Osiris to this day is heralded among many as a uniquely significant ancient God, not only for his influence as ruler of Egypt, but because of the many aspects of his reign which influenced further generations of peoples across the globe.
The exact details of Osiris and his adventures varies across the millennia depending on who is telling his story. All saw him as a political leader of Egypt, but one who held his position due to divine authority as a God.
Some saw him as the son of the sun god Ra, while others gave worship to him as a supreme deity in his own right. But all versions of his story tell of a ruler who was deposed and killed, brutally dismembered and left powerless before a loyalist found his remains, reassembled him and allowed him to reclaim his reign and his divinity.
The tale of Osiris as a metaphor for immortality became a template for other religions that followed, if not as a pattern for their myths, but at least as a context in which faiths such as Abrahamic religions developed. Scriptures of figures such as Moses, Jesus or Muhammad may consider the Egyptian belief systems obsolete or heretical in a literal sense, but the figurative impact of the Osiris myth persisted as a metaphor for people in early Biblical times, and still persists today. Similarities between Osiris and the Greco-Roman deity of Dionysus or Bacchus have been noted as well.
The Osiris myths included a number of concepts which have been later used in other religions, including a cycle of birth, death and resurrection; the possibility of immortality achieved via an afterlife; the notion of a supreme being performing post-death judgment of an individual's activities during life; the preservation of one's mortal body post-death, and the preservation of one's immortal soul for the afterlife.
The cyclical nature of the Osiris myth has been applied throughout history to explain other astronomical and Earthly cycles, such as the passage of days or the passage of seasons, as well as related agricultural cycles, such as the planting, growth and harvesting of crops. Or the foliage of wild plants budding, blooming, fading in color, losing their leaves and persisting in a hibernation phase during the dead of winter, before the rebirth of plants each spring.
As such, Osiris has been worshipped simultaneously as the god of agriculture, of fertility, and of vegetation, but also the god of life, of death, of resurrection and of the afterlife.
Believers in Osiris and his ways resulted in some of the world's first known funerary practices, including preserving bodies via mummification and entombment. These practices also led to discovery of some of the world's oldest known writing systems, as the specific legends of Osiris and their variations throughout history are known to us today in no small part due to the discovery of hieroglyphs in tombs created by Osiris' faithful so many years ago.
The truth is that the religion that created to preserve the immortality of its worshippers has itself been preserved along with their physical bodies and their tombs. Had the religion of preservation not existed, it might have otherwise disappeared from humanity's memory.
While today many would hesitate to hold Osiris in the same divine esteem as his followers of two thousand years ago, his ideas persist, showing that Osiris did achieve a certain degree of immortality in that the concepts he promoted are likely to never perish as long as human beings exist somewhere in the universe.