I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Osiris—not as a distant god carved into temple walls, but as someone who once walked, breathed, ruled, was betrayed, and then chose to rise differently. If I imagine him looking at today’s world, I don’t think he’d be shocked by the hardships. Hunger, injustice, the weight of being crushed by systems you didn’t choose—he knows those bones. He was cut into pieces by his own brother, after all.

What might move him is the quiet, grinding exhaustion of modern sheep-life. Not the dramatic betrayal, but the slow erosion: waking to an alarm that owns you, scrolling through a feed that measures your worth in likes, working until your spirit flattens into a CV. We are shepherded by algorithms, debt, expectations, news cycles that scream but never resolve. And most of us just… walk. Head down. Graze. Pretend the fence isn’t there.

But here’s what the old ways taught me, and what I believe Osiris would recognize: being a sheep isn’t the shame. The shame is forgetting that sheep can dream of growing horns. The old mysteries—the ones whispered in initiations, painted in tombs—never said to escape the herd. They said to remember that even a flock has a hidden king buried inside each belly.

So when I practice the old ways now—lighting a candle before dawn, speaking a name that feels older than language, planting seeds in rhythm with a moon that doesn’t care about my deadlines—I’m not rejecting modern life. I’m rejecting its lie that I’m just meat following a crook. Osiris, the one who was scattered and gathered, would understand that. He’d look at the exhausted commuter, the anxious student, the person crying in a parked car, and he’d see not a lost sheep—but a field of fragmented god, waiting to remember how to stand back up.

The modern hardship is loneliness inside connection. The old remedy isn’t escape. It’s the stubborn, quiet act of hallowing the ordinary: my coffee becomes an offering, my breath a prayer, my frustration a small death I choose to transform. I don’t need to be a lion. But I also don’t need to forget that the Shepherd of the West once ruled the dead by becoming grain, by rotting, by rising green.

So no, Osiris wouldn’t despise the sheep. He’d kneel beside them in the mud and whisper: You are the shepherd you’ve been waiting for. Now wake up—not to run, but to walk with your eyes open.