Star Wars and the Osiris Cycle

The Star Wars movies were the bible of many people in Generation X. I saw Star Wars: A New Hope in 1977 when I was only 5 or 6 years old. It was the first distinct event I remember being excited about. There was some build-up to it among the kids in the neighborhood and somehow everyone knew presumably through advertising and media buzz that the movies were going to be not only entertaining, but important. I do not remember the experience of sitting in the theater and watching the movie, but I know I loved it.

I'm not a huge fanboy, but since then, I've watched the entire series many times. Before I knew about the mythology content, I watched the series for its nostalgic value, to relive my childhood. Once I started studying mythology more intensely, though, I realized the series is entirely imbued with it.

George Lucas gave an extensive interview (It used to be on YouTube, but removed) about how he relied on Joseph Campbell's ideas of the Monomyth to craft Star Wars. (The monomyth's a generalized version of cyclical solar hero myths.) More specifically, the series seems to rely on the Osiris Cycle and its derivatives to provide not only the main story arc, but to inform the entire movie, including the imagery. Star Wars is literally about conflict between heavenly bodies, the constellations, stars and planets of Earth's night sky, that is their anthropomorphic characters as imagined by our ancient ancestors countless years ago. It's a retelling of the Osiris cycle--mostly found in The Contendings of Horus and Set.

Even though I find the parallels between the movies and the mythology completely fascinating, I think elaborating the entire thing will get tedious quickly, even for ardent fans. Instead I'll focus on some fairly arbitrary highlights.

Sunman/Moonman

Luke and Han, Sun/Moonman

Luke Skywalker and Han Solo are, together, Horus the Egyptian sky god, whose eyes are the Sun and Moon. The Sunman/moonman buddy movie trope is pervasive. The sunman is usually the "smart one" with long hair (Luke). The moonman is often portrayed as a gruff, action oriented military man (Han, the smuggler). Gilgamesh and Enkidu are such a pairing. Peachey and Danny from The Man Who Would Be King are another. More recent versions are Bo and Luke Duke from the Dukes of Hazard, Daniel Jackson and Colonel O'Brien from Stargate, Starsky and Hutch, or Sam and Dean Winchester from Supernatural.

The imagery associated with Luke is Solar. He flies an X-Wing fighter, which evokes the solar cross. His flight suit is fiery orange and his flight goggles are yellow tinted.

The imagery associated with Han is Lunar. He flies the Millennium Falcon (Falcon = Horus), which evokes the disk of the moon complete with cracks and craters. All the spaces in the Millenium Falcon are rounded to evoke the Moon.

The sunman/moonman pairing of Luke and Han is lampooned in the pairing of C3PO and R2D2. C3PO is golden, he's stiff and tall and "by the book", a protocol droid. R2D2 is short, stumpy and rounded and is fond of improvisation and is not afraid to go his own way.

Dick Pics

C3PO Collector Card
with Erection

An important element of the Osiris cycle is the creation of a Golden Phallus that Isis uses to replace Osiris' missing member and so get pregnant with baby Horus. In Star Wars C3PO seems to fill that role. C3PO is stiff and tall, in fact a collector card that appears to show C3PO with a big erection was "accidentally" released. In the series, C3PO gives aid to Padme to birth Leia and Luke.

The X-Wing fighter nose is obviously phallic, and the destruction the Death Star is destroyed by a sperm like photon-torpedo.

Underwater and Buried

Many fans think The Empire Strikes Back is the best of the Star Wars movies. Scenes in the movie are drawn directly from the Contendings. In The Empire Strikes back, Luke loses a hand to Darth Vader, just as Horus loses both hands to Set. When Luke is recovering, he's suspended in a watery tube, which parallels Horus and Set's contest to see who can remain underwater the longest.

Han Solo, instead of going under the water, ends up buried in "carbonite" with his hands sticking out, which is arguably one of the most iconic images of Star Wars, reproduced numerous times as coffee tables, ice cube trays, and wall hangings and Halloween costumes. (Maybe this represents the waning crescent moon?) And it parallels events in The Contendings when Set blinds Horus in the desert.

Princess Leia

In Star Wars, Leia is a Kick Ass Moon Girl, and she serves as a composite goddess character taking on the roles of both Isis and Hathor in The Contendings. She takes the Hathor role when she rescues Han in The Return of the Jedi.

Several of the key scenes with Princess Leia have direct parallels with scenes from The Contendings, but since this post is getting really wordy, I'll save that for another day.

In the next post, I'm going to riff on the Star Wars use of myths to explore how it works, that is, why are we so drawn to these stories.