Comte de Gabalis: Commentary Continued: Q. Bacchus and Osiris the Same
BACCHUS AND OSIRIS THE SAME.
"Now that Osiris is really the same with Bacchus, nobody can be supposed to know better than you, O Clea, not only as you are chief of his priestesses at Delphi, but moreover as you are initiated, in right of both your parents, into the service and religion of Osiris--As others, however, may not be so well satisfied in this point; to omit the evidence which may be brought in proof of it from those more secret rites which are not to be divulged, do not those very cere- monies, which the priests perform in public, when
But to resume a while our former argument concerning the identity of Bacchus and Osiris; as a farther proof of this point, we may mention the Ivy, which as it is esteemed by the Greeks sacred to Bacchus, so is it likewise stiled by the Egyptians, in their language, Chenosiris, that is, as some interpret it, the plant of Osiris. In like manner Aristo, who wrote a treatise of the Athenian Colonies, tells us, he somewhere met with an epistle of Alexarchus, wherein Bacchus was expressly said to have been the son of Isis, and to heve been named by the Egyptians not Osiris, but Asiris, with an A; a word, in the language of that country, signifying strong and mighty: and this is farther
PLUTARCH'S TREATISE OF ISIS AND OSIRIS, §35, §37. TRANSLATED BY SAMUEL SQUIRE, A.M., 1744.
