Osiris and Typhon: Higher Triad versus Lower Tetrad

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 8 pages

The correction offered is to Plutarch. Typhon is not, as he asserts, a distinct Evil Principle or the Satan of the Jews, but an aspect or shadow of Osiris — the lower cosmic principles of his divine body, Osiris being the personified universe as ideation and Typhon the same universe in its material realisation; the two in one are Vishnu-Shiva. On this reading Typhon is the terrestrial and material envelope of Osiris, who is the indwelling spirit of it, which is why the two map onto the higher triad and the lower quaternary of the constitution set out elsewhere in this section.

The evidence offered is the confusion of the scholars themselves. Orientalists are perplexed to find Set-Typhon addressed in some papyri as a great and good god and in others as the embodiment of evil — but Shiva, one of the Hindu Trimurti, is described in some places as the best and most bountiful of gods and elsewhere as dark, black, destroying and terrible; and Loki, the Scandinavian Typhon, described in earlier times as a beneficent being and god of the domestic hearth, suddenly lost caste and became a power of evil and a demon of the worst kind. Blavatsky's explanation for that invariable transformation is the argument of the file: that these dual gods are symbols of good and of necessary evil, of light and darkness, and remain so only so long as the two halves are kept together.

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