In the developed funerary religion the dead came before Osiris for judgement. The scene, illustrated again and again in the Book of the Dead, shows the heart of the deceased weighed against the feather of Maat, truth and right order. The dead person recites a declaration of innocence, denying a list of specific wrongs; if the heart balances the feather, he is declared true of voice and admitted to Osiris's realm. If it fails, the monster Ammit devours it, and the person simply ceases. Osiris presides over this weighing as the enthroned judge.
His holiest cult centre was Abydos, believed to hold the god's tomb, and Egyptians who could not be buried there sought at least to have a stela or a symbolic pilgrimage connect them to it. Annual festival dramas at Abydos re-enacted the god's death and vindication before crowds.
Osiris was also, in an older layer, a god of vegetation and the fertile flood, the grain that is buried and rises, the black silt the Nile leaves. Egyptians made Osiris beds, trays of soil planted with seed in his shape, so that the sprouting grain enacted his return to life. The two meanings, agricultural renewal and human afterlife, were held together rather than kept apart.