My sometimes fellow researcher who got his honours degree in classical history has found that little of what he learned has any basis now that he knows the Phoenician/ Keltic complex and the work we have explored together. It has been over a decade of dedicated work on my part. I hope I can pass on some of what I have learned. This decade began with an Ogham scholar asking me to re-write an out-of-print book. I didn't know Ogham from Om (the Universal Sound) but my whole life had been dedicated to this pursuit. It is a pursuit that entails all knowledge and I confess some pride in the fact that I bear the name Baird which means 'bard' or 'poet' and was the high Druidic leaders such as Isis and Osiris title in one of the ancient cultures who may have existed as long ago as 36,000 B.C. according to many. There are over 25,000 books published on just that one culture - Atlantis.


The elites and their Divine Kings are a plague upon life on earth and it is not getting better. The sophistication of the intrigues are not always obvious like it is in Korea today where we have ‘Moonies with Missiles’ or in Iran where the Ayatollahs run roughshod over soulful enablement. The same thing works in most media controlled environments or the world paradigm in toto. Just because the traditional religions have lost some demographics in terms of having insane or cultish followers does not mean the Mormons, Noahdist extremists and Moslem Jihadists or Scientologists are any different.


We should be trying to end intolerance and the deification of one group while demonizing any others or branding some as heretical points of view. Ultimately all religions and beliefs are struggling with the same thing but those that stop seeking to participate in the creation and thus limit 'What is' are engaged in playing god. They often have made themselves the sole spokesmen for their imaginary god or the Lord as in the case of the Catholic hegemonists. But before we get into the current hegemony too much we will have to understand the root of the problem. The Reformation did not just happen and in some ways it is an academic or superficial construct. Here is Černỷ a top Egyptologist as he addresses one of the origin myths thought to be most ancient. Note Heliopolitanism (Druidic sun-worship that Thomas Paine tells us is the basis of Masonry.) seems to be even more ancient.


“At about the same time as it found a means of reconciliation with the conception of the king as the god Horus, the solar religion of Heliopolis succeeded in reaching a compromise with a new cult, in fact a new religion which was irresistibly spreading from the center of the Delta towards the south, the religion of Osiris. Osiris came from Djedu, the capital of the IXth nome of Lower Egypt; ‘Lord of Djedu’ is his old title and the town was called Per-Usire (the Greek form of this being Busiris). ‘House of Osiris’. Nevertheless, Djedu was probably not his original home, since the proper god of Djedu was Andjeti, who is represented in human form as a ruler with his insignia, a long crooked sceptre in one hand and a whip in the other, with two feathers on his head. Andjeti was, however, very early absorbed by Osiris and his name became a mere epithet of that god.


A circumstance that favoured the absorption was that Osiris too was entirely human in form. He also is shown with the Upper Egyptian white crown to which two feathers are attached on both sides and which is set on a pair of ram’s horns. But there is an important difference between Andjeti and Osiris: while the former represents a living ruler, Osiris is always shown as a dead person, standing, wrapped in a long white royal cloak, the two arms holding the sceptre. His name Usire, of which Osiris is the Greek form, seems to mean ‘Seat of the Eye’; it has the appearance of a human name and it is probable that Osiris was originally a human king {How long ago?} who became deified after his death. A myth was woven around his person which is less concerned with his former life and rule as a king of Egypt than with his death and subsequent resurrection after which he became a ruler in the realm of the dead. No systematic expression of this myth is known from Egyptian sources, our chief authority in this respect being Plutarch in his ‘On Isis and Osiris’; frequent allusions, however, occur in Egyptian texts of all periods which show that Plutarch’s account agrees essentially with the Egyptian belief.” (3)

With the imposition of christianity on the Roman Empire in the fifth century, the native gods of the subject races were invariably demonised and their imoortance diminished. What we know of the majority of these earlier religions comes to us largely through myth, which Robert Graves, in his Introduction to "The Greek Myths" describes as politico-religious history.
He also states:
"The whole of neolithic Europe, to judge from surviving artifacts and myths, had a remarkably homogenous system of religious ideas, based on worship of the many-titled Mother-Goddess, who was also known in Syria and Libya."
He continues:
"Ancient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought."
I recognise, of course, that you're writing of Egypt, not Europe, yet according to the title of your post "The Origins of Religion?" the earliest concept was of a masculine deity. So what did the Egyptians worship before Osiris? And where does Isis fit?

Graves is a so-so scholar.

The scholar I quoted is Cerny and his thought on Osiris if you read closely shows it came from elsewhere and he does not know where these origins are - I do cover it better than any others - Heliopolitanism which he refers to preceding Osiris is far earlier than Egypt.

Isis according to him is the throne upon which Osiris sat.

According to me - Isis and Isis Pelasgi (which is the continuing title of Egyptian Pharaohs till Cleopatra) are the Sea Peoples or Phoenician Kelts. They were egalitarian and women were the equal of men. Their representative deities for the forces of Reality (Nature) had not been manipulated until the time Cerny talks about in Egypt. This is the start of religion rather than shamanic or Druidic science. Eliade's The Forge and the Crucible is one of my many sources and he is closer by far than Graves or Sir James Frazer.

One of the northern derivatives of Hopewell of interest to a few scholars is the anomalous Effigy Mound culture of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa. The remains attract attention because of the range of animal forms represented by the low effigy mounds. There are sometimes burials at the "vital" points - hips, head or heart area - of the animals, but there is only the simplest of grave goods.


{How these nature worship spiritual guide representations can be talked about as "anomalous" is beyond me. The Serpent Mound near Cincinnati is a key worldwide astrological figure. The Nazca Line effigies of animals are well known. The Dragon Project and other ley line and Gaian concepts of earth energy and center point location of the Mayan urban and pyramid complexes are definitely related. Stonehenge is recently shown connected to the Serpent Mound and certain astrological or astronomical observations are discussed in Ancient American magazine. Vortexes of energy are obvious in places like Sedona, Arizona. The Giza main pyramid is on such a vortex and some people talk about time warp effects there. But we must remember most archaeologists like their academic brethren the psychiatrists, don't believe in psychic visions, soulful interpretations and other spiritual things that all early people on earth clearly knew very well.


What good is there in denial of what others did or used as central to their lives, even if 'science' of this variety was right? They aren't right anyway, but please ask this question of the scholars who are interpreting these important cultural artifacts. Why avoid the actual beliefs of the people? The reason to locate the burial in points where the energy is collected relates to the cult of the individual involved and their tribal guide, as well as to their sex and specific power ally. It is part of many less dramatic rituals such as the Star of David and the pentagram.}


Burials are either flexed or bundle types. The link with Hopewell is found in ceramics and in the interest in raptors and certain mammals. At one group, Sny-Magill (now a national monument in Iowa), Beaublein (1953) thought two mounds of the group to be Hopewellian in construction and content. McKern has reported several sites of the Effigy culture (McKern 1928; 1930), as well as the Wisconsin Hopewell - locally called the Trempealeau (McKern 1931). Jennings (1965a) and Rowe (1956) have attempted summaries of the Effigy culture. The sites often lie on ridges overlooking a stream valley. The mounds take about a dozen shapes: conical, biconical, oval, linear, panther, bear, bird (goose, raptor), deer, buffalo (?), turtle, lizard, wolf, or fox, and beaver. These are arranged in clusters or lines with no regularity as to the forms depicted; the linear and conical ones are mixed with the effigies. {Likely no relation to guides or spirits but rather to allow earth energy to build or flow in some manner enhancing or guarding the people. Their ancestral forefathers who are often dug up and moved in the Iroquois or eastern regions mimics practices carried on around the world. [There is a genetic energy and spiritual reality that psychology has shown to exist between family members separated at birth (Harvard) and especially 'twins' (Minnesota's University).]} The groups may contain dozens of mounds...


In New York, Ritchie (1965) identifies Hopewell in the artifacts and mounds of the Squawkie Hill phase; earlier, he had incorporated this phase in his Point Peninsula culture series. Griffin (1964) also notes the Hopewellian content of the New York finds. Furthermore, he mentions the extension of dentate rocker stamping on pottery well beyond the appearance of other Hopewell traits and also comments on the blurring or fading of the Hopewell complex after about A.D. 250.


{It was almost completely gone by 500 AD. This is an important time in world history. The Ostrogothic disappearance from Italy that led to major fortifications in South America as discovered by Gene Savoy after this time when Jennings wrote this book might also have led to the end of the Hopewell cultural control. We know Roman statues were found in Mexico with a 99% archaeological certainty according to University of Calgary Professor Emeritus David Kelley. But few scholars have drawn any connection even with the huge forts in South America. Probably it is pure co-incidence. But when you know the Visigoths are Merovingian related and the people like Dagobert had a trepanned skull as well as other things we will lay before you later you might think it less a co-incidence. The influx of Keltic 'Red-Heads' from the Taklamakand Desert near the present Great Wall occurred at this time too, according to Prof. Covey of Wake Forest University, and Professor Joan Price of the American Archaeological Institute.}


This is about the time the southern derivatives began to appear and the cultures of the Middle West and East developed stronger regional differences, with many local sequences replacing the more uniform culture characteristic of Hopewell dominance. Even so, as in the widespread dentate pottery decoration, vestiges of Hopewell ancestry can be noted. In New York, for example, the development of late Point Peninsula into Owasco and even historic Iroquois can be tied through a few traits to Hopewell (Griffin 1964).


The Owasco culture of New York, accepted as being ancestral to the Iroquois, is dated at A.D. 1000 to 1300.... Farming tools included elk-scapula hoes, as well as two types of flint hoe. Food-storage pits are common in some sites.