In part 2 the other branch I'd like to explore is the setting of broken bones that Al Jabbar refers to. I have alluded to Isis and her love of Osiris. Isis searched high and low in Egypt to find the pieces of Osiris that were hacked up and scattered by Set. Once she had gathered up all of Osiris' pieces she put him back together long enough to work her magic and be impregnated by Osiris' seed. The allusion here is the light spirit of Osiris penetrating the earth mother Isis and her representation as the vessel of matter where the new life will grow. That new life is of course the baby Horus; Horus being the result of the soul incarnated into matter, acquiring love and wisdom and then being declared fit to join the enlightened ones. It's ancient natural philosophy at its finest. It is yours and it is my destiny; we are all destined to become Horus.
But what about this dismembering? Where does this come from? The constellation of Orion, as the yearly cycle passes, eventually sinks lower and lower below the horizon each night when the sun goes down. One by one all the stars that make up the great giant by late spring are eventually dismembered until finally Orion is no longer visible at night for seventy days. After the seventy day period the constellation starts to re-appear again in late summer, as the sun is about to rise. This is the setting of the broken bones of the giant Al Jabbar. Not coincidentally, the ancient Egyptian mummification period lasted 70 days as well; these ancients being the ultimate symbolizers of natural philosophy. Material death, mummification and Osiris all played parts in symbolizing the reconstitution of self in order to facilitate re-birth into a different plane of existence as well as the engendering of new life. This can also symbolize the incarnation of soul into matter, as mentioned earlier, where a new life portrayed as Horus, will be the result of this union.
This explains Al Jabbar the giant and why this moniker also refers to the setting of broken bones. In my mind this leads to a couple more immediate questions and observations. The first one is who is this Set and why would he dismember Osiris? The second one is the connection to observing natural phenomenon and how the dismembering and remembering is something you see every night in the monthly waning and waxing of the moon. With Easter coming up this is a fantastic topic that needs to be explored further.
