A Skeleton Key to OSIRIS JONES GETS AN ICE CREAM
The idea for this comic popped into my head fully formed, like an email attachment from the great beyond, and translated to the page almost effortlessly. I say almost because the last little detail I wanted to add, the hieroglyphic translation of the monologue on the first page, proved strangely elusive.
I HAVE THE POWER TO BE BORN A SECOND TIME.
I AM THE SOURCE AND CREATOR OF ALL THE GODS!”
A passage I picked up from a PBS Pledge Week showing of the Joseph Campbell documentary Sukhavati – Place of Bliss, while I was laid up with a broken hip and fractured arm. (Same time as I was studying the Tale of the Tribe w/ RAW, et al.)
For the life of me I can’t find or remember where I picked this up from, (Campbell? Leary? Wilson? Narby?) but this enigmatic passage from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, has a modern answer, of sorts.
What is of the past, present, and future, with the power to be continuously reborn, and is the source of all our fantastical imaginings?
DNA!
I think I got so stuck on the importance of having the hieroglyphic source of this quote in the comic, because of this anecdote from RAW’s Prometheus Rising:
“I am He that was, and is, and shall be,” a sentence from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in hieroglyph and in his own handwriting, was found on the desk where Beethoven composed the Ninth Symphony and all his later, aeon-spanning “evolutionary” music.
My assumption that these mythic hieroglyphs would be easy to find and pop into my otherwise finished comic slowly but surely faded away, as my hours long search stretched into a 3 AM delirium, and on into a week long expedition into the furthest corners of the internet. I eventually gave up on the web and shelled out some hard earned cash for a print copy of E. A. Wallis Budge‘s The Egyptian Book of the Dead, with its line by line translation of the ancient tome, but still no dice! I scoured the almost 400 pages of that thing, to no avail, and briefly considered trying to reverse engineer my own translation, but having come this far, it felt wrong to just fudge it.
At this point, the search for reference to a throwaway visual gag, that no one but me would care about, had now taken a week longer than the creation of the rest of the comic! Eventually, luckily, and thankfully, my persistence, and my Temple University Academic Journal subscriptions, paid off, and I found a satisfactory source for the translation.
This was in 2009, and now flashing forward to 2022, where I’ve just finished remastering the art for the comic, and am about to republish, when I think back to my struggles to translate the opening bit, and it occurs to me, I never documented my source! I don’t actually remember where this translation came from. My only assurance is that I trust my stubbornness enough that I probably wouldn’t have given up unless I found something pretty solid, but that same stubbornness being still very much intact, that trust doesn’t cut the mustard.
And so guess what? The whole thing repeats again!
Though this time with a bit more clarity.
I figure out that I’m looking for Chapter LXIV,
AKA Utterance 64, of The Egyptian Book of the Dead,
Whereby one cometh forth by day from the Netherworld.
And that there are 2 versions:
One from the Papyrus of Nu and another from the Papyrus of Nebseni.
From the Papyrus of Nebseni (Brit Mus. No. 9,900 Sheet 24
The reason I couldn’t find it in the book I bought is because that particular version of The Egyptian Book of the Dead is based on the Papyrus of Ani, which is missing that chapter.
With this important distinction in mind I manage to turn up another E. A. Wallis Budge book, with the elaborate title, The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day or The Theban Recension of the Book of the Dead, the Egyptian Hieroglyphic Text Edited from Numerous Papyri.
The good news is that this book has the hieroglyphs I’m looking for! But the bad news is that there’s no accompanying translation. So I can’t be sure what’s what.
I then turn up still another E. A. Wallis Budge book, with an almost identical and equally elaborate title, The Book of the Dead: The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, The Egyptian Text According to the Theban Recension in Hieroglyphic, Edited from Numerous Papyri, with a Translation Vocabulary, etc.
And you guessed it, this is the exact reverse of the other book, and contains the English translation, but no hieroglyphs.
Between the 2 though, I have numbered lines that I can match up, and am now in the ballpark.
And really, it looks like my 2009 effort matches pretty well! It picks up about halfway through line 2 and ends about halfway through line 3. Some of the symbol stacking is different, but clearly whatever reference material I found back then is at least talking about the right turkey.
Having fallen down yet another multiple day internet rabbit hole, chasing this same damn funny bunny*, I’m hesitant to leave well enough alone without some sort of smoking gun, so I decide to once again plunk down some cold hard cash for a physical book, with still another elaborate title. This one looking like it was written by an SEO algorithm specifically for someone in my unique position:
READING HIEROGLYPHICS – A Very Ancient Text: CHAPTER 64 THE BOOK OF THE DEAD Extracts from the Papyrus of Nu and the Papyrus of Nebseny By Bernard Paul Badham
I mean, pretty on the nose, right?
So I just got my grubby mitts on a copy of READING HIEROGLYPHICS, and am very happy to say that it appears to very much agree with my original 2009 translation. Again, there are some minor formatting differences, and Badham’s English translation differs slightly from both Budge and Campbell, but his line by line translation agrees exactly with the starting point I have in the comic, which was my main remaining doubt. (I’d include his translation, but this book was only published in 2016, and I’m guessing this passage is the main draw for this very niche publication, and am loathe to steal his thunder)
Anyway, after all that, I feel comfortable allowing the original hieroglyphs to remain :)))
* “According to some damn book I lost (sorry!)
Osiris really means Divine Hare”
Robert Anton Wilson to me in an email, circa 2005.
And now the only other minor bone of contention, OSIRIS JONES.
The name Osiris Jones also comes from Joseph Campbell, in a lecture about Egyptian Mythology, Campbell explains that according to the Book of the Dead, upon their demise, every Average Joe becomes identified as one with Osiris, JC then appears to riff a name for this everyman/God hybrid, “Osiris Jones, let’s say.”
Here it is straight from the source:
A subsequent googling would suggest that I was incorrect in assuming that Osiris Jones was an arbitrary stock name that Campbell came up with off the top of his head, because it appears to be a direct reference to a 1931 book by Conrad Aiken called “The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones.”
I didn’t know this until just now, but apparently James Joyce was somewhat panicked when this book came to his attention, according to Richard Ellmann’s Joyce biography, “the title of Aiken’s book sounded so close in theme to Finnegans Wake that it seemed more urgent for him to read the book than for him to move” out of the path of a rapidly expanding WW II.
“Osiris Jones has not yet come forth by day or by night and I am waiting for a copy of that biography to be sent me by Gorman or his publisher.”
Letter from James Joyce to Maria Jolas dated 7 September 1940.
There appear to be several records of Joyce attempting to acquire a copy of Osiris Jones, but it seems doubtful that he was able to find a copy before he died just a few months later.
See also “Chaos – Hurray! – Is Come Again”: Heroism in James Joyce and Conrad Aiken
A looser connection, that I was indeed aware of at the time, involves the late, great Ol’ Dirty Bastard. The first, and so far only, member of the Wu Tang Clan to pass on. One of ODB’s numerous nicknames is Osiris, as he announces on “Triumph” the lead single from Wu Tang Clan’s 1997 album Wu Tang Forever:
I’M THE OSIRIS OF THIS SHIT”
Amongst all his other names, suchlike Ason Unique, Dirt McGirt, Big Baby Jesus, and innumerable others, his government name was Russell Jones. It takes a little bit of cherry picking, but it ain’t too hard to find Osiris Jones in the mix.
My version of Osiris Jones debuted in the Spring 2006 issue of the Maybe Quarterly, albeit spelled as “Osirius”, perhaps as a portmanteau of the Egyptian God and the mythic Dog Star, but honestly, more likely, just a misspelling!
These first depictions of Osiris Jones were giant 3ft x 3ft paintings.
Funnily enough, given the backstory, the first image is based on the title page of the first edition of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.
This blue skinned pharaoh character began to pop up continuously in my work, such as on the cover of the Winter 2006 issue of Maybe Quarterly.
Or again in the Summer of 2007 with Big Justice
The blue skin was about trying to create a more inclusive mythic iconography, that could work within a planetary society. In 2009, when James Cameron’s Avatar emerged, with its global box office dominating blue skinned cat people, it made pretty specific sense to me.
The problem with the name Osiris Jones didn’t occur to me until 2014, when I was prepping the first print edition of Weird Comix #1, in which the Osiris comic is the lead off hitter. It suddenly occurred to me that OSIRIS JONES sounds, and maybe even looks, like a rip off of OSMOSIS JONES, a 2001 live-action/animated movie, starring a blue skinned cartoon character, voiced by Chris Rock.
I don’t know why I thought it mattered, but I decided it was a good idea to change my character’s name to Osiris Smith, thinking that the main gist of the bit was Osiris + a common everyday surname, not realizing I was leaving behind almost 100 years worth of contextual resonance, and for what? To not step, ever so slightly, on the toes of a movie barely anyone remembers?
So forgetting all that noise, for this updated edition, the name Osiris Jones has been restored.
Enclosed are links to all 3 iterations of the comic:
OSIRIS JONES GETS AN ICE CREAM (2009)
OSIRIS SMITH GETS AN ICE CREAM (2014)
OSIRIS JONES GETS AN ICE CREAM (2022)
P.S. I have done what James Joyce could not! And acquired a copy of Conrad Aiken’s “The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones” Same 1931 edition Joyce was chasing too :)))
