Ink of Ages Fiction Prize

The Untold Story of the Murder of Isis

Many are familiar with the ancient Egyptian story of how my consort, Osiris, was killed by his jealous brother, Set. But few know about Osiris’ murder of me, Isis. 

After Osiris’ death, I waited in the dark Cave of Creation for him to remanifest. As Creation itself, we embodied beingness in endlessly fascinating forms, for the earth teems with all manner of life. Would he remanifest as a scorpion? A hippopotamus? If he chose to experience the beingness of a papyrus plant, I might join him as a spider mite clambering over one of his fronds.  

To my surprise, he came back as … himself, in his previous form as human-Osiris. Yet remanifesting in one’s prior incarnation contradicted the rule of renewal: every life/embodiment is unique. There is no repetition of life in one’s preceding body.

“Beloved,” I called to him in thought. “Join me in a different expression.” 

“No.” His voice scraped like heavy stone dragged over desert sand.

At first, I could not make sense of his “No.” See, life and creation is the embodiment of, “Yes.” From the first pulse of the smallest cell, “Yes, more,” has been our essential nature. When light pierced the dark of the first oceans, “YES, more!” led to sensors that developed the eye. When a gasping sea-creature flopped onto land to escape a predator, we thrilled, “Yes, more!” and so developed lungs, then legs. The exuberance of yes is at the very heart of life. Even when some of our expressions fail and reform back into the all-ness of being, “yes” and “more” continue as the operating principles. Creation/life never says, “No.”

He must have sensed my confusion, for he added, “My people have made me King and the Conqueror of Death. Through me, they will achieve Eternal Life, for humans are the most important of all Beings.”

Now, every creature believes itself the “most important” during its short existence but Osiris clearly meant something else. The walls of the Cave of Creation rumbled around us. 

“Life does not take sides or choose favorites,” I reminded him. “There is no eternal life for the individual. Those who live must die in order for life itself to regenerate.”

“Not for me, not anymore, and not for my people,” he called and our cave transmuted into a dark tomb. A sputtering torch threw wavering light against columns painted with colorful symbols and animals. The air was heavy with the scent of resin, myrrh, and frankincense, which barely masked the unmistakable reek of rot.

Osiris transformed before my eyes. His body swelled into a stiff, stony mass. His face shone with green paint and his body was suddenly wound in long strips of linen. He crossed his arms over his chest and raised his chin to gaze over the horizon. “It is in this form that I am worshipped,” he exulted. 

Osiris had always had a preference for the people of the Nile, I recalled, despite my warnings that Creation has no favorites. Over the eons, we both had enjoyed manifesting into the hairless primates who had created so much in their own right—fire, clay, tools, and the words that led to stories. Of all these new creations, only stories generated something we had never before seen—a confusion of representation with reality. 

When humans created stories about the stars in the sky, or the “dangerous” people over the ridge, or monsters who stole hearts, they mistook their word creations for “truth,” even when such tales were clearly unmoored from reality. Creation always delights in creation but Osiris manifesting in response to humanity’s false stories of living forever in the same body? Impossible.

Once, after a long absence, I returned to the lands of the Nile. Osiris was manifesting then as a leader called Horus. I emerged from the fertile waters, sleek and shining like ebony, my head covered in tight tiny curls just as I had looked the last time I had manifested into humanity. Yet no spark of recognition flared in my lover’s eyes as I approached him on the banks of the swelling river. True, thousands of human years had passed—a mere blink to us—but he had never not “known” me in any form. Physically, he had changed along with the people of the Nile, I noted, as I swayed toward him. 

Horus-Osiris’ skin was now a reddish-brown, reflecting migrations of the people from the north and the east, mingling with the original people of the south. His nose was sharper and longer and his eyes a lighter brown. His hair was as black as my skin and was of a different texture—long and tied back by a piece of leather. 

When our eyes met, recognition sparked and he remembered me. Desire rolled through us as it always had. We came together in the human way. His skin smelled like the first shoots of papyrus uncurling from the loam of the Nile. Later he would tell me mine smelled sharp and spicy, like the bark of a tree his people would later call cinnamon. He claimed the scent was ‘new’ to him, which surprised me. Did he not remember manifesting as a bear, and scratching his hide against the tree’s brown bark? How deeply the scent permeated into his fur?

After our reunion, we lay together, sated and drowsy, in a small dwelling, a human creation made of mudbrick with windows shaded by dried reeds. “The people call this love,” he murmured into my ear, drawing me into his warm body. I had to admit humanity’s unique expression of unity between lovers was enthralling. In most animals, coupling was a momentary affair, commanded and directed by the body’s “knowing” of when conception might take place. But this….this languid, exquisite exploration of pleasure in one self, expressed through giving pleasure to another, was intoxicating. 

A beautiful human creation-expression.

However, it soon became clear that humanity’s creativity had a dark side. The longer I stayed with my lover, the more my body changed in unexpected ways. One morning I raised my hand to the diffused light streaming in through the reeds and marveled to find that my skin was no longer shining obsidian but matched Horus-Osiris’ red-brown hue. My scalp felt heavy. No longer did tight curls cover my head. My hair was long and thick and waxed with the scent of lotus oil. 

“What is this?” I cried. As pure Creation, I endlessly transmuted, but only by my own desire. This change had been done “unto” me. 

“It is how my people depict you,” my lover explained. Human art had changed as people changed. Gone were the round, big-hipped statuettes with heads of close-cropped curls from earlier ages. Instead, the walls were filled with painted images of stiff, slim-hipped men and women, the latter sporting the long tresses that were now mine.

It was the first time I understood that humanity’s powers of creation—primarily through imagination, storytelling, writing, and art—was no longer a mere reflection of their world, but had begun to shape it. The unintended consequence of humans codifying thoughts and words and stories onto clay or papyrus led to a confusion between the representation of their words with reality. They had come to believe that if it was written (or drawn) it was true, and if it was true, it was written or drawn. 

However, that terrible day when the Cave of Creation turned into a tomb, I saw that I was already too late. Osiris had fully merged with, and calcified into, humanity’s false beliefs. 

“Eternal Life in one static form is impossible,” I tried once more. “Join me in remanifesting anew. Into the flow of life.” 

“No, no, no,” he repeated, and his voice reverberated like the staccato beat of a sculptor’s chisel. 

In a flash, I saw the danger—if humans continued believing what was not true—that they could live forever in the same form, in the face of direct evidence to the contrary—what would stop them from endlessly remaking reality with lies that satisfied their personal desires? What would stop them from imposing new man-created “truths” onto the rest of the world—that all of life was theirs to do with as they wished; that they could “own” the land; or animals or even other humans? That certain people must be dominated or enslaved or killed? 

“Osiris, turn away from these untruths,” I warned. “Humanity’s stories of dominion over all—even their right to Eternal Life—will bring much suffering and sorrow.” 

I realized then that Osiris’ transformation was changing me too, for Creation/Life did not warn or condemn. It observed. But even that warning was too late. Osiris had made his choice. He had become the Lord of the Dead. My refusal to merge with mankind’s false notions separated us like an enormous gorge gouged from one of earth’s violent shudders.

Osiris had enshrined in stone man’s beliefs about their world. “Begone, woman,” he thundered. “Am I not your KING? You are but a wife and a mother. Go birth our son and watch over him and obey.”

I was no longer his equal, his consort, but a force to be controlled.

So when I say he murdered “me,” I mean he killed the truth.

“These are lies,” I whispered, to no avail. Osiris had already separated himself from the flow of life, just as humanity had done. The lie of overcoming death and assertion of man’s dominion over all spread throughout humankind like a plague. Goddesses disappeared along with the understanding of the interconnectedness of Life. 

Osiris’ people even claimed that women were not needed for creation. How I laughed when I heard the priests exclaim that life “emerged” from Ra, their new ruling male god—pleasuring himself with his hand. Not a woman in sight. Absurd the stories people created and confused with the truth. The “yes” that propelled life’s expansion was being warped into a false reality of “Mine”—domination, status, power and endless life.

After Osiris spurned me, I manifested into an ancient, less complex form of life, swaying as algae on the surface of the great river. The drive to grow, to multiply, and overtake in this form was strong and soon the red algae bloom consumed all it touched. The white underbellies of dead fish lined the banks of the Nile. Tainted water killed crops. Humanity suffered plagues. All manner of creatures inside and outside the waters suffered and died.

But such was life. And death. The river would renew as would manifestations of life more resistant to the blooms’ toxicity.

In the face of that natural occurrence, though, humans created even more false stories. One group of shepherds from the east claimed that their angry god had turned the Nile to blood, thus proving their god was stronger than any other god. Wars and endless enslavements followed. The lies multiplied as did the suffering of all who came in contact with those who perpetuated them. Even now, wherever humans believe they are above death, above others, above nature and Life itself, suffering blooms like killing algae.

The irony is that by merging with the stories of mankind, Osiris also murdered himself, for a lie can only hold humanity’s attention for so long. He “died” when the people he so loved stopped creating new stories about him. Such is the lasting legacy of Osiris, my beloved, the one who said, “No,” to the “Yes” of life that accepts death.   

As for me, Creation, I continue manifesting into every expression of life, without judgment, without favorites. Yet my experiences with Osiris changed me forever too, for whenever I re-enter the flow of mankind, a deep longing for the human-love we once shared suffuses my entire being. And covers me like a shroud.