing:

... the priests...indulge in shoutings and movements exactly as do those who are under the spell of the Dionysiac ecstasies....For the same reason many of the Greeks make statues of Dionysus in the form of a bull...Furthermore, the tales regarding the Titans and the rites celebrated by night agree with the accounts of the dismemberment of Osiris and his revivification and regenesis.

I have not been able to determine whether Plutarch's essay was available in Latin in the 15th century. According to Ingrid D. Rowland, The Culture of the High Renaissance, p. 50, it was; she cites no evidence, but her claim makes sense, given the intense interest in the Osiris myth at that time. The Moralia, of which the essay was a part, was first printed in 1509 Venice, according to Babbit, editor of the Loeb edition (p. xxiii). But before that many essays had been printed in Latin translation, he says (p. xxviii). I see on WorldCat that Latin translations of some of his philosophical works were printed in 1477, but I don't know which ones. Also, manuscript editions were readily available to people with the right credentials in the centers of learning. The 1509 Greek edition was based primarily on the manuscripts of Bessarion, which he had willed to the city of Venice at his death in 1469 (p. xxiv). These manuscripts were quite easy for noble citizens of the city to get on loan, requiring only a signature (Lotte Lobowsky, Bessarion's Library and the Biblioteca Marciana: Six Early Inventories, Rome 1979, which I quote extensively at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=613&p=8936&hilit=bessarion#p8936).

And here is a poem by the ancient Latin poet Tibullus that merges the two gods Dionysus and Osiris (http://infomotions.com/etexts/gutenberg/dirs/etext06/eltib10.htm), in an elegy touching on the miracle of the rising of the Nile, and to what the Egyptians attribute it:

..On thee they call! Or in sepulchral shade,
      The life-reviving, sky-descended powers
      Of bright _Osiris_ hail,--
      While, wildly chanting, the barbaric choir,
      With timbrels and strange fire,
      Their Memphian bull bewail.
    Osiris did the plough bestow,
      And first with iron urged the yielding ground.
      He taught mankind good seed to throw
      In furrows all untried;
      He plucked fair fruits the nameless trees did hide:
      He first the young vine to its trellis bound,
      And with his sounding sickle keen
      Shore off the tendrils green.
    For him the bursting clusters sweet
      Were in the wine-press trod;
      Song followed soon, a prompting of the god,
      And rhythmic dance of lightly leaping feet.
      Of Bacchus the o'er-wearied swain receives
      Deliverance from all his pains;
      Bacchus gives comfort when a mortal grieves,
      And mirth to men in chains.
      Not to Osiris toils and tears belong,
      But revels and delightful song;
      Lightly beckoning loves are thine!
      Garlands deck thee, god of wine!
      We hear thee coming, with the flute's refrain,
      With fruit of ivy on thy forehead bound,
      Thy saffron vesture streaming to the ground.
      And thou hast garments, too, of Tyrian stain,
      When thine ecstatic train
      Bear forth thy magic ark to mysteries divine.

Of course in Diodorus it is Dionysus who is credited with the invention of the plow. I found this poem quoted by Cartari, 1647 edition; this work on mythology was first published in 1556. If Cartari knew it, certainly humanists before him did as well.

For our purposes, the point is that anyone wishing to project Dionysus onto the tarot trumps of the late 15th and early16th century would have had much more relevant imagery to choose among if the myths of Osiris, as presented by the Greek and Latin authors, was also available to them.

Isis was well enough known even in 1445 that in Ferrara there was a theatrical production called Iside in that year, in which the future Ercole I allegedly participated. Also, Ciriaco of Ancona visited Egypt as far as Cairo in 1435, taking numerous notes and copying inscriptions. He then talked with others of his experiences, including one visit to Ferrara at least, in 1449; it is mentioned primarily because he described what he saw of Belfiore, Leonello's country estate, including most importantly the paintings of the Muses there.

Thus Osiris was very much in the ascent by the late 1490s. The Borgia Pope Alexander VI not only traced his ancestry back to Osiris, but had his apartments decorated with frescoes illustrating the myth of Isis and Osiris as presented by Diodorus, featuring prominently the Borgia Bull, now the Apis bull, incarnation of Osiris:

Not to be outdone, the Emperor had his genealogy done, too, showing him with the same ancestor, and had Durer draw him surrounded by what were considered hieroglyphs:

Many of the texts--Apuleius, Herodotus, Diodorus, Plutarch, Clement--also talked about the "hieroglyphs", ancient pictures that meant common ordinary things like birds and oxen to the vulgar but divine things to the wise (see my posts at http://forum.tarothistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=603). They were not tied to Egypt: it was believed that the Romans also used them, and they existed alongside ordinary phonetic writing, for the most sacred things. Many Italian writers discoursed on hieroglyphs in this way, including Filelfo in Milan but most famously Alberti in his The art of building, in ten books, in manuscript from about 1450, augmented until his death in 1472 and printed in 1485. Of the Egyptians' sacred writing he said(p. 256 of Rykwert et al trans.),

the method of writing they used could be understood easily by expert men all over the world, to whom alone noble matters should be communicated

.He quickly added that the Romans used this method as well. As such, the humanists could make up hieroglyphs themselves; the most famous early example was Alberti's "winged eye", c. 1438 (Wind, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance). And in 1499 Venice came the Hypnerotomachia (Strife of love in a dream). a fantasy novel that pictured and sometimes deciphered many such constructions.

So likewise the tarocchi cards themselves could become hieroglyphs, meaning a way of writing in pictures that would hide their deeper meaning from the vulgar but disclose it to the wise. This word "hieroglyph" was in fact applied to the 22 special cards in the Anonymous Discourse of c. 1570 in northeastern Italy, and also in other works, 1603 and 1676, as quoted by Ross G. R. Caldwell at http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=94755.

The literature about Dionysus, to be sure, surpassed that of Isis and Osiris. In Latin, there was, besides the things I have already mentioned, a graphic depiction of suppressed rites in Rome in Livy's History of Rome. Also, Ovid treated of Dionysus in the popular Metamorphoses, Ars Amore and Fasti. There was also Virgil's Georgics, of which Dionysus was a main subject.

In Latin translation, Plutarch made incidental comments about Dionysus and his followers in his Parallel Lives, a highly popular book, first published in Latin translation in 1470 Rome, then 1478 Venice and often thereafter. The main lives of relevance are Theseus, in which we learn much about his wife Ariadne, Mark Antony and Alexander the Great.

Also originally in Greek but translated before 1505, there were also the dramatists, notably Euripides' Bacchae and Aristophanes' Frogs; in both, Dionysus is a major character. Euripides' play had been known in manuscript since the 14th century in Italy (Loeb edition, p. liv) and was printed in Greek and Latin in 1503 Venice. Aristophanes' Frogs ("Batrichoi": the Bacchantes croaked like frogs) in Greek and Latin was printed in 1498 Venice. There was also the Church Father Clement of Alexandria, whom I have already quoted. There were references to the "mysteries", mainly Orphic, in Plato's works, as translated by Ficino and others. (For more on Plato's Orphic aspect, see Graeme Nicholson, Plato's Phaedrus and the Philosophy of Love. pp. 132ff and Robert McGehey, The Orphic Moment: From Shaman to Poet-thinker in Plato, Nietzsche, and Mallarme, pp. 37ff.)

In Greek only during this period, there were the references in Neoplatonist works, the accounts of local cults in Pausanias's Description of Greece. I have already mentioned the very long Dionysiaca by Nonnus, printed in  starting 1507, and in 1569 with a Latin translation, but known as such to humanists and artists since Poliziano (d. 1494) identified it in the late 15th century. Many other works contained short references, as well as the works, mostly in Latin but also in Italian, of the humanists themselves.