We have no means of finding out what were the earliest conceptions about Osiris, but it seems that he was originally a water spirit, or the god of some arm of the Nile, or portion of the main body of the Nile, and that he developed later into a great water-god; Dr. Brugsch [Religion, pp.190, 197] and M. Maspero [Histoire Ancienne, tom. i., p.172] both regarded him as a water-god, and rightly consider that he represented the creative and nutritive powers of the Nile stream in general and of the Inundation in particular.

The natural opponent of Osiris was Set, who typified death and destruction, and who was the god par excellence of the desert; and in various forms and told in different ways we have the narrative of the contest between the powers of life and death, and light and darkness, and decay and regeneration, which appears in the religious texts of every period.