In the original, Cinderella was blackened with soot because she was in mourning, because the prince she was dreaming of was missing, presumed dead. She had been roaming the world, searching for his remains, and her quest had reached its climax- in pantomime terms its ‘transformation scene’- while she was working in disguise as a servant in the kitchen of the palace of the king of Syria. In the original version, she was called Isis and her prince was called Osiris: Osiris was a popular king, a mighty hunter who rid the land of many monsters that were ravaging it.
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One day he returned from one of these hunting expeditions to find that his giant of a brother, Seth, was organizing a gala dinner for him. After dinner there were games and Seth announced he had made a beautiful wooden chest, inlaid with gold and silver and precious stones. He said that whoever fitted the chest perfectly could keep it. Too many guest tried the chest, but they were all too fat, too thin, too short or too tall for it. Eventually Osiris tried: ‘’Look’ he cried, ‘it fits! It fits me like the skin I was born in!”
Everybody looked on, amazed, but they were even more amazed when Seth and his henchmen leapt forwards and slammed down the lid. They hammered in nails and filled all the holes with led. The chest was now a coffin. As so Seth and his men carried the chest down to the banks of the Nile and launched it onto the waves.
A tamarisk tree gradually grew around it, wrapping it in its branches until it became entirely enclosed in the tree. In time this tree was chapped down and used as a pillar in the new palace of the Syrian King.
In her grief Osiris’s young wife, Isis, had cut her hair short and covered herself in ASHES. She roamed the world looking for her man.
One night she had an extraordinary vision: She saw Osiris imprisoned in the old tree that held up the central hall of the palace.
The next morning she fought her way into the throne room and managed to convince the king of her true identity. The king allowed her to cut through the bark of the tree and prise open the coffin. She was also allowed to carry the body of Osiris away from the palace to a small island, where she began to use oil and magic arts to revive him.
But Seth had magic powers too. Him and his cohorts were hunting by moonlight when they saw Isis cradling Osiris on the banks of the island. Swooping down on them, they snatched the body and gleefully hacked Osiris to pieces. Seth wanted to make sure this time, so he had the pieces of the corpse buried in remote parts of the land.
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Isis had to set out again on her travels, accompanied this time by her sister Nepthys. She transformed herself into a dog, to seek out and dig up the parts of the corpse.
Eventually they assembled them and took them to the island of ABYDOS. There Isis bound the parts together with a strip of white linen and brought just enough life back to her husband so that he was able to impregnate her.
Isis, the mother goddess, was now carrying Horus, the future Sun God.
Source: The Sacred History by J. Black