+++
title = "Jane Sellers"
slug = "jane-sellers"
description = "Jane B. Sellers, the Egyptologist whose The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt (1992) read the Osiris myth as a record of precessional loss — the most disciplined single-tradition test of the Hamlet's Mill thesis."
template = "wiki-page.html"
toc = true

[extra]
category = "Methodology"
editorial_pass = "2026-05"
entry_type = "biographical"
claim_type = "direct"
alternative_names = [
    "Jane B. Sellers",
    "author of The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt",
]
summary = "**Jane B. Sellers** was an American Egyptologist whose *The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt* (1992) applied the *Hamlet's Mill* precessional method to a single tradition with more discipline than any other continuator. Her thesis: the myth of the murder of Osiris is a record of **precessional loss** — that when the stars of Orion (Osiris) stopped rising on the equinox around 6700 BCE, the god 'died' in the sky, and the long oral tradition of his murder grew up to remember it. She connected the seventy-two conspirators of Plutarch's account to the 72-years-per-precessional-degree constant, and argued that the numbers 72, 432, 2,160, and 25,920 'all signified the concept of the Eternal Return.' The corpus uses her Osiris reading to date the trauma of its Gemini chapter."
see_also = [
    { title = "Age of Gemini", path = "timeline/age-of-gemini", description = "The age in which the corpus places Osiris's precessional death (c. 6700 BCE)." },
    { title = "Hamlet's Mill", path = "wiki/hamlets-mill", description = "The parent thesis Sellers applied, with unusual rigour, to Egypt alone." },
    { title = "Comparative Mythology", path = "wiki/comparative-mythology", description = "The dying-and-rising Osiris the corpus reads through Sellers's precessional lens." },
    { title = "Graham Hancock", path = "wiki/graham-hancock", description = "The populariser who built Sellers's 'Osiris numbers' into the precessional code." },
    { title = "Great Year", path = "wiki/great-year", description = "The 72 / 432 / 2,160 / 25,920 number-family Sellers read as the Eternal Return." },
    { title = "The Mill That Grinds the Ages", path = "articles/the-mill-that-grinds-the-ages", description = "The Explainer treating Sellers as the disciplined Egyptological continuation of the thesis." },
]

references = [
    { id = "the-death-of-gods-in-ancient-egypt-the-osiris-myth-as-record-of-precessional-los", locator = "Sellers (1992) — the Osiris myth as a record of precessional loss; Orion's equinox rising extinguished c. 6700 BCE; the seventy-two companions; the numbers as 'the concept of the Eternal Return'" },
    { title = "De Iside et Osiride, 13 (Plutarch's account, which gives Seth exactly seventy-two co-conspirators in the murder of Osiris)", author = "Plutarch", date = "c. 100 CE" },
    { id = "krupp-echoes-ancient-skies", locator = "E. C. Krupp — the sympathetic-but-critical line that keeps archaeoastronomy honest: whether the Egyptians were fully aware of precession is one thing; that they responded to its effect is another" },
    { id = "fingerprints-of-the-gods", locator = "Hancock — building Sellers's 'Osiris numbers' into the precessional code" },
    { id = "hamlets-mill", locator = "the parent program Sellers applied to a single tradition" },
    { id = "the-book-which-tells-the-truth", locator = "the canon's precessional age-transition framing" },
]
+++

**Jane B. Sellers** was an American Egyptologist — trained at the Oriental Institute and working largely outside the academic establishment — whose one influential book, *The Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt* (1992), remains the most disciplined attempt to apply the {% wiki(slug="hamlets-mill") %}Hamlet's Mill{% end %} method to a single tradition. Where Santillana and von Dechend ranged across the whole world's mythology, and where {% wiki(slug="graham-hancock") %}Graham Hancock{% end %} would popularise the thesis at the level of civilisation, Sellers did the narrower and harder thing: she took one culture's central myth and tried to read a specific astronomical event out of it.

## The Osiris myth as precessional record

Her subject was the murder of Osiris — dismembered by his brother Set (Seth), mourned and reassembled by Isis, avenged by Horus. Sellers argued that the myth encodes a real celestial change. Osiris is identified in Egyptian religion with the constellation of **Orion**; and at the latitude of southern Egypt, the {% wiki(slug="precession") %}precession{% end %} of the equinoxes carried Orion's stars out of their equinoctial rising around **6700 BCE**. "I suggest," she wrote, "that Orion's precessionally caused failure to appear in 'his place' at 'his proper time' gave rise to long centuries of an oral tradition of Osiris's death." On this reading the god did not die of anything that happened in Egypt; he died in the sky, when the slow wheel of precession pulled his constellation off its mark — and the myth is the memory of that loss, transmitted for millennia by tellers who no longer knew what it recorded.

## The number seventy-two

Sellers's second contribution is arithmetical. Plutarch's account of the murder (*De Iside et Osiride* 13) gives Set exactly **seventy-two** co-conspirators — a number with no obvious narrative reason to be so precise. Sellers connected it to the precessional constant: the equinox moves one degree every **72 years**. She read the recurring figures of the tradition — 72, 432, 2,160, 25,920 — as a deliberate arithmetical signature: "I am convinced that for ancient man, the numbers 72, 432, 2,160, and 25,920 all signified the concept of the Eternal Return." The reading is double-edged, and the corpus keeps both edges: no surviving *Egyptian* text gives the number 72, which is attested only in Plutarch, a Greek author writing after Hipparchus — so it may be a genuinely old datum Plutarch preserved, or a late Hellenistic import. As Hancock put it, following her: one can hardly insert 71.6 conspirators into a story, but 72 will fit comfortably.

## Reception

Sellers's book is, in the corpus's phrase, the one continuation of the *Hamlet's Mill* program that mainstream reviewers half-forgave — taken more seriously than the popular literature because its method is narrower and its claims more testable. The Griffith Observatory's **E. C. Krupp**, reviewing sympathetically, nonetheless drew the line that keeps archaeoastronomy honest: whether the Egyptians were fully *aware* of precession is one thing; that they *responded* to its effect is another. Her specific dates may be wrong; what survives the scrutiny is the mechanism — a horizon-marked heliacal rising failing, over centuries, to keep its date requires no instruments and no theory, only stubborn record-keeping.

## In the Wheel of Heaven framework

The corpus treats Sellers as the model of what the precessional-encoding thesis looks like when it is argued with discipline rather than asserted with enthusiasm. It adopts two of her readings. Her dating of Osiris's death to c. 6700 BCE is used directly in the [Age of Gemini](/timeline/age-of-gemini/) chapter — the corpus's own Gemini window (−6690 to −4530) opens on almost exactly her date, so that the drowned-and-scattered god of the Theomachy material acquires a second layer as the drowned constellation of an expiring age. And her reading of the seventy-two conspirators feeds the corpus's treatment of the precessional number-family in the {% wiki(slug="great-year") %}Great Year{% end %} and {% wiki(slug="great-month") %}Great Month{% end %} entries. Both are registered as `inferred`: Sellers and her book are fact, but the Osiris-as-precession and 72-as-constant readings are contested interpretations the corpus finds persuasive and argues rather than asserts — held alongside Krupp's caveat. The fuller treatment is in the [Age of Gemini](/timeline/age-of-gemini/) chapter and the Explainer [The Mill That Grinds the Ages](/articles/the-mill-that-grinds-the-ages/).