The Dead Osiris & Underworld Journey (Moon Knight pt. 4) | Marvelous Demystifiers ep. 8
In our continuing quest to analyze the occult and mythological significance of symbolism in the Moon Knight series, we press onward to explore episode 4, "The Tomb." Major themes include the death and resurrection of the Sun-King, the dismemberment of Osiris, exposing the poor portrayal of ancient Egyptian ideas, and the ever-present broken mirror MK Ultra schizoid soul-division.
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In this episode
Core themes
The Fall Into the Osirian Underworld
Chance opened by calling episode four the fall and the beginning of the underworld cycle, a major theme in Egyptian mythology, in which the dying and resurrecting Osiris was embodied by initiates and pharaohs. The hosts read the opening hanged man ritual, with its twisting camera, as Osiris entering the underworld, and Gabe tied the polar imagery, the maze and the path to Mario Garza's work on the pole star. One of the hosts argued the show inverted Egyptian ideas by treating statues as literal gods instead of symbolic access points.
Scorpio, Betrayal and the Far Strider
The hosts followed a Scorpio thread through the episode. Chance argued that Layla's Scorpio sign, the kiss of betrayal and the fall that follows it formed the main beats, and that Layla played both Isis and Nephthys. Gabe argued she acted as Hecate, the goddess of two torches, luring the pursuers with one flare and striking from behind with the second. One of the hosts added that her long leaps across gaps fulfilled the Hecate title of far strider, and that the flare worked as a stand in for the missing Osirian phallus.
Scarab, Scapegoat and Masonic Third Degree
The hosts read the scarab on its mound as a sign of rebirth, and one of them read a passage from the book July's End on the sacred scarab, its twenty eight day cycle and the shift from scarab to crab. The goat in the canyon became a Yom Kippur scapegoat, and one host linked the scarab to the root of that ritual. Another host described the Masonic third degree tracing boards. Gabe offered a theory that the dry river bed matched the Mississippi River, which he linked to Old Testament geography and the devil card.
Heka, Canopic Jars and the Word Can
At the hidden chamber the hosts took up Heka as both magic and medicine, and read the cannibal pharaoh passage from the Pyramid Texts. One host played with the syllable can across canopic, canopy, cane and cannabis, while another argued that the snake skin grafted onto an arm pointed to a grafted bloodline. Gabe noticed that the cups, the jars and the snake skin seen from the rafters resembled the dippers and Draco around the pole star, which he said marked the exit. The zombie priest pulling entrails drew an Ophiuchus comparison.
Dream Asylum, Jung and the Tertium Quid
In the white asylum the hosts treated the bingo calls as a cipher, and one host decoded the numbers into letters that spelled a vote. They read the scene as a black mass and as a dream whose edges come apart. Harrow, dressed as Carl Jung, said the world is lived inside the psyche, and one host called Jung a two sided sword that can be used for or against us. The hosts tied taking inventory of feelings to organs kept in canopic jars, and one host explained the red third sarcophagus as the tertium quid, a third self linked to the placenta, before Taweret appeared.
Quotes
“The fall and beginning of the underworld cycle, which is a huge theme in Egyptian mythology, the dying and resurrecting Osiris, of which any initiate or pharaoh was said to actually embody and become Osiris during their process of going through their initiations.”
“So first of all, scarab was the symbol for cancer in Egyptian astrology before it became the crab. The mound is symbolic of the primordial earth that rises up from the celestial waters before there's any creation.”
“And the Scorpio theme in this episode is really important. We've already uncovered that Layla, the female hero of this show, is a Scorpio. The kiss of betrayal and the fall are basically the primary things of importance that occur in this episode.”
“This is where she becomes the far strider. She has to do these long lunges to get across these gaps, as she's kind of doing the wall crawl here. And that is the far darter or the far strider is another name for Hecate. So it's just really interesting how many ways she's fulfilling the many names of this same entity.”
“When I said at the beginning that this episode is symbolic of Osiris entering the underworld, I mean, we're about to find out that where they're at in this mental institution is the Duat, which is Osiris' home.”
“Well, one thing that was really hitting hard was a lot of that polar symbolism seems to have been an overarching theme throughout. And so I definitely had Mario Garza on my mind in a major way as I was watching the film, because they seem to be indicating some sort of an exit, some exit up above.”
“She uses one torch to lure them, almost like a matador where she draws them in and they over commit to coming to find her, and she uses that first flare as a lure and then she swoops, she does a roll underneath the truck and comes up from the backside with the second torch.”
“I see a lot of Old Testament information actually lining up a little better with American geography. So I took some liberties with theorizing that we might be actually talking about a correspondent location to the Mississippi River because the Mississippi and the Nile, I see them as interwoven in Old Testament mythology.”
“Because this is where all things Mario Garza were just popping out everywhere I looked here. Because they kept saying amazing and we have an eye in the sky up above them is very powerfully indicating to me this, the Polaris, the pole star.”
“When he crawls up there to that lofty elevated spot where all of the ingredients are, it is quite amazing that the cups, the Canopic jars are like the dippers. They're like the two dippers. There's a big dipper and a little dipper. And there's even the snake skin. Well, that's Draco that drapes around the pole star.”
“And while I'm watching that today, I've been looking at the youngest owl that I have right now, I've named Merriwether. And I kind of thought they were female at first, all three of them, but the two oldest ones were female and the littlest one who I named Merriwether turns out he's a male.”
“It was the big push to give all of the big military-industrial complex companies that you can count on one hand, essentially carte blanche, to figure out what they needed to do to make this fighter do the things that they wanted. It was a big project, right?”
Gabriel, known on air as Slick Dissident, co-hosts InnerVerse's Vibe Rant show and is a longtime recurring guest on the podcast. He teaches occult symbolism and tarot on his YouTube channel, ranging across the Major Arcana, the esoteric Enneagram, mythology and archetype, mystic linguistics, and the symbolism hidden in popular film. He is best known for Tarot-tories, his own system mapping the 22 Major Arcana and zodiac archetypes onto the geography of the United States.
See all Gabe episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
