The Prophecies of Osiris, Egyptian Mythology, and the Grateful Dead’s Giza Trip

The Prophecies of Osiris, Egyptian Mythology, and the Grateful Dead’s Giza Trip

By Ryan Slesinger, PhD. Initially presented to the Grateful Dead Scholars Caucus on February 12, 2010.

In 1978, the Grateful Dead traveled to Egypt for three historic shows at the Giza Sound and Light Theater beside the Sphinx at the foot of the Great Pyramid during an eclipse. The eclipse itself marks the climax of many synchronicities that led the Dead to and through Egypt. But this eclipse also held cosmic, mythological, and ritual significance unfathomed by the band. This immensity was felt by the band, crew, and audience at the time of the performance: profound, yet mysterious. The profundity of the trip added a vital and dynamic facet to the Grateful Dead’s always evolving identity, spawning new rhythms and tones in their music, and inspiring artists to add Egyptian-inflected images to their iconography. For decades, the trip and its mysteries have captivated the imaginations of band members, artists, and fans alike. Eventually the trip’s allure led bassist Phil Lesh to look further into the mysterious aspects of the event. In his book, Searching for the Sound (2005), Lesh reveals that he "stumbled upon... the astronomical and spiritual meaning behind the myth of Osiris and discovered that [the Grateful Dead] had played a role in the return of the gods." Lesh’s explanation is tantalizingly mystical and deliberately opaque; yet it gestures towards a hidden meaning beyond its opacity. That gesture confirms a deeper profundity to the Egypt trip, and suggests that the interested reader might pursue that insight themselves. And so, in 2010 I set out to find the answer to Lesh’s question: “What was the role played by the Grateful Dead in the return of the Gods?” The path to that insight leads down a trail that is stranger than fiction. It positions the Grateful Dead at the intersection of mythology and reality, playing a key role in a tale that unfolds over millennia, spanning multiple continents, and aligning at one particular moment in time: beside the Sphinx, at the foot of the Great Pyramid, under a lunar eclipse, on September 16, 1978. 

Our story begins in Egyptian antiquity, with the myth of the death and resurrection of Osiris as told by Plutarch.  The myth of Osiris—briefly—is a drama of fratricide, regicide, and resurrection. Osiris is a good king and justly rules the people. But he is killed by his jealous brother Set—who seals Osiris in a sarcophagus and floats him down the Nile on the 17th of Athyr. Isis, Osiris’s widow, pursues the coffin and eventually brings it back to Egypt. But, she stops in to check on her son Horus, born of the union of Isis and Osiris, and while her back is turned Set reclaims Osiris’s corpse. Set then dismembers the corpse and spreads its 14 pieces all over Egypt. Isis commences a journey to find the portions of Osiris and at every point where she finds a body part, erects a temple (this is the beginning of a unified national religion in Egypt).  She recovers thirteen pieces, but cannot find the fourteenth, the phallus, which Set has thrown into the Nile where it was eaten by fish. So Isis constructs a golden phallus, 3 times the size of the original to stand in its place (thus the beginning of penile worship and certain fish being regarded as sacred in ancient Egypt). Once Osiris’s pieces are collected and unified, and Horus has slain Set, Osiris becomes resurrected in the underworld and becomes associated with the Sun. However, he is not the only deity associated with the Sun; Ra and Osiris’s own son Horus are also included in the ancient Egyptians’ invocations of the Sun deity. The syncretism of ancient Egyptian religion is on full display here.

The possible interpretations and applications of this myth are endless. Since the nineteenth-century mythologists have applied many varying lenses in their studies of myth, including psychological, anthropological, religious, structuralist, and poststructuralist lenses among many others. But, I’d like to offer two interpretations that are far from groundbreaking. These interpretations follow the type of mythological interpretation that suggests myths represent and explain natural phenomena. Such interpretations might be found in a work like Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), or the works of the nineteenth-century German nature mythologists. They are important here because they show the connection between the natural world and the ancients’ development of stories through which to understand that world. Interpretation #1: Osiris represents the sun which every night dies and each morning is resurrected. Also, the sun rises higher in the sky through the summer months and sinks lower during the winter, providing another potential reference point for Osiris’s life, death, and resurrection. Interpretation #2: Osiris represents the Nile, which flooded every year in ancient times to bring fertile soil to its banks. Then it would recede and flood again the next year too. In addressing the myth of Osiris by focusing our attention on the story of death and resurrection—indeed, renewal—as an explanation of natural processes, we see that the Egyptians perceived no ends and beginnings, but only endless cycles of renewal.

The Osirian myth evidences the ancient Egyptians’ observations of diminishing and renewal among the landmarks in their natural world: chiefly, the sun, the moon, and the river. They charted the course of astronomical objects through the sky, and the ebb and flood pattern of the Nile and organized their calendar around them. Importantly, Plutarch and Herodotus both report the same the death date for Osiris: the 17th of Athyr (in their native Greek), or Hathor (in Coptic).[1] The 17th of Athyr/Hathor roughly corresponds to November 26th on the Gregorian calendar. In ancient Egypt, Athyr/Hathor was the third month of the four-month season of Akhet (inundation). Akhet is the ancient flood season for the Nile. At this point—the 17th of Athyr/Hathor—in the four-month flood cycle the river begins to subside, having risen around the time of the summer solstice about 100 days previous.  The summer solstice is—of course—the moment when the sun is highest in the sky. Even more, the Egyptian hieroglyph “Akhet” is an ideogram for horizon, and appears in the Great Pyramid, and in the hieroglyphic name of both Ra and Horus (with whom Osiris forms a syncretic trinity). The ideogram shows the sun rising between two mountain peaks.

So, the renewing cycles of the sun and the river are connected in ancient Egypt by the multivalent word, Akhet, meaning both horizon—and showing the sun rising past the horizon—and flood season. The season of Akhet would begin around the time that the sun is highest in the sky, and would chart the time when the river is mightiest. That the given death date of Osiris corresponds to that time in which the mightiness of the river begins to subside appears to be no coincidence. The Egyptians’ understanding of cycles in nature informs their creation of the myth of Osiris. 

Fast Forward: Enter the Alchemist

The narrative in this section draws from the voluminous works of researchers Vincent Bridges and Jay Weidner, who first cracked the Alchemist’s code in 1999. I believe this to be the research discovered by Phil Lesh. A list of their specific writings consulted appears at the bottom of the page. [2] I am greatly endebted to Bridges and Weidner’s research as a foundation for my original observations also included in this section.

In between the World Wars, Paris was a beacon of light; a city that exploded in culture and art during one of the darkest periods in European history. Artists, poets, philosophers, expatriates, absinthe-schwillers, visionaries, and mystics—ecstatic or crazed—made their way to Paris from all corners of the globe. The mystic inclinations of these folks and their zeal for the occult were palpable in the bohemian atmosphere of the city at that time. Into this environment stepped Fulcanelli, the last of an archaic lineage of initiated Alchemists. It was rumored that Fulcanelli possessed the secret of transmutation in addition to multitudinous other secrets that had been closely guarded by the Alchemists over the centuries. 

He had appeared mysteriously in 1915 and taken on a group of protégés including Eugène Canseliet—who wrote the forewords to his books—and Jean-Julien Champagne, an absinthe-addicted occultist who became Fulcanelli’s illustrator. No one outside of this group of apprentices ever encountered Fulcanelli, including the editor of the publishing company that released his books. The first book to drop came in 1926 with the title The Mystery of the Cathedrals. The book was a dense alchemical text describing the obscure, puzzling non-Christian imagery adorning the medieval cathedrals of Europe. Paris’s own Notre Dame Cathedral was devoted special attention in the analysis. 300 copies of the book were printed and released into the occult-hungry Paris scene. The indirect effects of this book are wide ranging; its influence is at once found in Surrealism and Psychoanalysis, two burgeoning fields of the day, suggesting that both Andre Breton and Carl Jung were familiar with Fulcanelli’s work.

The Mystery of the Cathedrals became a locus of attention among the Parisian occultists. But the book is especially cryptic. Fulcanelli’s commentary on cathedral symbols is itself an encryption in a mysterious hermetic language that Fulcanelli referred to as “The Green Language.” This mystical, mythical, divinely perfect language is the “language of the birds,” imparted from Athena to Tiresias, the blind seer of the Odyssey, after Hera had taken Tiresias’s sight because he revealed the secrets of Olympus to mankind. Another version of this myth tells that Athena herself took Tiresias’s sight when he stumbled upon her bathing in the nude. She later felt bad and imparted the language of the birds to the blind seer.

Fulcanelli’s method of encryption seems to utilize common language signifiers to signify non-sequitur signifieds… which is to say, it is doubly metaphorical. The terms signifier and signified come from the thought of linguistic structuralist Ferdinand de Sausurre who suggests that these are the two aspect of a linguistic sign. The signifier is the word, or the “plane of expression,” and what is signified is the image conveyed, or the “plane of content.” Language itself is metaphorical—e.g. the word (signifier) “tree” is not a tree, but conjures a mental image of a tree (signified) that the word represents. This is a system of metaphorical encoding to which we all agree whenever we use language. Fulcanelli’s encryption doubles this encoding by adding a second level of signifieds to the typical usage of signifiers. Canseliet discloses this second level of encryption that is specifically aimed at alchemists in his preface to the 1926 edition of Mystery. He writes that in addition to Fulcanelli’s discussion of “the wonders of the Middle Ages [that] hold the same positive truth, the same scientific basis as the pyramids of Egypt, the temples of Greece, the Roman catacombs and the Byzantine basilicas…The hermeticists—those at least who are worthy of the name—will discover other things here.” Fulcanelli’s encryption of his messages to the other hermeticists is a literary endeavor, similar to the construction of metaphor in the works produced by great literary artists, such as James Joyce, and Thomas Pynchon [h/t Timothy Roman]. But where literary artists are playful and original—read, “nonsystematic”—in their composition of metaphors, Fulcanelli adheres to an inherited system of metaphorical encryption that relies on homophones, puns, anagrams, strategic word placement on the page, and other tactics that would be recognized by a select few readers. The heart of his work is in this second level of metaphor, accessible only to those who are able to recognize and decode it.

Both content and encryption in Mystery demonstrate the hermetic truth that mysteries are often hidden in plain sight. And to that point, Canseliet also wrote that, despite Fulcanelli’s fastidious adherence to his systematic encryption, “the key to the major arcanum is given quite openly in one of the figures, illustrating the present work” (original emphasis). I believe that illustration is the above frontispiece by Jean-Julien Champagne, included in the 1926 edition of The Mystery of the Cathedrals. That illustration includes an arrangement of aligned heavenly bodies across the top margin, an image of the sphinx in the background, positioned to the left of the focal point. And behind the sphinx—and in back of the focal point—one can make out the outline of a pyramid. Based on the location of the sphinx and pyramid, the raven and skull occupying the focal point of the image appear to be in a similar location to the Giza Sound and Light stage, where the Grateful Dead performed. The contemporary Deadhead viewer can’t help but notice this association to the iconography of the Grateful Dead, though this illustration was created in 1910, and there is no evidence that any member of the Dead was aware of Fulcanelli until Phil Lesh investigated the work of Vincent Bridges and Jay Weidner in the early 2000’s. Weidner and Bridges themselves didn’t uncover the connection between the Grateful Dead and Fulcanelli until 1999, some seventy-three years after the publication of Mystery.

Needless to say, the occult-interested Parisians gobbled up The Mystery of the Cathedrals and Fulcanelli became trendy. People far and wide claimed encounters with Fulcanelli. The fact of the matter is though, that there is no empirical evidence that Fulcanelli ever existed and nothing to substantiate these claimed encounters.

The second Fulcanelli book, The Dwellings of the Philosophers appeared in 1929. This book demonstrated much less inner-coherence and symbolic wordplay—and as such garnered much less critical acclaim. The Fulcanelli fad was fading. In 1930, Eugène Canseliet saw his master for the last time. Until that point, he had worked closely with Fulcanelli to produce the books. Canseliet was always trepidatious in revealing the reasons behind Fulcanelli’s disappearance, but it can be inferred that Fulcanelli was displeased with the work his apprentices put into Dwellings. Champagne at this point, resigned himself to his absinthe bottle and a newfound morose disposition, drinking himself to death within the next two years.  Canseliet, however, continued with his work. Fulcanelli, who was roughly 80 years old in 1930, gave to Canseliet a sign to watch for—in case the master ever needed his apprentice again—and instructions for what to do when the sign came. Then Fulcanelli disappeared… for 22 years at least.

In 1952 the sign came. As instructed, Canseliet packed up his lab materials and headed for the designated town in the Pyrenees—probably Seville—where a car promptly met him and carried him deep into the mountains to an undisclosed chateau. He was shown to his room in the top of one of the chateau’s towers. The room was equipped with its own laboratory. As he gazed out of his tower window on the first night, he noticed young children dressed in 16th century clothes playing in the courtyard. Thinking nothing of it—for some reason—Canseliet went to bed. Over the next few days Canseliet busied himself with his own work and in his free time was given to strolling the chateau’s grounds. It became apparent to him on these strolls that this chateau was Fulcanelli’s stronghold to which were summoned the brightest alchemical adepts, all undertaking their own projects. Eventually Fulcanelli visited Canseliet in his personal laboratory. To Canseliet’s surprise, his master, who had been 80 in 1930, now appeared to be about 50, even though he should have been over 100 years old at that point. The two engaged in a project which Canseliet would never disclose. However, a reprint of Cathedrals was issued the next year containing a new chapter. We can infer that the master alchemist had summoned his apprentice to help him write this additional chapter. 

Towards the end of his stay at the mystery chateau, Canseliet woke up one morning with an overwhelming desire for fresh air. Desperate for air, Canseliet headed to the courtyard, and in his haste he neglected to properly account for his appearance. With shirt untucked and suspenders hanging at his sides, Canseliet stepped into the courtyard to take in the new day. But, to his chagrin, three beautiful young ladies approached the courtyard conversing and giggling. Canseliet ducked into the doorway’s shadow, hoping to remain hidden as the girls strolled the courtyard. The young ladies walked all the way through the courtyard without noticing him, but, right as they were about to leave the courtyard, one of the girls deliberately and immediately turned her gaze towards Canseliet standing in the shadows. Canseliet was shocked, for he recognized that this young girl was Fulcanelli. That encounter is the last time that Fulcanelli was ever seen.

To his credit, Canseliet told this story numerous times with remarkable consistency throughout the duration of the rest of his life. He also swore 2 things: #1: That he was not Fulcanelli. #2: Fulcanelli did exist and existed in the form of a human being. The key to the secret of Fulcanelli’s identity died with Eugène Canseliet in 1982.

What becomes apparent to those who are adept in the interpretation of hermetic symbolism is that the imagery contained on the “cyclical” cross of Hendaye comprised an encrypted key for deciphering the encrypted content that the alchemists had included in the imagery adorning the cathedrals. When decrypted, Fulcanelli’s interpretation of the cyclical cross, in conjunction with his interpretation of the Cathedral imagery would yield to the investigator the secrets of the alchemists. What was decrypted were sophisticated star charts demonstrating a series of galactic and terrestrial alignments that detailed a 24-year period of “cyclical catastrophe” which would occur at the “end of time.” Noticeably absent from the content decrypted was the orientation point at which to stand in order to properly align the charts. Fulcanelli alluded to this orientation point but chose not to disclose it. With the benefit of hindsight, I believe that the frontispiece of Mystery does disclose this orientation point, hidden in plain sight at the very beginning of Fulcanelli’s text: in front of the Great Pyramid, beside the Sphinx.

And so, we find ourselves at a bizarre turning point in a peculiar story that so far has very little to do with the Grateful Dead. What we know is that Fulcanelli, the last alchemist in a proud tradition of initiates into the cult of hermetic secrets, chose to pass on information regarding the impending apocalypse that had been so closely guarded by his predecessors that the rest of the world barely knew alchemy was a field involved in eschatological pursuits. He chose to do so by encoding the great secret in plain sight, for anyone in the world to discover yet chose to refrain from providing the one point necessary to properly align the star charts and discover the timing of that 24 year cyclical catastrophe. Fulcanelli, effectively, had created an unsolvable riddle, giving enough away to drive someone mad, while refraining from disclosing the one point which might bring the investigator back to sanity. But ingeniously, he offered a solution to that riddle in the frontispiece imagery that was sure to be overlooked by anyone scouring the text to decrypt his encoded bird language. What Fulcanelli didn’t account for—or perhaps did—was the development of modern star mapping computer programs which could simulate the movements and positions of heavenly bodies on any day, historical or forthcoming.

And now we return to the two gentlemen who cracked Fulcanelli’s code. Vincent Bridges and Jay Weidner both separately began investigating the Fulcanelli mystery in the mid 1990’s. Through a series of synchronicities, they met and combined forces on the project. They went to Hendaye and they went to Notre Dame and they poured effort into their scrutinization of Fulcanelli’s symbology. After five years of diligent attention to their subject—and I can only assume long periods of perceived insanity—they cracked the Mysteries of the Cathedrals and gained access to the treasured star charts of the Alchemists. Thanks to the technological explosion of the computer age, Fulcanelli’s omission of the orienting point was of no consequence. When Bridges and Weidner uploaded the deciphered data into the star mapping program, they found that the time and place of the orientation point at the beginning of the 24-year cyclical catastrophe was at the Sphinx, next to the great pyramid at Giza in the evening of September 16, 1978 which was signaled by the eclipse that hung in the sky over the pyramid: the precise time and place of the Grateful Dead’s performance at the pyramids. And, that was just the easiest alignment to observe on that special evening. Beyond the alignment of Sun, Moon, Earth and pyramid, based on Bridges and Weidner’s star mapping programs, apparently—and that’s a big apparently—the great pyramid, at that place and time, stood at the center point between the north and south poles as well as at the center point between the eastern most and western most meridians of the globe, as well as at the midpoint between the galactic edge and galactic center. More observable though, was the unique cultural alignment that occurred on that evening amidst levels and levels of cosmic alignments.

The Grateful Dead and the 24-year Cyclical “Catastrophe”

This cultural alignment may best be represented by an anecdote Blair Jackson cut from his book, Garcia: An American Life that pertains to the events of the Dead’s Sept. 16, 1978 Giza show. Jackson informs his readers that, as the eclipse hung in the sky, the members of the Dead one by one stepped on stage with Hamza al Din and the Nubian musicians performing to integrate themselves into the hypnotic melodies being conjured. The feeling of that moment in the air was indescribable. In the crowd, a female deadhead hopped up on an ancient stone and bared her breasts to the Nubians while she let out a long Yee-haw, to which the delighted Nubians replied with their own Yee-haw (although they did not speak English, and especially not southern emphatic colloquialisms). Amidst the revelry of yee-haws, some of the Nubians began their own tongue clicking “Ul-Ul-Ul-Ul” cries which were in turn reciprocated by the Deadheads. Language barrier be damned. Language is a difficult medium for conveying ecstatic feelings anyway, just ask a poet. And on that point, it might be of synchronous interest that the only notable Grateful Dead member absent from Egypt (besides Scully) was Robert Hunter who, according to Garcia, had convinced himself it wouldn’t be important.

So, what to make of this supposed 24-year cyclical catastrophe that would have begun on September 16, 1978 and run through the year 2002? First, it is important to remember that that phrase is un-decoded Fulcanelli symbology. Second, we must be aware that our interpretations of eschatological pursuits are guided by our own cultural interpretations of the “end of time.” In a Western, Christian context, we assume that phrases such as “catastrophe,” “Armageddon,” and “end of time” are all destructive terms that establish a sense of finality. But, in the context of the ancient Egyptian notion of godly renewal, we begin to see that an end might not be so final, and instead it may be a cyclical step towards a new beginning. To start with, even though Ra is identified as the sun god, when Osiris is resurrected, he too becomes a divinity associated with the sun. So too does Horus, in his father’s footsteps. So that when the ancient Egyptians invoked the Sun God, that invocation would be vocalized as, “Oh Ra, oh Osiris, oh Horus, oh Sun,” naming all three divinities and the heavenly body with which they were all associated. Additionally, when Osiris—who rose to national-god status—came into conflict with a local deity exhibiting the same qualities, the Egyptians chose rather to include the two in one name as opposed to ditching one or the other. For example, the local god Apis became Osiris-Apis.  The Greeks were also hip to this idea of evolving god identities so that Osiris-Apis, in Greek times became Serapis. Isis, who was associated with Hathor, became Isis-Hathor and in Greek times Aphrodite. Neith accordingly became Athena, who imparted the “green language” to Tiresias and effectually made Fulcanelli’s encryption possible.           

So, when we address the 24-year period of “cyclical catastrophe” we must eschew our cultural presuppositions in favor of adopting the lens of the cultures who started all of this. Looking at the “catastrophe” as the ancient Egyptians would, we may re-interpret the word “catastrophe” as either “renewal” or “resurrection” and the phrase “end times” as “transition times.” When looking at the 24-year period from 1978 to 2002 with this type of gaze, we may notice that many things are different now than they were in 1977. Technology is so pervasive that we all have fascinating little computers in our pockets or purses as we speak. Identity movements have gained momentum and changed the ways we view ourselves and others.  Ecological preservation movements are trying their hardest to succeed where previously they didn’t exist, and also, we have had our share of disasters. No period of rebirth and renewal could come without such costs. Without death there cannot be new life, and it might better serve us to envision the new world that arose from the 24-year transition period not as wholly and literally unique from the previous—this would not make sense—but as metaphorical, conjured within the physical realm that already occupied this time and space: a syncretic meld of the old world and the new.     

Finally, we have returned to our original question: “What role did the Grateful Dead play in the return of the Gods?” It’s actually quite simple and hidden in plain view, in keeping with the tenets of the Alchemists whose code the Grateful Dead unintentionally cracked. The Grateful Dead were simply present at the orienting point during the galactic alignment that ushered in the 24-year cyclical catastrophe, or, in our terms, the 24-year period of renewal and resurrection.  

In ancient Egypt, processions were led by the sistrum bearer and the music emitted by that guide was meant to lead the resurrected Gods to their point of return. The Grateful Dead were not at the orienting point because they had undertaken the Indiana Jones-like adventure set up by Fulcanelli. In fact, Bridges and Weidner, who were finally successful in cracking the alchemists’ code, showed up 19 years after the fact. The Grateful Dead were present because they thought it would be a hip place to play and a hip time to play there, unaware of the magnitudes that that hipness reached. The Grateful Dead were in tune with the cosmos to such a degree that they glided their way into a role akin to the sistrum bearer of ancient Egyptian processions. The Grateful Dead became the sistrum bearers in the procession of the fulfillment of Osirian prophecy. Simply by being where they were on September 16, 1978, they began the procession of cyclical renewal with their music.

[1] Plutarch: “Isis and Osiris”, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt, Moralia Volume V, 356 C and D, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1936, edition consulted  1993, page 37.

[2] Consulted Essays by Vincent Bridges and Jay Weidner. All essays available at vincentbridges.com

• Abydos, the Osireion, and Egyptian Sacred Science

• Fulcanelli and the Mystery of the Cross at Hendaye

• Fulcanelli: The Mystery, The Secret, and the Man

• Fulcanelli’s Final Revelation: Raising the Djed at the End of Time

• Into the Alchemical Mysteries of Fulcanelli Part I

• Into the Alchemical Mysteries of Fulcanelli Part IV

• Notes on Egyptian Religion

• Return of the Djedi

• The Body of Light and the Alchemical Secret

• The Luxor Sufis: Living Keepers of the Ancient Egyptian Mysteries

• The Path of Ausar and the Mysteries of Resurrection

• The Path of Ra

• The Raising of the Djed