Isis and Osiris (30)

Now Osiris and Isis changed from good minor deities into gods.[*] But the power of Typhon, weakened and crushed, but still fighting and strugglingagainst extinction, they try to console and mollify by certain sacrifices; but again there are times when, at certain festivals, they humiliate and insult him by assailing red-headed men with jeering, and by throwing an ass over the edge of a precipice, as the people of Kopto do, because Typhon had red hair and in colour resembled an ass.[*] The people of Busiris[*] and Lycopolis do not use trumpets at all, because these make a sound like an ass[*]; and altogether they

regard the ass as an unclean animal dominated by some higher power because of its resemblance to Typhon,[*] and when they make cakes at their sacrifices in the month of Paÿni and of Phaophi they imprint upon them the device of an ass tied by a rope.[*] Moreover, in the sacrifice to the Sun they enjoin upon the worshippers not to wear any golden ornaments nor to give fodder to an ass. It is plain that the adherents of Pythagoras hold Typhon to be a daemonic power; for they say that he was born in an even factor of fifty-six; and the dominion of the triangle belongs to Hades, Dionysus, and Ares, that of the quadrilateral to Rhea, Aphroditê, Demeter, Hestia, and Hera, that of the dodecagon to Zeus,[*] and that of a polygon of fifty-six sides to Typhon, as Eudoxus has recorded.