James Joyce's "The Sisters": chalices and umbrellas, ptolemaic Memphis and Victorian Dublin

Susan Swartzlander

Almost 30 years ago, Berni Benstock published a note about "The Sisters," questioning whether the short story had "come-of-age," a point "when a critic takes it upon himself to summarize the compendium of previous criticism, cut away, the accumulation of erroneous conjectures, and make some definite final statements about it -- rare distinction for a short story." Despite those "definite final statements," Berni found "room for at least another two cents worth of commentary" (Benstock 32). Perhaps there never are final words to say about Joyce's texts, and it is precisely the mystery, the complexity, the ambiguity that Joyceans find so absorbing.

I would like to explore once more the tantalizing mysteries of "The Sisters," assuming two of Berni's main points -- his diagnosis of the priest's madness as a crisis of faith: the priest "comes dose to losing his mind because he is seriously on the verge of losing his faith; as well as his assertion that the infirm Father Flynn "contributes to a view that the Church is both corroded and a dangerously corrosive force" (Benstock 33).

As a story about the loss of faith and the corruption of religious values, Joyce's "The Sisters" has its roots in a Georg Ebers novel of the same title. The German Ebers, an Egyptian archeologist and author of historical romances, based his fiction on historical documents. In the case of The Sisters, Ebers focused on the ancient Memphite cult of Serapis, an institution that worshiped the Egyptian and Greek equivalents of the god Osiris, a god of death and resurrection.

Joyce peppers his story with allusions to the world Ebers recaptures.(1) Joyce's references to the East include the boy's dream, the word "gnomon," and the epithet Rosicrucian. The boy dreams of "long velvet curtains and a swimming lamp of antique fashion. I felt that I had been very far away, in some land where the customs were strange -- in Persia, I thought" (13). Appropriate for a story about death, this image recalls a festival of lamps that honored the dead one night a year in a commemoration observed throughout the East. The rows of oil lamps fastened to houses were intended "to light the shades on their return to their old homes and back again to the realm of the dead" (Frazer 398).

The word "gnomon," which the boy contemplates in conjunction with "simony" and "paralysis," also points toward the East. Not only is Alexandrian Greece invoked with the naming of Euclid, but Egypt has long been considered the source of geometry -- the gnomon in particular -- as a way of measuring a loss. Herodotus tells us that any man whose property sustained damage from Nile flooding would appeal to the king, "who would send inspectors to measure the extent of the loss, in order that he might pay in future a fair proportion of the tax at which his property had been assessed." The historian surmises that "this was the way in which geometry was invented, and passed afterwards into Greece -- for knowledge of the sundial and the gnomon and the twelve divisions of the day came into Greece from Babylon" (Herodotus 169). In "The Sisters" the gnomon not only symbolizes a significant loss, in this case the loss of faith, the word signals that one dimension of Joyce's story will involve Eastern influences.

A third example of joyce's suggestive technique occurs when the uncle calls his nephew "that Rosicrucian there" (11). Members of the "Ancient Order of Rosae Crucius" believed themselves to be "mystically in touch with the Great White Brotherhood of Egypt," a priesthood that flourished in the fifteenth century BCE, recalling the cults of Memphis. This "international fraternity of religious mystics" advocated a "dreamy aesthetic withdrawal from worldly concerns" (Gifford 30). Rosicrucians, and many historians, trace the origins of early Christian asceticism to these ancient Egyptian movements.

Intrigued by an historical approach that discerns patterns repeated in different times and places, Joyce delighted in weaving together details to illustrate that ancient Eastern philosophy, religion, and politics held some meaning for modern experience. While engaged in writing and revising "The Sisters," Joyce definitely had such Irish and Eastern correspondence in mind.(2) In the 1907 lecture he delivered in Trieste, "Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages," Joyce described the Celtic language as "oriental in origin . . . identified by many philologists with the ancient language of the Phoenicians." More than the language evolved from the East, however: "The religion and civilization of this ancient people, later known by the name of Druidism, were Egyptian" (CW 156). Perhaps most indicative of Joyce's design in "The Sisters" was his pronouncement that "Ancient Ireland is dead just as ancient Egypt is dead. Its death chant has been sung, and on its gravestone has been placed the seal" (CW 173).

These words provide a key to a more comprehensive understanding of "The Sisters." While writing and revising the story,Joyce thought about his own nation's failures and his countrymen's futile attempts to revive her. Resurrection (or, more aptly, the absence of a resurrection) became not only a major theme of "The Sisters," but an essential metaphor by which Joyce expressed his own assessment of Ireland's national and religious failure: "It is well past time for Ireland to have done once and for all with failure. If she is truly capable of reviving, let her awake, or let her cover up her head and lie down decently in her grave forever" (CW 174).

In the late nineteenth century historians drew parallels between the origin of Christianity and the development of Egyptian religion. Edward Lecky describes "the Egyptian ... bowed low, before the Divine presence. He veiled his eves, he humbled his reason, he represented the introduction of a new element into the moral life of Europe, the spirit of religious reverence and awe" (Lecky 1: 344). Like Father Flynn's lessons about the "complex and mysterious" ceremonies of the Church, the Egyptian system maintained "religious ceremonies ... veiled in mystery and allegory. Chastity, abstinence from animal food, ablutions, long and mysterious ceremonies of preparation or initiation, were the most prominent features of worship" (Lecky 1: 354). Even ancient historians believed the Egyptian zealots "originated, and taught the Greeks to use, ceremonial meetings, processions, and liturgies" (Herodotus 152). Ebers saw in his own historical documents proof "that the great Monastic Idea -- which "under the influence of Christianity, grew to be of such vast moral and historical influence -- first struck root in one of the centers of heathen religious practices" (Ebers i).

Joyce's interest in evoking ancient Egypt, however, goes beyond illustrating Christianity's religious origins. Ebers's novel explores the corruption and the dissolution of the Egyptian religion in an age of extreme anxiety. Ancient Egypt, under Greek and later Roman rule, became as much a victim of spiritual and political "paralysis" as had Joyce's Ireland. Herodotus described the later Egyptians as "religious to excess, beyond any other nation in the world" obsessively observing only the superficialities (Herodotus 143). Historians describe a decline in Egypt's political fortunes that exhausted "the forces of life both within and without ..."; a crippling paralysis gripped Egypt, "Stagnation and a deadly and indifferent inertia fell like a stupor upon the once vigorous life of the nation." The response in these desperate times consisted not of claiming "ancient Egypt is dead" but in clamoring for the more glorious past: "the nation fell back upon the past" (Breasted 363-65). Historians saw in this blind workshop of the past, Egypt's demise: "In this process of conserving the old, the religion of Egypt sank deeper and deeper in decay to become,what Herodotus found it, a religion of innumerable external observances and mechanical usages, carried out with such elaborate and insistent punctiliousness." These hollow observances "were no longer the expression of a growing and developing inner life, as in the days before the creative vitality of the race was extinct" (Breasted 367).

Egypt "had become a vast and impressive legend, a colossus slumbering in a feeble old age, but still wearing a mysterious air of majesty." Egyptians attempted to veil their insecurity as Irish patriots had: "In their days of weakness then. adopted an air of mysterious profundity as their defensive attitude. In that way the younger peoples were greatly impressed with visions of a vast and vague glory and wanted to become as great as Egypt had been" (Wilson 317).

These descriptions of ancient Egypt come astonishingly close to Joyce's own descriptions of the Ireland he knew, a country characterized by "paralysis" from nationalism rooted in blind reverence for romantic versions of a glorious Irish past and blind obedience to a religious institution that choked individual freedom. Both Joyce's story and Ebers's novel show us individuals enslaved in moribund institutions. Ironically, there is no hope, no revival, for these institutions built on the very premise of resurrection.(3)

Ebers wrote, his novel as a tribute to two sisters whose plight he found movingly, recorded in the Sarapieion archive. The sisters served in the temple as detainees subject to a system called katoche. Those bound to the temple found themselves there for a variety of reasons. Some were petty criminals seeking sanctuary; others were debtors; many were devout anchorites following an omen or portent decreeing that they dedicate themselves to Sarapis. Retaining little personal freedom, these enkatochoi were confined to the Serapeum grounds (Thompson 218-19).

Economics combined with difficult family circumstances drove the sisters to the temple. Thaues and Taus -- Irene and Klea in the novel -- play roles as official mourners at funerals. Reenacting the roles of Isis and Nephthys, the two offered lamentations and libations to the deceased, and by extension, to the dead god Osiris. In return for their service, which included fetching "water in cracked jars from the Nile ... for the three hundred and sixty daily libations at the altar of Serapis," the sisters were supposed to receive "three cakes of bread a day, with an annual bounty of wheat and kiki-oil." However, as Ebers records in his travel book, although the supplicants worked tirelessly, they lived in abject poverty, forced to plead for the most basic sustenance. Their "doles were so irregularly paid that, in order not to die of hunger, they were forced to ask help" in a series of petitions (Ebers 159).

"The Sisters" of Joyce's story, Nannie and Eliza, do not carry water in cracked jugs from the Nile (nor from the Liffey for that matter), but they do carry associations of libations and lamentation. As Eliza discusses the "beautiful corpse" (15) of their deceased brother, Nannie presses sherry and cream crackers on the guest mourners in a ritualistic presentation: "Nannie went to the sideboard and brought out a decanter of sherry and some wineglasses. She set these on the table and invited us to take a little glass of wine. Then, at her sister's bidding, she poured out the sherry into the glasses and passed them to us" (15). As the sisters enact their own roles in this Dublin funerary drama, they assume the same roles Klea and Irene emulate, the Egyptian goddesses Isis and Nephthys. Isis sports a seat or throne as a headdress, associating her with the royal throne (Watterson 89). From the moment Eliza appears in the story, and for its duration, she appears enthroned in her deceased brother's place: "In the little room downstairs we found Eliza seated in his arm-chair in state." The added phrase "in state" implies more than we might expect to find in the dreary "little room" (14). Nephthys (whose headdress is the more pedestrian basket) is designated "The Lady of the House," and appears subservient to Isis. Nannie does her sister's bidding, escorting the visitors to "he dead-room," and then serving her sister and the guests. When Eliza sees Nannie "about to fall asleep" and says, "There's poor Nannie . . . she's wore out. All the work we had . . ." the reader has little doubt about who does the work and who sits "in state" (14, 16). The Dublin sisters' lamentations, like those preserved in the Egyptian papyri, represent a traditional formula of trite phrases: "Ah, well, he's gone to a better world. . . . He had a beautiful death, God be praised. . . . such a beautiful corpse" (15). The funerary lamentations of Isis and Nephthys, published in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works of archaeology, seem no less trite, invoking the deceased as "Oh beautiful" and "Oh beauteous."

Critics, responding to the sisters' connections with funeral lamentations and libations, have found in the pair reflections of symbolic priests and nurses of the spirit (Magalaner), as well as allusions to Mary and Martha, the biblical sisters who sought the resurrection of their dead brother Lazarus (Spielberg, Kenner). Other critics have responded primarily to the sisters' desperate straits: "the one element of the story that is the most constant is the emphasis on their poverty, their hard work, and their unselfish support of their brother" (Walzl, "Dubliners" 209).

The brother they, support appears as a grotesque figure whose body has been ravaged by a physical and spiritual paralysis. Some have considered the priest a Christ or Lazarus figure for whom there will be no resurrection, but he also becomes Dublin's failed Osiris as well. Joyce invested in Father Flynn characteristics that play on the mythology surrounding this Egyptian god of the dead, a god synonymous with resurrection.(4) Undoubtedly, Joyce would have been aware of Osiris's similarity to Christ.(5) Archaeologists believe that Osiris, at one time a wise and benevolent king of Pre-dynastic Egypt, became the Egyptian equivalent of Jesus Christ:

His appeal lay in the belief that he lived on earth as a man who

brought nothing but good to mankind but who was betrayed and

murdered. His resurrection and the hope of eternal life that he held

out to everyone further enhanced his popularity. (Watterson 88)

Flynn's home, like Osiris's abode, faces west: "the window-panes of the houses that looked to the west reflected the tawny gold of a great bank of clouds . . . [the dead-room] was suffused with dusky golden light" (14). Ebers recalls that in Memphis, "as in all Egyptian cities, on its Western side lay its `City of the Dead'" (Ebers 7). Not only was the "West End" the "abode of the dead in Egyptian cities," but "to `go West' meant to die" (Durant 154). The only other light in the room emanates from the two candles, the "pale thin flames" of the dikerion, "reputed to signify `the advent of the Holy Spirit,'" Christian symbolism that some historians suggest emerged from the Egyptian funerary practice symbolizing "the descent of Ra the holy spirit on the inert body of Osiris" (Massey 222).

As the god of resurrection, Osiris retains the "words of power" that triumph over evil, darkness, death. Father Flynn we know is a man of few words and little power. In fact, the most stark images of his paralysis appear in descriptions of the priest's mouth and face. The boy dreams that the "heavy grey face of the paralytic" appears to him. Although the boy tries to think of happier events, like Christmas, there will be no birth, or rebirth, to celebrate, only a death to mourn. As he contemplates the threatening "grey face" that follows him with its "murmuring voice," the boy wonders why "it smiled continually and why the lips were so moist with spittle. But then I remembered that it had died of paralysis" (11).

In Egyptian accounts, the deceased, the Osiris, seeks an escape from paralysis and "pleads with all his dumbness that his mouth may be opened, or, in other words, that his memory, which he has lost awhile, may be given back to him" (Massey 208). The Egyptian Books of the Dead include incantations for the deceased to proclaim "my mouth is firm," which Budge glosses as "I know how to utter the words of power which I possess with vigor" (Budge 216). Those seeking a reward of eternal life sought to be declared "true of voice" (Budge 176); typical epithets for Osiris included "true of speech" (Frazer 389). The Egyptian priests paid particular attention to the mouth, adopting a formal ceremony, the "rite of opening the mouth," to ensure that the mummy would have the power of speech, a prerequisite for resurrection. Here again archaeologists relate details of Egyptology and Christianity. Massey, for instance, noted that

this rite of `opening the mouth' is still performed in Rome. It was

announced in a daily paper not long since (the Mail, August 8th,

1903) that after the death of Pope Leo XIII and the coronation of

Pius X, `a consistory would be held to close and open the lips of

the cardinals newly created' or newly born into the purple. (Massey

208)

Eliza reminds the reader twice of the priest's brooding silence: "You wouldn't hear him in the house any more than now"; "He began to mope by himself, talking to no one" (16-17). Descriptions of Father Flynn's open mouth suggest no power or vitality, but only underscore his feebleness. Although the boy recalls that Flynn used to tell him stories, the reader pictures the priest not as animated narrator but as a grotesque parody of the silent communicant: "When he smiled he used to uncover his big discoloured teeth and let his tongue he upon his lower lip" (13). Eliza describes how she would often find her brother, "Whenever I'd bring in his soup to him there I'd find him with his breviary fallen to the floor, lying back in the chair and his mouth open" (16).

Although this Dublin Osiris's most significant enemies are physical and spiritual paralysis, Joyce adds a touch of humor by providing a symbolic Set in the story. The Egyptian Set is described as the fertility god's exact opposite. Considered the "wicked God of desiccation," Set "shriveled up harvests with his burning breath" (Durant 200). Old Cotter, puffing away on his pipe (a detail repeated four times in little more than a page of text), spitting "rudely into the grate," and fixing the boy with "his little beady black eyes," talks appropriately of "faints and worms" (10). In an interesting bit of wordplay, Old Cotter becomes the "old cutter" responsible for having Osiris hacked to pieces.

For Ebers, as for Joyce, the mythological elements yield to the flesh-and-blood people who suffer the effects of a "creed outworn," a religion that rings hollow for its time and its people, entrapping, victimizing, and paralyzing. In both the short story and the novel, religion has become a theatrical show, emphasizing the superficial, the appearance over substance. In Ebers's The Sisters, the high-priest of the temple installs a device at the altar to ensure a fine "performance": the priest explains that "Any temple servant, hidden here behind the altar, can now light or extinguish the lamps without the illusion being detected by the sharpest." The high-priest tests the device, crying in a chanting voice: "Thus he commands the night, and it becomes day, and the extinguished taper, and lo! it flames with brightness. If indeed thou art nigh, oh, Serapis! manifest itself to us." At these words a bright stream of light flashed from "the holy of holies," and again was suddenly extinguished when the high-priest sang: "Thus showest thou thyself as light to the children of truth, but dost punish with darkness the children of lies." The priest insists that such trickery is not deception: "We only present to short-sighted mortals the creative power of the divinity in a form perceptible and intelligible to their senses."

Joyce saw such an emphasis on matters of form in a Greek mass he attended, an observation he linked to his own short story:

While I was attending the Greek mass here last Sunday it seemed

to me that my story The Sisters was rather remarkable. The Greek

mass is strange. The altar is not visible but at times the priest opens

the gates and shows himself. He opens and shuts them about six

times. For the Gospel he comes out of a side gate and comes down

into the chapel and reads out of a book. For the elevation he does

the same. At the end when he has blessed the people he shuts the

gates: a boy comes running down the side of the Chapel with a

large tray full of little lumps of bread. The priest comes after him

and distributes the lumps to scrambling believers. Damn droll! The

Greek priest has been taking a great eyeful out of me: two

haruspices. (4 April 1905; Letters 2: 86)

In Joyce's "The Sisters," religion also assumes an air of theatricality. When he first thinks about visiting the deceased priest, as he is just about to recall his ecclesiastical lessons, the boy engages in "reading all the theatrical advertisements in the shop-windows" (12). He then recounts Flynn's lessons about "the meaning of the different ceremonies of the Mass and of the different vestments worn by priest." Flynn creates the same effect in the boy that Ebers's high-priest aims for, a sense of unquestioning awe: "His questions showed me how complex and mysterious were certain institutions of the Church which I had always regarded as the simplest acts." The boy wonders "how anybody had ever found in himself the courage to undertake" such "grave" duties as the Eucharist and Confession. The youngster is "put ... through the responses of the Mass" and contemplates the fact that the Church fathers had written books as thick as the Post Office Directory and as closely printed as the law notices in the newspaper, elucidating all of these intricate questions" (13).

Ebers and Joyce both describe institutions that bear the mark of simony, as it is defined most broadly, the prostitution of spiritual values. In both texts, simony carries with it the echoes of Simon Magus who used sorcery, theatre, to bewitch the people (Acts 8: 9-24). In short story and novel, the authors expose religious institutions as not only deceptive but also as imprisoning forces that threaten individual freedom. In the Ebers novel, Klea and Irene are involuntarily pressed into service, told they either must "quit the sanctuary or else make up our minds to take the place of the twin sisters . . . who have hitherto been employed in singing the hymns of lamentation." They are expected to appear "as Isis and Nephthys, by the bier of the deceased god on the occasion of the festivals of the dead, and in pouring out the libations with wailing and outcries, when the bodies were brought into the temple to be blessed" (69-70). Although Temple ordinances require biological twins for the position, Klea explains, "They will make twins of us! Irene's hair is to be dead black like mine, and the soles of her sandals are to be made thicker, to make her as tall as I am" (70). The sisters in Joyce's story know no other life than service to their brother. That service makes them representative of all who remain bound to the Church: "The sisters as representative of the laity, pious and poor, ignorant or deaf, sustain him at a great sacrifice to themselves" (Walzl, "Joyce's `The Sisters'" 381). Such sacrifice is not always freely chosen.

Ebers describes anchorites living in pastophoria, small cells attached to the sanctuary: the "ascetic penitents led a gloomy cloistered life in the strictest self-imposed seclusion" seeking inward purification (Ebers, Egypt 159). In the novel, a visitor to the cult expresses shock that anyone would choose such a life: "When I was told that in this temple there were people who had themselves locked into their little chambers never to quit them, taking thought about their dreams and leading a meditative life, I thought they were simpletons or fools, or both at once." The anchorite offers an even more distressing explanation: "There is a fourth alternative you did not think of. Suppose now among these men there should be some shut up against their will...?" He elaborates, saying that he himself "got into this miserable cage" because of his mother's wishes (25-26).

Like Father Flynn, who was "too scrupulous always" (17), the anchorites in the Serapeum arc described as constantly trying to thwart their natural feelings and desires:

think of the fools shut up in the Temple of Serapis! Nothing is

beautiful but what is free and he only is not free who is forever

striving to check his inclinations -- for the most part in vain -- in

order to live, as feeble cowards deem virtuously, justly and

truthfully. (Ebers 124)

Perhaps it is learning this lesson that makes a priest who was "too scrupulous always" a "disappointed man" (17). His disappointment, his loss of faith, is symbolized in his breaking of the chalice and his "large hands loosely retaining a chalice" as his body lies in the coffin, with a vitriolic ("truculent") facial expression. No cup of thanksgiving, this chalice seems more like the Celtic cup of truth, reputed to break if lies are spoken over it (Walker 134).

The idle chalice is only one symbol of failed resurrection that appears in Joyce's text. The pattern of sunshine and darkness that recurs throughout the story reflects an ancient association of the sun with resurrection owing to its daily pattern of rising, setting, and rising again to begin a new day. The priest's body lives in a gloomy room "suffused with dusky golden light" (14); the mourners "all gazed at the empty fireplace." Eliza wiped her tears and "gazed at the empty grate" (17). These scenes sharply contrast with the boy's world when he feels a "sensation of freedom," walking on the "sunny side of the street"; repeated a page later: "I walked on along in the sun" (12-13). The ancient Greeks believed that the sun drove a chariot across the sky (Frazer 82). Scholars of comparative mythology see in "This immortal chariot of the Sun" the origins of King Solomon's chariot (Bailey 154), as well as the chariot of fire that appears when Elijah ascends to heaven. No chariots of the sun appear for Flynn and his sisters. Eliza can only recall their unfulfilled dream of getting "one of them new-fangled carriages," one with "rheumatic wheels," to take the three of them "to see the old house again where we were all born" (17).

The sisters' drapery shop "consisted mainly of children's bootees and umbrellas" (11). Children's bootees seem out of place in this celibate world of the priest who dedicated himself to the Church and the two spinster sisters who surrendered their own possibilities to serve their brother. The bootees underscore the fact that here there will be no birth (or rebirth), not even a return to "where we were all born."

The sign in the shop, "Umbrellas Re-covered," becomes a clever, subtle play on word origins and associations that reinforce the idea that resurrection is an impossibility. The ancient Egyptians had umbrellas, which were thought to have originated as symbols of the solar deity, often depicted in the form of a disc or a spoked sun wheel. The word umbrella comes from the Latin umbra meaning shade or shadow. Joyce's contemporaries would call the dead "shades," as Gabriel does in "The Dead": "They were all becoming shades" (222). Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable identifies the umbrella as a symbol of the deity, citing Quarles's Emblems of 1635: he "used the word to signify the Deity hidden in the manhood of Christ" (1133). The shop sign may advertise recovery of shades, but no resurrection is forthcoming: Eliza "stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened; but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin as we had seen him, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast" (18).

With his allusions to Ebers's ancient Egypt, Joyce shows us the dimensions of a paralysis that afflicts not only the Flynn family but Ireland as well. This chapter of Joyce's "moral history" is a tale of corruption, enervation, and hopelessness -- hardly an appropriate subject for a tribute to Berni Benstock whose vitality, humanity, and hopefulness live on in his work and in our own memories of him.

(1) Joyce refers to Egypt's history as a subjugated people in his allusions to her invaders, Persia, Greece, and Rome. Ireland's similar fate appears in references to Irishtown and Great Britain Street.

(2) Florence Walzl traces the genesis of "The Sisters" from the earliest draft published in The Irish Homestead in 1904 to a revised version Joyce mentions in a 1906 letter. Walzl notes that "it is not certain when the final revision of `The Sisters' was done, but by April 1909, the story had been extensively rewritten" (Walzl, "Dubliners' 376).

(3) Florence Walzl believes that "behind Father Flynn looms always the figure of Christ as antitypal high-priest redeemer." She includes the priest's death date, July 1st, as one of Joyce's ironic parallels, noting that the feast of the Precious Blood of Jesus is "a priestly feast: the epistle (Hebrews 9: 11-15) emphasizing Christ as `high priest' and mediator who saves men by his blood and `will cleanse our conscience from dead works'; the gospel (John 19: 30-35) describing Christ's crucifixion as `the price of our redemption'; and the offertory and communion prayers addressing Jesus as the `chalice of benediction' in the bread and wine of the mass (Walzl, "Joyce's `The Sisters'" 411).

(4) The Osiris myth is a tale of death and resurrection. Osiris died, entrapped in an ornate chest and drowned by his jealous brother Seth. Isis retrieved her "brother-husband's" body from the Nile. When Seth discovered this, he confiscated the body and cut it into 14 parts, which he scattered throughout Egypt. Isis and her sister Nephthys collected all of the parts (except the penis, which was eaten by fish). The sisters' lamentations were so sorrowful that the sun-god Ra sent the jackal-headed Anubis to help the women put Osiris back together. The dead god revived to reign as king over the dead in the underworld. Thereafter, this "Lord of Eternity" presided as judge at the "trial of the souls of the departed," apportioning eternal life for those who lived in virtue and punishment for sinners. At every Egyptian burial, the deceased became Osiris --, with the community reenacting the drama of the god's death and resurrection, complete with professional mourners playing the roles of Isis and Nephthys (Frazer 388-89).

(5) The Osiris myth and other Egyptian motifs appear in Joyce's other works. For more information, see Henke, Troy, and Bishop.

WORKS CITED

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Bell, H. Idris. Cults and Creeds in Graeco-Roman Egypt. New York: Philosophical Library, 1953.

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Bishop, John. Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1986.

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Spielberg, Peter. "`The Sisters': No Christ at Bethany." James Joyce Quarterly 3 (1966):192-95.

Thompson, Dorothy. J. Memphis under the Ptolemies. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1988.

Troy, Mark. Mummeries of Resurrection: The Cycle of Osiris in Finnegans Wake. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia, 1976.

Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. New York: Harper, 1988.

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--. "Joyce's `The Sisters': A Development." James Joyce Quarterly 10 (1973): 375-421.

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