Festivals often involved a ceremonial procession in which a cult image was carried out of the temple in a barque @-@ shaped shrine . These processions served various purposes . In Roman times , when local deities of all kinds was believed to have power over the Nile inundation , processions in many communities carried temple images to the riverbanks so the gods could invoke a large and fruitful flood . Processions also traveled between temples , as when the image of Hathor from Dendera Temple visited her consort Horus at the Temple of Edfu . Rituals for a god was often based in that deity 's mythology . Such rituals was meant to be repetitions of the events of the mythic past , renewing the beneficial effects of the original events . In the Khoiak festival in honor of Osiris , his death and resurrection was ritually reenacted at a time when crops was beginning to sprout . The returning greenery symbolized the renewal of the god 's own life .