Isis (; ''Ēse''; ;
Meroitic: ''Wos''
'a''or ''Wusa'';
Phoenician: 𐤀𐤎,
romanized: ʾs) was a major
goddess
A goddess is a female deity. In many known cultures, goddesses are often linked with literal or metaphorical pregnancy or imagined feminine roles associated with how women and girls are perceived or expected to behave. This includes themes of s ...
in
ancient Egyptian religion
Ancient Egyptian religion was a complex system of polytheistic beliefs and rituals that formed an integral part of ancient Egyptian culture. It centered on the Egyptians' interactions with many deities believed to be present in, and in control ...
whose worship spread throughout the
Greco-Roman world
The Greco-Roman civilization (; also Greco-Roman culture; spelled Graeco-Roman in the Commonwealth), as understood by modern scholars and writers, includes the geographical regions and countries that culturally—and so historically—were di ...
. Isis was first mentioned in the
Old Kingdom
In ancient Egyptian history, the Old Kingdom is the period spanning c. 2700–2200 BC. It is also known as the "Age of the Pyramids" or the "Age of the Pyramid Builders", as it encompasses the reigns of the great pyramid-builders of the Fourth ...
() as one of the main characters of the
Osiris myth
The Osiris myth is the most elaborate and influential story in ancient Egyptian mythology. It concerns the murder of the god Osiris, a primeval king of Egypt, and its consequences. Osiris's murderer, his brother Set, usurps his throne. Meanwhile, ...
, in which she resurrects her slain brother and husband, the divine king
Osiris
Osiris (, from Egyptian ''wsjr'', cop, ⲟⲩⲥⲓⲣⲉ , ; Phoenician: 𐤀𐤎𐤓, romanized: ʾsr) is the god of fertility, agriculture, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation in ancient Egyptian religion. He was ...
, and produces and protects his heir,
Horus
Horus or Heru, Hor, Har in Ancient Egyptian, is one of the most significant ancient Egyptian deities who served many functions, most notably as god of kingship and the sky. He was worshipped from at least the late prehistoric Egypt until the P ...
. She was believed to help the dead enter the
afterlife
The afterlife (also referred to as life after death) is a purported existence in which the essential part of an individual's identity or their stream of consciousness continues to live after the death of their physical body. The surviving ess ...
as she had helped Osiris, and she was considered the divine mother of the
pharaoh
Pharaoh (, ; Egyptian: ''pr ꜥꜣ''; cop, , Pǝrro; Biblical Hebrew: ''Parʿō'') is the vernacular term often used by modern authors for the kings of ancient Egypt who ruled as monarchs from the First Dynasty (c. 3150 BC) until the an ...
, who was likened to Horus. Her
maternal
]
A mother is the female parent of a child. A woman may be considered a mother by virtue of having given birth, by raising a child who may or may not be her biological offspring, or by supplying her ovum for fertilisation in the case of gestat ...
aid was invoked in healing
Spell (paranormal), spells to benefit ordinary people. Originally, she played a limited role in royal rituals and
temple
A temple (from the Latin ) is a building reserved for spiritual rituals and activities such as prayer and sacrifice. Religions which erect temples include Christianity (whose temples are typically called churches), Hinduism (whose temples ...
rites, although she was more prominent in
funerary practices and magical texts. She was usually portrayed in art as a human woman wearing a throne-like
hieroglyph
A hieroglyph ( Greek for "sacred carvings") was a character of the ancient Egyptian writing system. Logographic scripts that are pictographic in form in a way reminiscent of ancient Egyptian are also sometimes called "hieroglyphs". In Neoplatoni ...
on her head. During the
New Kingdom
New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created.
New or NEW may refer to:
Music
* New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz
Albums and EPs
* ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013
* ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator, ...
(), as she took on traits that originally belonged to
Hathor
Hathor ( egy, ḥwt-ḥr, lit=House of Horus, grc, Ἁθώρ , cop, ϩⲁⲑⲱⲣ, Meroitic: ) was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion who played a wide variety of roles. As a sky deity, she was the mother or consort of the sky ...
, the preeminent goddess of earlier times, Isis was portrayed wearing Hathor's headdress: a sun disk between the horns of a
cow
Cattle (''Bos taurus'') are large, domesticated, cloven-hooved, herbivores. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae and the most widespread species of the genus ''Bos''. Adult females are referred to as cows and adult ma ...
.
In the first millennium BCE, Osiris and Isis became the most widely worshipped Egyptian deities, and Isis absorbed traits from many other goddesses. Rulers in Egypt and its neighbor to the south,
Nubia
Nubia () (Nobiin: Nobīn, ) is a region along the Nile river encompassing the area between the first cataract of the Nile (just south of Aswan in southern Egypt) and the confluence of the Blue and White Niles (in Khartoum in central Sudan), or ...
, built temples dedicated primarily to Isis, and her temple at
Philae
; ar, فيلة; cop, ⲡⲓⲗⲁⲕ
, alternate_name =
, image = File:File, Asuán, Egipto, 2022-04-01, DD 93.jpg
, alt =
, caption = The temple of Isis from Philae at its current location on Agilkia Island in Lake Nasse ...
was a religious center for Egyptians and Nubians alike. Her reputed
magical power was greater than that of all other gods, and she was said to protect the kingdom from its enemies, govern the skies and the natural world, and have power over
fate
Destiny, sometimes referred to as fate (from Latin ''fatum'' "decree, prediction, destiny, fate"), is a predetermined course of events. It may be conceived as a predetermined future, whether in general or of an individual.
Fate
Although often ...
itself.
In the
Hellenistic period
In Classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Mediterranean history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire, as signified by the Battle of Actium in 3 ...
(323–30 BCE), when Egypt was ruled and settled by
Greeks
The Greeks or Hellenes (; el, Έλληνες, ''Éllines'' ) are an ethnic group and nation indigenous to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions, namely Greece, Cyprus, Albania, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and, to a lesser extent, oth ...
, Isis was worshipped by Greeks and Egyptians, along with a new god,
Serapis
Serapis or Sarapis is a Graeco-Egyptian deity. The cult of Serapis was promoted during the third century BC on the orders of Greek Pharaoh Ptolemy I Soter of the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt as a means to unify the Greeks and Egyptians in his r ...
. Their worship diffused into the wider Mediterranean world. Isis's Greek devotees ascribed to her traits taken from
Greek deities
The following is a list of gods, goddesses, and many other divine and semi-divine figures from ancient Greek mythology and ancient Greek religion.
Immortals
The Greeks created images of their deities for many purposes. A temple would house the ...
, such as the invention of marriage and the protection of ships at sea, and she retained strong links with Egypt and other Egyptian deities who were popular in the Hellenistic world, such as Osiris and
Harpocrates
Harpocrates ( grc, Ἁρποκράτης, Phoenician: 𐤇𐤓𐤐𐤊𐤓𐤈, romanized: ḥrpkrṭ, ''harpokrates'') was the god of silence, secrets and confidentiality in the Hellenistic religion developed in Ptolemaic Alexandria (and also ...
. As Hellenistic culture was absorbed by
Rome
, established_title = Founded
, established_date = 753 BC
, founder = King Romulus (legendary)
, image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg
, map_caption ...
in the first century BCE, the
cult
In modern English, ''cult'' is usually a pejorative term for a social group that is defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals, or its common interest in a particular personality, object, or goal. This ...
of Isis became a part of
Roman religion
Religion in ancient Rome consisted of varying imperial and provincial religious practices, which were followed both by the people of Rome as well as those who were brought under its rule.
The Romans thought of themselves as highly religious, ...
. Her devotees were a small proportion of the
Roman Empire
The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post-Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings around the Mediterr ...
's population but were found all across its territory. Her following developed distinctive
festivals
A festival is an event ordinarily celebrated by a community and centering on some characteristic aspect or aspects of that community and its religion or cultures. It is often marked as a local or national holiday, mela, or eid. A festival co ...
such as the
Navigium Isidis
The ''Navigium Isidis'' or ''Isidis Navigium'' (trans. ''the vessel of Isis'') was an annual ancient Roman religious festival in honor of the goddess Isis, held on March 5. The festival outlived Christian persecution by Theodosius (391) and Ar ...
, as well as
initiation ceremonies
Initiation is a rite of passage marking entrance or acceptance into a group or society. It could also be a formal admission to adulthood in a community or one of its formal components. In an extended sense, it can also signify a transformation ...
resembling those of other
Greco-Roman mystery cults. Some of her devotees said she encompassed all feminine divine powers in the world.
The worship of Isis was ended by the rise of
Christianity
Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the world's largest and most widespread religion with roughly 2.38 billion followers representing one-third of the global pop ...
in the fourth through sixth centuries CE. Her worship may have influenced Christian beliefs and practices such as the
veneration of Mary
Marian devotions are external pious practices directed to the person of Mary, mother of God, by members of certain Christian traditions. They are performed in Catholicism, High Church Lutheranism, Anglo-Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Orient ...
, but the evidence for this influence is ambiguous and often controversial. Isis continues to appear in
Western culture
Leonardo da Vinci's ''Vitruvian Man''. Based on the correlations of ideal Body proportions">human proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius in Book III of his treatise ''De architectura''.
image:Plato Pio-Cle ...
, particularly in
esotericism
Western esotericism, also known as esotericism, esoterism, and sometimes the Western mystery tradition, is a term scholars use to categorise a wide range of loosely related ideas and movements that developed within Western society. These ideas a ...
and
modern Paganism
Modern paganism, also known as contemporary paganism and neopaganism, is a term for a religion or family of religions influenced by the various historical pre-Christian beliefs of pre-modern peoples in Europe and adjacent areas of North Afric ...
, often as a
personification of nature or the feminine aspect of divinity.
In Egypt and Nubia
Name and origins
Whereas some
Egyptian deities
Ancient Egyptian deities are the gods and goddesses worshipped in ancient Egypt. The beliefs and rituals surrounding these gods formed the core of ancient Egyptian religion, which emerged sometime in prehistory. Deities represented natural fo ...
appeared in the late
Predynastic Period
Prehistoric Egypt and Predynastic Egypt span the period from the earliest human settlement to the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period around 3100 BC, starting with the first Pharaoh, Narmer for some Egyptologists, Hor-Aha for others, with th ...
(before c. 3100 BCE), neither Isis nor her husband
Osiris
Osiris (, from Egyptian ''wsjr'', cop, ⲟⲩⲥⲓⲣⲉ , ; Phoenician: 𐤀𐤎𐤓, romanized: ʾsr) is the god of fertility, agriculture, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation in ancient Egyptian religion. He was ...
were mentioned by name before the
Fifth Dynasty
The Fifth Dynasty of ancient Egypt (notated Dynasty V) is often combined with Dynasties Third Dynasty of Egypt, III, Fourth Dynasty of Egypt, IV and Sixth Dynasty of Egypt, VI under the group title the Old Kingdom of Egypt, Old Kingdom. The Fifth ...
(c. 2494–2345 BCE). An inscription that may refer to Isis dates to the reign of
Nyuserre Ini
Nyuserre Ini (also Niuserre Ini or Neuserre Ini; in Greek known as Rathurês, ''Ῥαθούρης'') was an Ancient Egyptian pharaoh, the sixth ruler of the Fifth Dynasty during the Old Kingdom period. He is credited with a reign of 24 to 35 ye ...
during that period, and she appears prominently in the
Pyramid Texts
The Pyramid Texts are the oldest ancient Egyptian funerary texts, dating to the late Old Kingdom. They are the earliest known corpus of ancient Egyptian religious texts. Written in Old Egyptian, the pyramid texts were carved onto the subterranea ...
, which began to be written down at the end of the dynasty and whose content may have developed much earlier. Several passages in the Pyramid Texts link Isis with the region of the
Nile Delta
The Nile Delta ( ar, دلتا النيل, or simply , is the delta formed in Lower Egypt where the Nile River spreads out and drains into the Mediterranean Sea. It is one of the world's largest river deltas—from Alexandria in the west to Po ...
near
Behbeit el-Hagar
Behbeit El Hagar (, , ) is a village and an archaeological site in Lower Egypt that contains the remains of an ancient Egyptian temple to the goddess Isis, known as the Iseion. The village and the site lie in Gharbia Governorate along the Damietta ...
and
Sebennytos
Samannud ( ar, سمنود ) is a city (''markaz'') located in Gharbia Governorate, Egypt. Known in classical antiquity as Sebennytos ( grc-gre, Σεβέννυτος), Samannud is a historic city that has been inhabited since the Ancient Egyptia ...
, and her
cult
In modern English, ''cult'' is usually a pejorative term for a social group that is defined by its unusual religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals, or its common interest in a particular personality, object, or goal. This ...
may have originated there.
Many scholars have focused on Isis's name in trying to determine her origins. Her
Egyptian
Egyptian describes something of, from, or related to Egypt.
Egyptian or Egyptians may refer to:
Nations and ethnic groups
* Egyptians, a national group in North Africa
** Egyptian culture, a complex and stable culture with thousands of years of ...
name was ''ꜣst'', which became (''Ēse'') in the
Coptic form of Egyptian, ''Wusa'' in the
Meroitic language
The Meroitic language () was spoken in Meroë (in present-day Sudan) during the Meroitic period (attested from 300 BCE) and became extinct about 400 CE. It was written in two forms of the Meroitic alphabet: Meroitic Cursive, which was written wit ...
of Nubia, and Ἶσις, on which her modern name is based, in
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
. The
hieroglyphic
Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,00 ...
writing of her name incorporates the sign for a throne, which Isis also wears on her head as a sign of her identity. The symbol serves as a
phonogram
Phonogram may refer to:
* A sound recording – see Geneva Phonograms Convention
* ''Phonogram'' (comics), a comic book by Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie
* Phonogram (linguistics), a grapheme which represents a phoneme or a combination of phone ...
, spelling the ''st'' sounds in her name, but it may have also represented a link with actual thrones. The Egyptian term for a throne was also ''st'' and may have shared a common
etymology
Etymology ()The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) – p. 633 "Etymology /ˌɛtɪˈmɒlədʒi/ the study of the class in words and the way their meanings have changed throughout time". is the study of the history of the Phonological chan ...
with Isis's name. Therefore, the Egyptologist
Kurt Sethe
Kurt Heinrich Sethe (30 September 1869 – 6 July 1934) was a noted German Egyptologist and philologist from Berlin. He was a student of Adolf Erman. Sethe collected numerous texts from Egypt during his visits there and edited the ''Urkunden ...
suggested she was originally a personification of thrones.
Henri Frankfort
Henri "Hans" Frankfort (24 February 1897 – 16 July 1954) was a Dutch Egyptologist, archaeologist and orientalist.
Early life and education
Born in Amsterdam, into a "liberal Jewish" family, Frankfort studied history at the University of Amster ...
agreed, believing that the throne was considered the king's mother, and thus a goddess, because of its power to make a man into a king. Other scholars, such as Jürgen Osing and Klaus P. Kuhlmann, have disputed this interpretation, because of dissimilarities between Isis's name and the word for a throne or a lack of evidence that the throne was ever deified.
Roles
The
cycle of myth surrounding Osiris's death and resurrection was first recorded in the Pyramid Texts and grew into the most elaborate and influential of all
Egyptian myths. Isis plays a more active role in this myth than the other protagonists, so as it developed in
literature
Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...
from the
New Kingdom
New is an adjective referring to something recently made, discovered, or created.
New or NEW may refer to:
Music
* New, singer of K-pop group The Boyz
Albums and EPs
* ''New'' (album), by Paul McCartney, 2013
* ''New'' (EP), by Regurgitator, ...
(c. 1550–1070 BCE) to the
Ptolemaic Period (305–30 BCE), she became the most complex literary character of all Egyptian deities. At the same time, she absorbed characteristics from many other goddesses, broadening her significance well beyond the Osiris myth.
Wife and mourner
![Terre cuite pleureuse Louvre E27247](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/Terre_cuite_pleureuse_Louvre_E27247.jpg)
Isis is part of the
Ennead of Heliopolis
The Ennead or Great Ennead was a group of nine deities in Egyptian mythology worshipped at Heliopolis: the sun god Atum; his children Shu and Tefnut; their children Geb and Nut; and their children Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. The Ennea ...
, a family of nine deities descended from the creator god,
Atum
Atum (, Egyptian: ''jtm(w)'' or ''tm(w)'', ''reconstructed'' ; Coptic ''Atoum''), sometimes rendered as Atem or Tem, is an important deity in Egyptian mythology.
Name
Atum's name is thought to be derived from the verb ''tm'' which means 'to com ...
or
Ra. She and her siblings—Osiris,
Set
Set, The Set, SET or SETS may refer to:
Science, technology, and mathematics Mathematics
*Set (mathematics), a collection of elements
*Category of sets, the category whose objects and morphisms are sets and total functions, respectively
Electro ...
, and
Nephthys—are the last generation of the Ennead, born to
Geb
Geb was the Egyptian god of the earth and a mythological member of the Ennead of Heliopolis. He could also be considered a father of snakes. It was believed in ancient Egypt that Geb's laughter created earthquakes and that he allowed crops to ...
, god of the earth, and
Nut
Nut often refers to:
* Nut (fruit), fruit composed of a hard shell and a seed, or a collective noun for dry and edible fruits or seeds
* Nut (hardware), fastener used with a bolt
Nut or Nuts may also refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Co ...
, goddess of the sky. The creator god, the world's original ruler, passes down his authority through the male generations of the Ennead, so that Osiris becomes king. Isis, who is Osiris's
wife as well as his sister, is his queen.
Set kills Osiris and, in several versions of the story, dismembers his corpse. Isis and Nephthys, along with other deities such as
Anubis
Anubis (; grc, Ἄνουβις), also known as Inpu, Inpw, Jnpw, or Anpu in Ancient Egyptian () is the god of death, mummification, embalming, the afterlife, cemeteries, tombs, and the Underworld, in ancient Egyptian religion, usually depict ...
, search for the pieces of their brother's body and reassemble it. Their efforts are the mythic prototype for
mummification
A mummy is a dead human or an animal whose soft tissues and organs have been preserved by either intentional or accidental exposure to chemicals, extreme cold, very low humidity, or lack of air, so that the recovered body does not decay furth ...
and other
ancient Egyptian funerary practices
The ancient Egyptians had an elaborate set of funerary practices that they believed were necessary to ensure their immortality after death. These rituals included mummifying the body, casting magic spells, and burials with specific grave goods ...
. According to some texts, they must also protect Osiris's body from further desecration by Set or his servants. Isis is the epitome of a mourning widow. Her and Nephthys's love and grief for their brother help restore him to life, as does Isis's recitation of
magical spells.
Funerary texts
Funerary texts or funerary literature feature in many belief systems. Its purpose is usually to provide guidance to the newly deceased or the soon-to-be-deceased about how to survive and prosper in the afterlife.
Antiquity
The most famous example ...
contain speeches by Isis in which she expresses her sorrow at Osiris's death, her sexual desire for him, and even anger that he has left her. All these emotions play a part in his revival, as they are meant to stir him into action. Finally, Isis restores breath and life to Osiris's body and copulates with him, conceiving their son,
Horus
Horus or Heru, Hor, Har in Ancient Egyptian, is one of the most significant ancient Egyptian deities who served many functions, most notably as god of kingship and the sky. He was worshipped from at least the late prehistoric Egypt until the P ...
. After this point Osiris lives on only in the
Duat
The Duat ( egy, dwꜣt, Egyptological pronunciation "do-aht", cop, ⲧⲏ, also appearing as ''Tuat'', ''Tuaut'' or ''Akert'', ''Amenthes'', ''Amenti'', or ''Neter-khertet'') is the realm of the dead in ancient Egyptian mythology. It has been ...
, or underworld. But by producing a son and heir to avenge his death and carry out funerary rites for him, Isis has ensured that her husband will endure in the afterlife.
Isis's role in
afterlife beliefs was based on that in the myth. She helped to restore the souls of deceased humans to wholeness as she had done for Osiris. Like other goddesses, such as
Hathor
Hathor ( egy, ḥwt-ḥr, lit=House of Horus, grc, Ἁθώρ , cop, ϩⲁⲑⲱⲣ, Meroitic: ) was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion who played a wide variety of roles. As a sky deity, she was the mother or consort of the sky ...
, she also acted as a mother to the deceased, providing protection and nourishment. Thus, like Hathor, she sometimes took the form of
Imentet
Imentet (Ament, Amentet or Imentit, meaning "She of the West") was a goddess in ancient Egyptian religion representing the necropolises west of the Nile.
She was the consort of Aqen, a god who guided Ra through parts of the underworld. Althoug ...
, the goddess of the west, who welcomed the deceased soul into the afterlife as her child. But for much of Egyptian history, male deities such as Osiris were believed to provide the regenerative powers, including sexual potency, that were crucial for rebirth. Isis was thought to merely assist by stimulating this power. Feminine divine powers became more important in afterlife beliefs in the late New Kingdom. Various Ptolemaic funerary texts emphasize that Isis took the active role in Horus's conception by sexually stimulating her inert husband, some tomb decoration from the
Roman period in Egypt depicts Isis in a central role in the afterlife, and a funerary text from that era suggests that women were thought able to join the retinue of Isis and Nephthys in the afterlife.
Mother goddess
![Egyptian - Isis with Horus the Child - Walters 54416 - Three Quarter Right](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Egyptian_-_Isis_with_Horus_the_Child_-_Walters_54416_-_Three_Quarter_Right.jpg)
Isis is treated as the mother of Horus even in the earliest copies of the Pyramid Texts. Yet there are signs that Hathor was originally regarded as his mother, and other traditions make an elder form of Horus the son of Nut and a sibling of Isis and Osiris. Isis may only have come to be Horus's mother as the Osiris myth took shape during the Old Kingdom, but through her relationship with him she came to be seen as the epitome of maternal devotion.
In the developed form of the myth, Isis gives birth to Horus, after a long pregnancy and a difficult labor, in the
papyrus
Papyrus ( ) is a material similar to thick paper that was used in ancient times as a writing surface. It was made from the pith of the papyrus plant, '' Cyperus papyrus'', a wetland sedge. ''Papyrus'' (plural: ''papyri'') can also refer to a ...
thickets of the Nile Delta. As her child grows she must protect him from Set and many other hazards—snakes, scorpions, and simple illness. In some texts, Isis travels among humans and must seek their help. According to one such story, seven minor scorpion deities travel with and guard her. They take revenge on a wealthy woman who has refused to help Isis by stinging the woman's son, making it necessary for the goddess to heal the blameless child. Isis's reputation as a compassionate deity, willing to relieve human suffering, contributed greatly to her appeal.
Isis continues to assist her son when he challenges Set to claim the kingship that Set has usurped, although mother and son are sometimes portrayed in conflict, as when Horus beheads Isis and she replaces her original head with that of a cow—an
origin myth
An origin myth is a myth that describes the origin of some feature of the natural or social world. One type of origin myth is the creation or cosmogonic myth, a story that describes the creation of the world. However, many cultures have stor ...
explaining the cow-horn headdress that Isis wears.
Isis's maternal aspect extended to other deities as well. The
Coffin Texts
The Coffin Texts are a collection of ancient Egyptian funerary spells written on coffins beginning in the First Intermediate Period. They are partially derived from the earlier Pyramid Texts, reserved for royal use only, but contain substantial ...
from the
Middle Kingdom (c. 2055–1650 BCE) say the
Four sons of Horus, funerary deities who were thought to protect the internal organs of the deceased, were the offspring of Isis and the elder form of Horus. In the same era, Horus was syncretized with the
fertility god
A fertility deity is a god or goddess associated with fertility, sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and crops. In some cases these deities are directly associated with these experiences; in others they are more abstract symbols. Fertility rites may acc ...
Min
Min or MIN may refer to:
Places
* Fujian, also called Mǐn, a province of China
** Min Kingdom (909–945), a state in Fujian
* Min County, a county of Dingxi, Gansu province, China
* Min River (Fujian)
* Min River (Sichuan)
* Mineola (Am ...
, so Isis was regarded as Min's mother. A form of Min known as Kamutef, "bull of his mother", who represented the cyclical regeneration of the gods and of kingship, was said to impregnate his mother to engender himself. Thus, Isis was also regarded as Min's consort. The same ideology of kingship may lie behind a tradition, found in a few texts, that Horus raped Isis.
Amun
Amun (; also ''Amon'', ''Ammon'', ''Amen''; egy, jmn, reconstructed as (Old Egyptian and early Middle Egyptian) → (later Middle Egyptian) → (Late Egyptian), cop, Ⲁⲙⲟⲩⲛ, Amoun) romanized: ʾmn) was a major ancient Egyptian ...
, the foremost Egyptian deity during the Middle and New Kingdoms, also took on the role of Kamutef, and when he was in this form, Isis often acted as his consort.
Apis, a bull that was worshipped as a living god at
Memphis
Memphis most commonly refers to:
* Memphis, Egypt, a former capital of ancient Egypt
* Memphis, Tennessee, a major American city
Memphis may also refer to:
Places United States
* Memphis, Alabama
* Memphis, Florida
* Memphis, Indiana
* Memp ...
, was said to be Isis's son, fathered by a form of Osiris known as Osiris-Apis. The biological mother of each Apis bull was thus known as the "Isis cow". Isis was said to be the mother of
Bastet
Bastet or Bast ( egy, bꜣstjt, cop, Ⲟⲩⲃⲁⲥⲧⲉ, Oubaste , Phoenician: 𐤀𐤁𐤎𐤕, romanized: ’bst, or 𐤁𐤎𐤕, romanized: bst) was a goddess of ancient Egyptian religion, worshipped as early as the Second Dynasty (289 ...
by
Ra.
A story in the
Westcar Papyrus
The Westcar Papyrus (inventory-designation: ''P. Berlin 3033'') is an ancient Egyptian text containing five stories about miracles performed by priests and magicians. In the papyrus text, each of these tales are told at the royal court of king K ...
from the Middle Kingdom includes Isis among a group of goddesses who serve as midwives during the delivery of three future kings. She serves a similar role in New Kingdom texts that describe the divinely ordained births of reigning pharaohs.
In the Westcar Papyrus, Isis calls out the names of the three children as they are born. Barbara S. Lesko sees this story as a sign that Isis had the power to predict or influence future events, as did other deities who presided over birth, such as
Shai
Shai (also spelt Sai, occasionally Shay, and in Greek, Psais) was the deification of the concept of fate in Egyptian mythology. As a concept, with no particular reason for associating one gender over another, Shai was sometimes considered femal ...
and
Renenutet
Renenūtet (also transliterated Ernūtet, Renen-wetet, Renenet) was a goddess of nourishment and the harvest in the ancient Egyptian religion. The importance of the harvest caused people to make many offerings to Renenutet during harvest time.
In ...
. Texts from much later times call Isis "mistress of life, ruler of fate and destiny" and indicate she has control over Shai and Renenutet, just as other great deities such as Amun were said to do in earlier eras of Egyptian history. By governing these deities, Isis determined the length and quality of human lives.
Goddess of kingship and protection of the kingdom
![Abydos Tempelrelief Sethos I](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Abydos_Tempelrelief_Sethos_I._15.JPG)
Horus was equated with each living pharaoh and Osiris with the pharaoh's deceased predecessors. Isis was therefore the mythological mother and wife of kings. In the Pyramid Texts her primary importance to the king was as one of the deities who protected and assisted him in the afterlife. Her prominence in royal ideology grew in the New Kingdom. Temple reliefs from that time on show the king nursing at Isis's breast; her milk not only healed her child, but symbolized his divine right to rule. Royal ideology increasingly emphasized the importance of queens as earthly counterparts of the goddesses who served as wives to the king and mothers to his heirs. Initially the most important of these goddesses was Hathor, whose attributes in art were incorporated into queens' crowns. But because of her own mythological links with queenship, Isis too was given the same titles and regalia as human queens.
Isis's actions in protecting Osiris against Set became part of a larger, more warlike aspect of her character. New Kingdom funerary texts portray Isis in the barque of Ra as he sails through the underworld, acting as one of several deities who subdue Ra's archenemy,
Apep
Apep, also spelled Apepi or Aapep, ( Ancient Egyptian: ; Coptic: Erman, Adolf, and Hermann Grapow, eds. 1926–1953. ''Wörterbuch der aegyptischen Sprache im Auftrage der deutschen Akademien''. 6 vols. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs'schen Buch ...
. Kings also called upon her
protective magical power against human enemies. In her Ptolemaic temple at
Philae
; ar, فيلة; cop, ⲡⲓⲗⲁⲕ
, alternate_name =
, image = File:File, Asuán, Egipto, 2022-04-01, DD 93.jpg
, alt =
, caption = The temple of Isis from Philae at its current location on Agilkia Island in Lake Nasse ...
, which lay near the frontier with
Nubia
Nubia () (Nobiin: Nobīn, ) is a region along the Nile river encompassing the area between the first cataract of the Nile (just south of Aswan in southern Egypt) and the confluence of the Blue and White Niles (in Khartoum in central Sudan), or ...
n peoples who raided Egypt, she was described as the protectress of the entire nation, more effective in battle than "millions of soldiers", supporting Ptolemaic kings and Roman emperors in their efforts to subdue Egypt's enemies.
Goddess of magic and wisdom
Isis was also known for her
magical power, which enabled her to revive Osiris and to protect and heal Horus, and for her cunning. By virtue of her magical knowledge, she was said to be "more clever than a million gods". In several episodes in the New Kingdom story "
The Contendings of Horus and Set", Isis uses these abilities to outmaneuver Set during his conflict with her son. On one occasion, she transforms into a young woman who tells Set she is involved in an inheritance dispute similar to Set's usurpation of Osiris's crown. When Set calls this situation unjust, Isis taunts him, saying he has judged himself to be in the wrong. In later texts, she uses her powers of transformation to fight and destroy Set and his followers.
Many stories about Isis appear as ''
historiolae
The historiola is a modern term for a kind of incantation incorporating a short mythic story that provides the paradigm for the desired magical action. It can be found in ancient Mesopotamian,Fritz Graf"Historiola" in '' Brill’s New Pauly''. ...
'', prologues to magical texts that describe mythic events related to the goal that the spell aims to accomplish. In one spell, Isis creates a snake that bites Ra, who is older and greater than she is, and makes him ill with its venom. She offers to cure Ra if he will tell her his
true, secret name—a piece of knowledge that carries with it incomparable power. After much coercion, Ra tells her his name, which she passes on to Horus, bolstering his royal authority. The story may be meant as an origin story to explain why Isis's magical ability surpasses that of other deities, but because she uses magic to subdue Ra, the story seems to treat her as having such abilities even before learning his name.
Sky goddess
Many of the roles Isis acquired gave her an important position in the sky. Passages in the Pyramid Texts connect Isis closely with
Sopdet
Sopdet is the ancient Egyptian name of the star Sirius and its personification as an Egyptian goddess. Known to the Greeks as Sothis, she was conflated with Isis as a goddess and Anubis as a god.
Names
The exact pronunciation of ancien ...
, the goddess representing the star
Sirius
Sirius is the list of brightest stars, brightest star in the night sky. Its name is derived from the Ancient Greek language, Greek word , or , meaning 'glowing' or 'scorching'. The star is designated α Canis Majoris, Latinisation ...
, whose relationship with her husband
Sah—the constellation
Orion—and their son
Sopdu
Sopdu (also rendered Septu or Sopedu) was a god of the sky and of eastern border regions in the religion of Ancient Egypt.Wilkinson, Richard H. (2003). ''The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt''. Thames & Hudson. p. 211
He was Khensit's ...
parallels Isis's relations with Osiris and Horus. Sirius's
heliacal rising
The heliacal rising ( ) or star rise of a star occurs annually, or the similar phenomenon of a planet, when it first becomes visible above the eastern horizon at dawn just before sunrise (thus becoming "the morning star") after a complete orbit of ...
, just before the start of the
Nile flood
The flooding of the Nile has been an important natural cycle in Egypt since ancient times. It is celebrated by Egyptians as an annual holiday for two weeks starting August 15, known as ''Wafaa El-Nil''. It is also celebrated in the Coptic Church b ...
, gave Sopdet a close connection with the flood and the resulting growth of plants. Partly because of her relationship with Sopdet, Isis was also linked with the flood, which was sometimes equated with the tears she shed for Osiris.
By Ptolemaic times she was connected with rain, which Egyptian texts call a "Nile in the sky"; with the sun as the protector of Ra's barque; and with the moon, possibly because she was linked with the Greek lunar goddess
Artemis
In ancient Greek mythology and religion, Artemis (; grc-gre, Ἄρτεμις) is the goddess of the hunt, the wilderness, wild animals, nature, vegetation, childbirth, care of children, and chastity. She was heavily identified wit ...
by a shared connection with an Egyptian fertility goddess,
Bastet
Bastet or Bast ( egy, bꜣstjt, cop, Ⲟⲩⲃⲁⲥⲧⲉ, Oubaste , Phoenician: 𐤀𐤁𐤎𐤕, romanized: ’bst, or 𐤁𐤎𐤕, romanized: bst) was a goddess of ancient Egyptian religion, worshipped as early as the Second Dynasty (289 ...
. In hymns inscribed at Philae she is called the "Lady of Heaven" whose dominion over the sky parallels Osiris's rule over the Duat and Horus's kingship on earth.
Universal goddess
In Ptolemaic times Isis's sphere of influence could include the entire cosmos. As the deity that protected Egypt and endorsed its king, she had power over all nations, and as the provider of rain, she enlivened the natural world. The Philae hymn that initially calls her ruler of the sky goes on to expand her authority, so at its climax her dominion encompasses the sky, earth, and Duat. It says her power over nature nourishes humans, the blessed dead, and the gods. Other, Greek-language hymns from Ptolemaic Egypt call her "the beautiful essence of all the gods". In the course of Egyptian history, many deities, major and minor, had been described in similar grand terms. Amun was most commonly described this way in the New Kingdom, whereas in Roman Egypt such terms tended to be applied to Isis. Such texts do not deny the existence of other deities but treat them as aspects of the supreme deity, a type of theology sometimes called "
summodeism".
In the Late, Ptolemaic, and Roman Periods, many temples contained a
creation myth
A creation myth (or cosmogonic myth) is a symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it., "Creation myths are symbolic stories describing how the universe and its inhabitants came to be. Creation myths develop ...
that adapted long-standing ideas about creation to give the primary roles to local deities. At Philae, Isis is described as the creator in the same way that older texts speak of the work of the god
Ptah
Ptah ( egy, ptḥ, reconstructed ; grc, Φθά; cop, ⲡⲧⲁϩ; Phoenician: 𐤐𐤕𐤇, romanized: ptḥ) is an ancient Egyptian deity, a creator god and patron deity of craftsmen and architects. In the triad of Memphis, he is the h ...
, who was said to have designed the world with his intellect and sculpted it into being. Like him, Isis formed the cosmos "through what her heart conceived and her hands created".
Like other deities throughout Egyptian history, Isis had many forms in her individual cult centers, and each cult center emphasized different aspects of her character. Local Isis cults focused on the distinctive traits of their deity more than on her universality, whereas some Egyptian hymns to Isis treat other goddesses in cult centers from across Egypt and the Mediterranean as manifestations of her. A text in her temple at
Dendera
Dendera ( ar, دَنْدَرة ''Dandarah''; grc, Τεντυρις or Τεντυρα; Bohairic cop, ⲛⲓⲧⲉⲛⲧⲱⲣⲓ, translit=Nitentōri; Sahidic cop, ⲛⲓⲧⲛⲧⲱⲣⲉ, translit=Nitntōre), also spelled ''Denderah'', ancient ...
says "in each
nome it is she who is in every town, in every nome with her son Horus."
Iconography
In
Ancient Egyptian art
Ancient Egyptian art refers to art produced in ancient Egypt between the 6th millennium BC and the 4th century AD, spanning from Prehistoric Egypt until the Christianization of Roman Egypt. It includes paintings, sculptu ...
, Isis was most commonly depicted as a woman with the typical attributes of a goddess: a sheath dress, a staff of papyrus in one hand, and an ''
ankh
Progressive ankylosis protein homolog (ANK ilosis H omolog) is a protein that in humans is encoded by the ''ANKH'' gene.
This gene encodes a multipass transmembrane protein that is expressed in joints and other tissues and controls pyrophosphate ...
'' sign in the other. Her original headdress was the throne sign used in writing her name. She and Nephthys often appear together, particularly when mourning Osiris's death, supporting him on his throne, or protecting the
sarcophagi
A sarcophagus (plural sarcophagi or sarcophaguses) is a box-like funeral receptacle for a cadaver, corpse, most commonly carved in stone, and usually displayed above ground, though it may also be buried. The word ''sarcophagus'' comes from ...
of the dead. In these situations their arms are often flung across their faces, in a gesture of mourning, or outstretched around Osiris or the deceased as a sign of their protective role. In these circumstances they were often depicted as
kites
A kite is a tethered heavier than air flight, heavier-than-air or lighter-than-air craft with wing surfaces that react against the air to create Lift (force), lift and Drag (physics), drag forces. A kite consists of wings, tethers and anchors. ...
or women with the wings of kites. This form may be inspired by a similarity between the kites' calls and the cries of wailing women, or by a metaphor likening the kite's search for carrion to the goddesses' search for their dead brother. Isis sometimes appeared in other animal forms: as a sow, representing her maternal character; as a
cow
Cattle (''Bos taurus'') are large, domesticated, cloven-hooved, herbivores. They are a prominent modern member of the subfamily Bovinae and the most widespread species of the genus ''Bos''. Adult females are referred to as cows and adult ma ...
, particularly when linked with Apis; or as a scorpion. She also took the form of a tree or a woman emerging from a tree, sometimes offering food and water to deceased souls. This form alluded to the maternal nourishment she provided.
Beginning in the New Kingdom, thanks to the close links between Isis and Hathor, Isis took on Hathor's attributes, such as a
sistrum
A sistrum (plural: sistra or Latin sistra; from the Greek ''seistron'' of the same meaning; literally "that which is being shaken", from ''seiein'', "to shake") is a musical instrument of the percussion family, chiefly associated with ancient ...
rattle and a headdress of cow horns enclosing a sun disk. Sometimes both headdresses were combined, so the throne glyph sat atop the sun disk. In the same era, she began to wear the insignia of a human queen, such as a vulture-shaped crown on her head and the royal
uraeus
The Uraeus (), or Ouraeus (Ancient Greek: , ; Egyptian: ', "rearing cobra"), ''(plural: Uraei)'' is the stylized, upright form of an Egyptian cobra, used as a symbol of sovereignty, royalty, deity and divine authority in ancient Egypt.
Sym ...
, or rearing cobra, on her brow. In Ptolemaic and Roman times, statues and figurines of Isis often showed her in a
Greek sculptural style, with attributes taken from Egyptian and Greek tradition. Some of these images reflected her linkage with other goddesses in novel ways. Isis-Thermuthis, a combination of Isis and Renenutet who represented agricultural fertility, was depicted in this style as a woman with the lower body of a snake. Figurines of a woman wearing an elaborate headdress and
exposing her genitals may represent Isis-Aphrodite.
The ''
tyet
The tyet ( egy, tjt), sometimes called the knot of Isis or girdle of Isis, is an ancient Egyptian symbol that came to be connected with the goddess Isis. Its hieroglyphic depiction is catalogued as V39 in Gardiner's sign list.
In many respect ...
'' symbol, a looped shape similar to the ''ankh'', came to be seen as Isis's emblem at least as early as the New Kingdom, though it existed long before. It was often made of red
jasper
Jasper, an aggregate of microgranular quartz and/or cryptocrystalline chalcedony and other mineral phases,Kostov, R. I. 2010. Review on the mineralogical systematics of jasper and related rocks. – Archaeometry Workshop, 7, 3, 209-213PDF/ref> ...
and likened to Isis's blood. Used as a funerary
amulet
An amulet, also known as a good luck charm or phylactery, is an object believed to confer protection upon its possessor. The word "amulet" comes from the Latin word amuletum, which Pliny's ''Natural History'' describes as "an object that protects ...
, it was said to confer her protection on the wearer.
File:Flickr - schmuela - IMG 6672.jpg, alt=Relief of a woman in Egyptian clothing with an elaborate headdress, Isis with a combination of throne-glyph and cow horns, as well as a vulture headdress, Temple of Kalabsha
The Temple of Kalabsha (also Temple of Mandulis) is an ancient Egyptian temple that was originally located at Bab al-Kalabsha (Gate of Kalabsha), approximately 50 km south of Aswan.
In the 1960s the temple was relocated under the Internationa ...
, first century BCE or first century CE
File:Sarcophage de Ramsès III (Louvre, D 1) - Largeur coté sud cropped and sharpened.jpg, alt=Relief of a woman kneeling on a stool and spreading her arms, to which wings are attached, Winged Isis at the foot of the sarcophagus of Ramesses III
Usermaatre Meryamun Ramesses III (also written Ramses and Rameses) was the second Pharaoh of the Twentieth Dynasty in Ancient Egypt. He is thought to have reigned from 26 March 1186 to 15 April 1155 BC and is considered to be the last great monar ...
, twelfth century BCE
File:Isis (goddess).png, An illustration of Isis based on a painting in the tomb of Seti I
File:ThebanTomb335.png, alt=Fresco of a mummy lying on a bier. Women stand at the head and foot of the bier, while a winged woman kneels in the register above, Isis, left, and Nephthys stand by as Anubis
Anubis (; grc, Ἄνουβις), also known as Inpu, Inpw, Jnpw, or Anpu in Ancient Egyptian () is the god of death, mummification, embalming, the afterlife, cemeteries, tombs, and the Underworld, in ancient Egyptian religion, usually depict ...
embalms the deceased, thirteenth century BCE. A winged Isis appears at top.
File:Isis with Serpent Tail LACMA M.80.202.222.jpg, alt=Statue of a snake with the upper torso and head of a woman, Figurine of Isis-Thermuthis, second century CE
File:Ägyptisches Museum Leipzig 206.jpg, alt=Statue of a woman with a very tall headdress lifting her dress up to the hips, Figurine possibly of Isis-Aphrodite, second or first century BCE
File:Tit (Isis knot) amulet MET DP109370.jpg, alt=A red stone amulet shaped like a column with a looped top and two loops hanging at the sides, A ''tyet
The tyet ( egy, tjt), sometimes called the knot of Isis or girdle of Isis, is an ancient Egyptian symbol that came to be connected with the goddess Isis. Its hieroglyphic depiction is catalogued as V39 in Gardiner's sign list.
In many respect ...
'' amulet, fifteenth or fourteenth century BCE
Worship
Relationship with royalty
Despite her significance in the Osiris myth, Isis was originally a minor deity in the ideology surrounding the living king. She played only a small role, for instance, in the
Dramatic Ramesseum Papyrus, the script for royal rituals performed in the reign of
Senusret I
Senusret I (Middle Egyptian: z-n-wsrt; /suʀ nij ˈwas.ɾiʔ/) also anglicized as Sesostris I and Senwosret I, was the second pharaoh of the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt. He ruled from 1971 BC to 1926 BC (1920 BC to 1875 BC), and was one of the most ...
in the Middle Kingdom. Her importance grew during the New Kingdom, when she was increasingly connected with Hathor and the human queen.
The early first millennium BCE saw an increased emphasis on the family triad of Osiris, Isis, and Horus and an explosive growth in Isis's popularity. In the fourth century BCE,
Nectanebo I
Nectanebo I (Egyptian: ; grc-gre, Νεκτάνεβις ; died 361/60 BCE) was an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, founder of the last native dynasty of Egypt, the 30th.
Name
Nectanebo's Egyptian personal name was Nḫt-nb.f, which means "the strong ...
of the
Thirtieth Dynasty claimed Isis as his patron deity, tying her still more closely to political power. The
Kingdom of Kush
The Kingdom of Kush (; Egyptian language, Egyptian: 𓎡𓄿𓈙𓈉 ''kꜣš'', Akkadian language, Assyrian: ''Kûsi'', in LXX grc, Κυς and Κυσι ; cop, ''Ecōš''; he, כּוּשׁ ''Kūš'') was an ancient kingdom in Nubia, ce ...
, which ruled Nubia from the eighth century BCE to the fourth century CE, absorbed and adapted the Egyptian ideology surrounding kingship. It equated Isis with the ''
kandake
Kandake, kadake or kentake ( Meroitic: 𐦲𐦷𐦲𐦡 ''kdke''),Kirsty
Rowan"Revising the Sound Value of Meroitic D: A Phonological Approach,"''Beitrage zur Sudanforschung'' 10 (2009). often Latinised as Candace ( grc, Κανδάκη, ''Kandak ...
'', the queen or
queen mother
A queen mother is a former queen, often a queen dowager, who is the mother of the reigning monarch. The term has been used in English since the early 1560s. It arises in hereditary monarchies in Europe and is also used to describe a number of ...
of the Kushite king.
The
Ptolemaic Ptolemaic is the adjective formed from the name Ptolemy, and may refer to:
Pertaining to the Ptolemaic dynasty
* Ptolemaic dynasty, the Macedonian Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt founded in 305 BC by Ptolemy I Soter
* Ptolemaic Kingdom
Pertaining ...
Greek kings, who ruled Egypt as pharaohs from 305 to 30 BCE, developed an ideology that linked them with both Egyptian and
Greek deities
The following is a list of gods, goddesses, and many other divine and semi-divine figures from ancient Greek mythology and ancient Greek religion.
Immortals
The Greeks created images of their deities for many purposes. A temple would house the ...
, to strengthen their claim to the throne in the eyes of their Greek and Egyptian subjects. For centuries before,
Greek colonists and visitors to Egypt had drawn parallels between Egyptian deities and their own, in a process known as ''
interpretatio graeca
''Interpretatio graeca'' (Latin, "Greek translation") or "interpretation by means of Greek odels is a discourse used to interpret or attempt to understand the mythology and religion of other cultures; a comparative methodology using ancient Gr ...
''.
Herodotus
Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum, Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria ( Italy). He is known f ...
, a Greek who wrote about Egypt in the fifth century BCE, likened Isis to
Demeter
In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Demeter (; Attic: ''Dēmḗtēr'' ; Doric: ''Dāmā́tēr'') is the Olympian goddess of the harvest and agriculture, presiding over crops, grains, food, and the fertility of the earth. Although s ...
, whose mythical search for her daughter
Persephone
In ancient Greek mythology and religion, Persephone ( ; gr, Περσεφόνη, Persephónē), also called Kore or Cora ( ; gr, Κόρη, Kórē, the maiden), is the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. She became the queen of the underworld after ...
resembled Isis's search for Osiris. Demeter was one of the few Greek deities to be widely adopted by Egyptians in Ptolemaic times, so the similarity between her and Isis provided a link between the two cultures. In other cases, Isis was linked with
Aphrodite
Aphrodite ( ; grc-gre, Ἀφροδίτη, Aphrodítē; , , ) is an ancient Greek goddess associated with love, lust, beauty, pleasure, passion, and procreation. She was syncretized with the Roman goddess . Aphrodite's major symbols include ...
through the sexual aspects of her character. Building on these traditions, the first two Ptolemies promoted the cult of the new god
Serapis
Serapis or Sarapis is a Graeco-Egyptian deity. The cult of Serapis was promoted during the third century BC on the orders of Greek Pharaoh Ptolemy I Soter of the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt as a means to unify the Greeks and Egyptians in his r ...
, who combined aspects of Osiris and
Apis with those of Greek gods such as
Zeus
Zeus or , , ; grc, Δῐός, ''Diós'', label=Genitive case, genitive Aeolic Greek, Boeotian Aeolic and Doric Greek#Laconian, Laconian grc-dor, Δεύς, Deús ; grc, Δέος, ''Déos'', label=Genitive case, genitive el, Δίας, ''D ...
and
Dionysus
In ancient Greek religion and myth, Dionysus (; grc, Διόνυσος ) is the god of the grape-harvest, winemaking, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, festivity, and theatre. The Romans ...
. Isis, portrayed in a
Hellenized
Hellenization (other British spelling Hellenisation) or Hellenism is the adoption of Greek culture, religion, language and identity by non-Greeks. In the ancient period, colonization often led to the Hellenization of indigenous peoples; in th ...
form, was regarded as the consort of Serapis as well as of Osiris.
Ptolemy II
; egy, Userkanaenre Meryamun Clayton (2006) p. 208
, predecessor = Ptolemy I
, successor = Ptolemy III
, horus = ''ḥwnw-ḳni'Khunuqeni''The brave youth
, nebty = ''wr-pḥtj'Urpekhti''Great of strength
, gol ...
and his sister and wife
Arsinoe II
Arsinoë II ( grc-koi, Ἀρσινόη, 316 BC – unknown date between July 270 and 260 BC) was a Ptolemaic queen and co-regent of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of ancient Egypt. She was given the Egyptian title "King of Upper and Lower Egypt", making ...
developed a
ruler cult around themselves, so that they were worshipped in the same temples as Serapis and Isis, and Arsinoe was likened to both Isis and Aphrodite. Some later Ptolemaic queens identified themselves still more closely with Isis.
Cleopatra III
Cleopatra III ( grc-gre, Κλεοπάτρα; c.160–101 BC) was a queen of Egypt. She ruled at first with her mother Cleopatra II and husband Ptolemy VIII from 142 to 131 BC and again from 127 to 116 BC. She then ruled with her sons Ptolem ...
, in the second century BCE, used Isis's name in place of her own in inscriptions, and
Cleopatra VII
Cleopatra VII Philopator ( grc-gre, Κλεοπάτρα Φιλοπάτωρ}, "Cleopatra the father-beloved"; 69 BC10 August 30 BC) was Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt from 51 to 30 BC, and its last active ruler.She was also a ...
, the last ruler of Egypt before it was annexed by
Rome
, established_title = Founded
, established_date = 753 BC
, founder = King Romulus (legendary)
, image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg
, map_caption ...
, used the epithet "the new Isis".
Temples and festivals
![David Roberts Temple Island Philae](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/David_Roberts_Temple_Island_Philae.jpg)
Down to the end of the New Kingdom, Isis's cult was closely tied to those of male deities such as Osiris, Min, or Amun. She was commonly worshipped alongside them as their mother or consort, and she was especially widely worshipped as the mother of various local forms of Horus. Nevertheless, she had independent priesthoods at some sites and at least one temple of her own, at Osiris's cult center of
Abydos, during the late New Kingdom.
The earliest known major temples to Isis were the Iseion at
Behbeit el-Hagar
Behbeit El Hagar (, , ) is a village and an archaeological site in Lower Egypt that contains the remains of an ancient Egyptian temple to the goddess Isis, known as the Iseion. The village and the site lie in Gharbia Governorate along the Damietta ...
in northern Egypt and Philae in the far south. Both began construction during the Thirtieth Dynasty and were completed or enlarged by Ptolemaic kings. Thanks to Isis's widespread fame, Philae drew pilgrims from across the Mediterranean. Many other temples of Isis sprang up in Ptolemaic times, ranging from
Alexandria
Alexandria ( or ; ar, ٱلْإِسْكَنْدَرِيَّةُ ; grc-gre, Αλεξάνδρεια, Alexándria) is the second largest city in Egypt, and the largest city on the Mediterranean coast. Founded in by Alexander the Great, Alexandria ...
and
Canopus
Canopus is the brightest star in the southern constellation of Carina (constellation), Carina and the list of brightest stars, second-brightest star in the night sky. It is also Bayer designation, designated α Carinae, which is Lat ...
on the Mediterranean coast to
Egypt's frontier with Nubia. A series of temples of Isis stood in that region, stretching from Philae south to
Maharraqa
Temple of Al-Maharraqa is an ancient Egyptian Temple dedicated to Isis and Serapis. It was originally located in al-Maharraqa ( ar, المحرقة, DMG: Al-Maḥarraqa, Greek: Hierasykaminos), Lower Nubia, approximately south of Aswan on the south ...
, and were sites of worship for both Egyptians and various Nubian peoples. The Nubians of Kush built their own temples to Isis at sites as far south as
Wad ban Naqa
Wad ben Naga (also Wad Ban Naqa or Wad Naga) is the name of an ancient town of the Kushitic Kingdom of Meroë in present-day Sudan. The village lies on the eastern bank of the Nile, about 80 kilometers upstream of Meroë and about 40 km so ...
, including one in their capital,
Meroe.
The most frequent temple rite for any deity was the daily offering ritual, in which priests clothed the deity's
cult image
In the practice of religion, a cult image is a human-made object that is venerated or worshipped for the deity, spirit or daemon that it embodies or represents. In several traditions, including the ancient religions of Egypt, Greece and Rome ...
and offered it food. In Roman times, temples to Isis in Egypt could be built either in Egyptian style, in which the cult image was in a secluded sanctuary accessible only to priests, and in a Greco-Roman style in which devotees were allowed to see the cult image.
Greek and Egyptian culture were highly intermingled by this time, and there may have been no ethnic separation between Isis's worshippers. The same people may have prayed to Isis outside Egyptian-style temples and in front of her statue inside Greek-style temples.
Temples celebrated many festivals in the course of the year, some nationwide and some very local. An elaborate series of rites were performed all across Egypt for Osiris during the month of
Khoiak
Koiak (; cop, Ⲕⲟⲓⲁⲕ, []), also known as Choiak ( grc-gre, Χοιάκ, ''Khoiák'') and Kiyahk. ( cop, Ⲕⲓⲁϩⲕ, ''Kiahk'', []; ar, كياك or ), is the fourth month of the ancient Egyptian and Coptic calendars. It lasts between ...
, and Isis and Nephthys were prominent in these rites at least as early as the New Kingdom.
In Ptolemaic times, two women acted out the roles of Isis and Nephthys during Khoiak, singing or chanting in mourning for their dead brother. Their chants are preserved in the
Festival Songs of Isis and Nephthys
The Festival Songs of Isis and Nephthys are a work of ancient Egyptian literature whose author is unknown. Probably not older than the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, the songs form part of the funeral hieratic papyrus of Nesi Ámsu (No. 10158 in the British ...
and
Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys
The Book of Lamentations ( he, אֵיכָה, , from its incipit meaning "how") is a collection of poetic laments for the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. In the Hebrew Bible it appears in the Ketuvim ("Writings") as one of the Five Megillot ...
.
Festivals dedicated to Isis eventually developed. In Roman times, Egyptians across the country celebrated her birthday, the Amesysia, by carrying the local cult statue of Isis through their fields, probably celebrating her powers of fertility. The priests at Philae held a festival every ten days when the cult statue of Isis visited the neighboring island of
Bigeh
Bigeh ( ar, بجح; Ancient Egyptian ''znmwt'') is an island and archaeological site situated along the Nile River in historic Nubia and within the Aswan Governorate of southern Egypt. The island has been situated in the reservoir of the Old As ...
, which was said to be Osiris's place of burial, and the priests performed funerary rites for him. The cult statue also visited the neighboring temples to the south, even during the last centuries of activity at Philae when those temples were run by Nubian peoples outside Roman rule.
Christianity
Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the world's largest and most widespread religion with roughly 2.38 billion followers representing one-third of the global pop ...
became the dominant religion in the Roman Empire, including Egypt, during the fourth and fifth centuries CE.
Egyptian temple cults died out, gradually and at various times, from a combination of lack of funds and Christian hostility. Isis's temple at Philae, supported by its Nubian worshippers, still had an organized priesthood and regular festivals until at least the mid-fifth century CE, making it the last fully functioning temple in Egypt.
Funerary
![Isis and Nepthys as kites by the bier](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Isis_and_Nepthys_as_kites_by_the_bier.jpg)
In many spells in the Pyramid Texts, Isis and Nephthys help the deceased king reach the afterlife. In the Coffin Texts from the Middle Kingdom, Isis appears still more frequently, though in these texts Osiris is credited with reviving the dead more often than she is. New Kingdom sources such as the
Book of the Dead
The ''Book of the Dead'' ( egy, 𓂋𓏤𓈒𓈒𓈒𓏌𓏤𓉐𓂋𓏏𓂻𓅓𓉔𓂋𓅱𓇳𓏤, ''rw n(y)w prt m hrw(w)'') is an ancient Egyptian funerary text generally written on papyrus and used from the beginning of the New Kingdom ...
describe Isis as protecting deceased souls as they face the dangers in the Duat. They also describe Isis as a member of the divine councils that judge souls' moral righteousness before admitting them into the afterlife, and she appears in vignettes standing beside Osiris as he presides over this tribunal.
Isis and Nephthys took part in funeral ceremonies, where two wailing women, much like those in the festival at Abydos, mourned the deceased as the two goddesses mourned Osiris. Isis was frequently shown or alluded to in funerary equipment: on sarcophagi and
canopic chest
Canopic chests are cases used by ancient Egyptians to contain the internal organs removed during the process of mummification. Once canopic jars began to be used in the late Fourth Dynasty, the jars were placed within canopic chests. Although th ...
s as one of the four goddesses who protected the Four Sons of Horus, in tomb art offering her enlivening milk to the dead, and in the ''tyet'' amulets that were often placed on mummies to ensure that Isis's power would shield them from harm. Late funerary texts prominently featured her mourning for Osiris, and one such text, one of the
Books of Breathing
The Books of Breathing ( ar, كتاب التنفس, Kitab al-Tanafus) are several late ancient Egyptian funerary texts, intended to enable deceased people to continue to exist in the afterlife. The earliest known copy dates to about 350 BC.Hornung ...
, was said to have been written by her for Osiris's benefit. In Nubian funerary religion, Isis was regarded as more significant than her husband, because she was the active partner while he only passively received the offerings she made to sustain him in the afterlife.
Popular worship
Unlike many Egyptian deities, Isis was rarely addressed in prayers, or invoked in
personal names
A personal name, or full name, in onomastic terminology also known as prosoponym (from Ancient Greek πρόσωπον / ''prósōpon'' - person, and ὄνομα / ''onoma'' - name), is the set of names by which an individual person is known, ...
, before the end of the New Kingdom. From the Late Period on, she became one of the deities most commonly mentioned in these sources, which often refer to her kindly character and her willingness to answer those who call upon her for help. Hundreds of thousands of amulets and votive statues of Isis nursing Horus were made during the first millennium BCE, and in Roman Egypt she was among the deities most commonly represented in household religious art, such as figurines and panel paintings.
Isis was prominent in magical texts from the Middle Kingdom onward. The dangers Horus faces in childhood are a frequent theme in magical healing spells, in which Isis's efforts to heal him are extended to cure any patient. In many of these spells, Isis forces Ra to help Horus by declaring that she will stop the sun in its course through the sky unless her son is cured. Other spells equated pregnant women with Isis to ensure that they would deliver their children successfully.
Egyptian magic began to incorporate Christian concepts as Christianity was established in Egypt, but Egyptian and Greek deities continued to appear in spells long after their temple worship had ceased. Spells that may date to the sixth, seventh, or eighth centuries CE invoke the name of Isis alongside Christian figures.
In the Greco-Roman world
Spread
![Cossura Isis bronze coin](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Cossura_Isis_bronze_coin.jpg)
Cults based in a particular city or nation were the norm across the ancient world until the mid- to late first millennium BCE, when increased contact between different cultures allowed some cults to spread more widely. Greeks were aware of Egyptian deities, including Isis, at least as early as the
Archaic Period (c. 700–480 BCE), and her first known temple in Greece was built during or before the fourth century BCE by Egyptians living in
Athens
Athens ( ; el, Αθήνα, Athína ; grc, Ἀθῆναι, Athênai (pl.) ) is both the capital and largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh largest city in the European Union. Athens dominates ...
. The
conquests of Alexander the Great
The wars of Alexander the Great were a series of conquests that were carried out by Alexander III of Macedon from 336 BC to 323 BC. They began with battles against the Achaemenid Persian Empire, then under the rule of Darius III of Persia. ...
late in that century created Hellenistic kingdoms around the Mediterranean and Near East, including Ptolemaic Egypt, and put Greek and non-Greek religions in much closer contact. The resulting
diffusion of cultures allowed many religious traditions to spread across the Hellenistic world in the last three centuries BCE. The new mobile cults adapted greatly to appeal to people from a variety of cultures. The cults of Isis and Serapis were among those that expanded in this way.
Spread by merchants and other Mediterranean travelers, the cults of Isis and Serapis were established in Greek port cities at the end of the fourth century BCE and expanded throughout Greece and Asia Minor during the third and second centuries. The Greek island of
Delos
The island of Delos (; el, Δήλος ; Attic: , Doric: ), near Mykonos, near the centre of the Cyclades archipelago, is one of the most important mythological, historical, and archaeological sites in Greece. The excavations in the island are ...
was an early cult center for both deities, and its status as a trading center made it a springboard for the Egyptian cults to diffuse into Italy. Isis and Serapis were also worshipped at scattered sites in the
Seleucid Empire
The Seleucid Empire (; grc, Βασιλεία τῶν Σελευκιδῶν, ''Basileía tōn Seleukidōn'') was a Greek state in West Asia that existed during the Hellenistic period from 312 BC to 63 BC. The Seleucid Empire was founded by the ...
, the Hellenistic kingdom in the Middle East, as far east as
Iran
Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...
, though they disappeared from the region as the Seleucids lost their eastern territory to the Parthian Empire.
Greeks regarded Egyptian religion as exotic and sometimes bizarre, yet full of ancient wisdom. Like other cults from the eastern regions of the Mediterranean, the cult of Isis attracted Greeks and Romans by playing upon its exotic origins, but the form it took after reaching Greece was heavily Hellenized.
Isis's cult reached Italy and the Roman sphere of influence at some point in the second century BCE. It was one of many cults that were introduced to Rome as the Roman Republic's territory expanded in the last centuries BCE. Authorities in the Republic tried to define which cults were acceptable and which were not, as a way of defining Romanitas, Roman cultural identity amid the cultural changes brought on by Rome's expansion. In Isis's case, shrines and altars to her were set up on the Capitoline Hill, at the heart of the city, by private persons in the early first century BCE. The independence of her cult from the control of Roman authorities made it potentially unsettling to them. In the 50s and 40s BCE, when the crisis of the Roman Republic made many Romans fear that pax deorum, peace among the gods was being disrupted, the Roman Senate destroyed these shrines, although it did not ban Isis from the city outright.
Egyptian cults faced further hostility during the Final War of the Roman Republic (32–30 BCE), when Rome, led by Octavian, the future Roman emperor, emperor Augustus, fought Reign of Cleopatra VII, Egypt under Cleopatra VII. After Octavian's victory, he banned shrines to Isis and Serapis within the ''pomerium'', the city's innermost, sacred boundary, but allowed them in parts of the city outside the ''pomerium'', thus marking Egyptian deities as non-Roman but acceptable to Rome. Despite being temporarily expelled from Rome during the reign of Tiberius (14–37 CE), the Egyptian cults gradually became an accepted part of the Roman religious landscape. The Flavian emperors in the late first century CE treated Serapis and Isis as patrons of their rule in much the same manner as traditional Roman deities such as Jupiter (mythology), Jupiter and Minerva. Even as it was being integrated into Roman culture, Isis's worship developed new features that emphasized its Egyptian background.
The cults also expanded into Rome's western Roman province, provinces, beginning along the Mediterranean coast in early imperial times. At their peak in the late second and early third centuries CE, Isis and Serapis were worshipped in most towns across the western empire, though without much presence in the countryside. Their temples were found from Petra and Palmyra, in the Arabia Petraea, Arabian and Syria (Roman province), Syrian provinces, to Italica in Hispania, Spain and Londinium in Roman Britain, Britain. By this time they were on a comparable footing with native Roman deities.
Roles
Isis's cult, like others in the Greco-Roman world, had no firm dogma, and its beliefs and practices may have stayed only loosely similar as it diffused across the region and evolved over time. Greek aretalogies that praise Isis provide much of the information about these beliefs. Parts of these aretalogies closely resemble ideas in late Egyptian hymns like those at Philae, while other elements are thoroughly Greek. Other information comes from Plutarch (c. 46–120 CE), whose book ''On Isis and Osiris'' interprets the Egyptian deities based on his Middle Platonist philosophy, and from several works of Greek literature, Greek and Latin literature that refer to Isis's worship, especially a novel by Apuleius (c. 125–180 CE) known as ''Metamorphoses'' or ''The Golden Ass'', which ends by describing how the main character has a vision of the goddess and becomes her devotee.
Elaborating upon Isis's role as a wife and mother in the Osiris myth, aretalogies call her the inventor of marriage and parenthood. She was invoked to protect women in childbirth and, in ancient Greek novels such as the ''Ephesian Tale'', to protect their virginity. Some ancient texts called her the patroness of women in general. Her cult may have served to promote women's autonomy in a limited way, with Isis's power and authority serving as a precedent, but in myth she was devoted to, and never fully independent of, her husband and son. The aretalogies show ambiguous attitudes toward women's independence: one says Isis made women equal to men, whereas another says she made women subordinate to their husbands.
Isis was often characterized as a moon goddess, paralleling the solar characteristics of Serapis. She was also seen as a cosmic goddess more generally. Various texts claim she organized the behavior of the sun, moon, and stars, governing time and the seasons which, in turn, guaranteed the fertility of the earth. These texts also credit her with inventing agriculture, establishing laws, and devising or promoting other elements of human society. This idea derives from older Greek traditions about the role of various Greek deities and culture heroes, including Demeter, in establishing civilization.
She also oversaw seas and harbors. Sailors left inscriptions calling upon her to ensure the safety and good fortune of their voyages. In this role she was called ''Isis Pelagia'', "Isis of the Sea", or ''Isis Pharia'', referring to a sail or to the island of Pharos, site of the Lighthouse of Alexandria. This form of Isis, which emerged in Hellenistic times, may have been inspired by Egyptian images of Isis in a barque, as well as by Greek deities who protected seafaring, such as Aphrodite. ''Isis Pelagia'' developed an added significance in Rome. Rome's food supply was dependent on Cura Annonae, grain shipments from its provinces, especially Egypt. Isis therefore guaranteed fertile harvests and protected the ships that carried the resulting food across the seas—and thus ensured the salus, well-being of the empire as a whole. Her protection of the state was said to extend to Rome's armies, much as it was in Ptolemaic Egypt, and she was sometimes called ''Isis Invicta'', "Unconquered Isis". Her roles were so numerous that she came to be called ''myrionymos'', "one with countless names," and ''panthea'', "all-goddess".
Both Plutarch and a later philosopher, Proclus, mentioned a veil of Isis, veiled statue of the Egyptian goddess Neith, whom they conflated with Isis, citing it as an example of her universality and enigmatic wisdom. It bore the words "I am all that has been and is and will be; and no mortal has ever lifted my mantle."
Isis was also said to benefit her followers in the afterlife, which was not much emphasized in Greek and Roman religion. ''The Golden Ass'' and inscriptions left by worshippers of Isis suggest that many of her followers thought she would guarantee them a better afterlife in return for their devotion. They characterized this afterlife inconsistently. Some said they would benefit from Osiris's enlivening water while others expected to sail to the Fortunate Isles of Greek tradition.
As in Egypt, Isis was said to have power over fate, which in traditional Greek religion was a power not even the gods could defy. Valentino Gasparini says this control over destiny binds together Isis's disparate traits. She governs the cosmos, yet she also relieves people of their comparatively trivial misfortunes, and her influence extends into the realm of death, which is "individual and universal at the same time".
Relationships with other deities
![Pompeii - Temple of Isis - Io and Isis - MAN](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Pompeii_-_Temple_of_Isis_-_Io_and_Isis_-_MAN.jpg)
More than a dozen Egyptian deities were worshipped outside Egypt in Hellenistic and Roman times in a series of interrelated cults, though many were fairly minor. Of the most important of these deities, Serapis was closely connected with Isis and often appeared with her in art, but Osiris remained central to her myth and prominent in her rituals. Temples to Isis and Serapis sometimes stood next to each other, but it was rare for a single temple to be dedicated to both. Osiris, as a dead deity unlike the immortal gods of Greece, seemed strange to Greeks and played only a minor role in Egyptian cults in Hellenistic times. In Roman times he became, like Dionysus, a symbol of a joyous afterlife, and the Isis cult increasingly focused on him. Horus, often under the name
Harpocrates
Harpocrates ( grc, Ἁρποκράτης, Phoenician: 𐤇𐤓𐤐𐤊𐤓𐤈, romanized: ḥrpkrṭ, ''harpokrates'') was the god of silence, secrets and confidentiality in the Hellenistic religion developed in Ptolemaic Alexandria (and also ...
, also appeared in Isis's temples as her son by Osiris or Serapis. He absorbed traits from Greek deities such as Apollo and served as a god of the sun and of crops. Another member of the group was Anubis, who was linked to the Greek god Hermes in his Hellenized form Hermanubis. Isis was also sometimes said to have learned her wisdom from, or even be the daughter of, Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing and knowledge, who was known in the Greco-Roman world as Hermes Trismegistus.
Isis also had an extensive network of connections with Greek and Roman deities, as well as some from other cultures. She was not fully integrated into the Greek pantheon, but she was at different times equated with a variety of Greek mythological figures, including Demeter, Aphrodite, or Io (mythology), Io, a human woman who was turned into a cow and chased by the goddess Hera from Greece to Egypt. The cult of Demeter was an especially important influence on Isis's worship after its arrival in Greece. Isis's relationship with women was influenced by her frequent equation with Artemis, who had a dual role as a virgin goddess and a promoter of fertility. Because of Isis's power over fate, she was linked with the Greek and Roman personifications of fortune, Tyche and Fortuna. At Byblos in Phoenicia in the second millennium BCE, Hathor had been worshipped as a form of the local goddess Baalat Gebal; Isis gradually replaced Hathor there in the course of the first millennium BCE. In Noricum in central Europe, Isis was syncretized with the local tutelary deity Noreia, and at Petra she may have been linked with the Arab goddess al-Uzza. The Roman author Tacitus said "Isis" of the Suebi, Isis was worshipped by the Suebi, a Germanic people living outside the empire, but he may have mistaken a Germanic deities, Germanic goddess for Isis because, like her, the goddess was symbolized by a ship.
Many of the aretalogies include long lists of goddesses with whom Isis was linked. These texts treat all the deities they list as forms of her, suggesting that in the eyes of the authors she was a summodeistic being: the one goddess for the entire oecumene, civilized world. In the Roman religious world, many deities were referred to as "one" or "unique" in religious texts like these. At the same time, Hellenistic philosophers frequently saw the unifying, abstract principle of the cosmos as divine. Many of them reinterpreted traditional religions to fit their concept of this highest being, as Plutarch did with Isis and Osiris. In ''The Golden Ass'' Isis says "my one person manifests the aspects of all the gods and goddesses" and that she is "worshipped by all the world under different forms, with various rites, and by manifold names," although the Egyptians and Nubians use her true name, Isis. But when she lists the forms in which various Mediterranean peoples worship her, she mentions only female deities. Greco-Roman deities were firmly divided by gender, thus limiting how universal Isis could truly be. One aretalogy avoids this problem by calling Isis and Serapis, who was often said to subsume many male gods, the two "unique" deities. Similarly, both Plutarch and Apuleius limit Isis's importance by treating her as ultimately subordinate to Osiris. The claim that she was unique was meant to emphasize her greatness more than to make a precise theological statement.
Iconography
Images of Isis made outside Egypt were Hellenistic in style, like many of the images of her made in Egypt in Hellenistic and Roman times. The attributes she bore varied widely. She sometimes wore the Hathoric cow-horn headdress, but Greeks and Romans reduced its size and often interpreted it as a crescent moon. She could also wear headdresses incorporating leaves, flowers, or ears of grain. Other common traits included corkscrew locks of hair and an elaborate mantle tied in a large knot over the breasts, which originated in ordinary Egyptian clothing but was treated as a symbol of the goddess outside Egypt. In her hands she could carry a uraeus or a sistrum, both taken from her Egyptian iconography, or a situla, a vessel used for libations of water or milk that were performed in Isis's cult.
As Isis-Fortuna or Isis-Tyche she held a rudder, representing control of fate, in her right hand and a cornucopia, standing for abundance, in her left. As Isis Pharia she wore a cloak that billowed behind her like a sail, and as Isis Lactans, she nursed Harpocrates. At times she was shown resting a foot on a celestial sphere, representing her control of the cosmos. The diverse imagery sprang from her varied roles; as Robert Steven Bianchi says, "Isis could represent anything to anyone and could be represented in any way imaginable."
File:Estatuas del Canope de Villa Adriana 01.JPG, alt=Bust of a woman set in a niche, Bust of Isis-Sothis-Demeter from Hadrian's Villa, second century CE
File:Detail of Persephone-Isis, Statue group of Persephone (as Isis) and Pluto (as Serapis), from the Sanctuary of the Egyptian Gods at Gortyna, mid-2nd century AD, Heraklion Archaeological Museum (30391383045).jpg, alt=Life-size statue of a woman, Statue of Isis-Persephone with corkscrew locks of hair and a sistrum, from Gortyna, second century CE
File:Isis-Aphrodite Petit Palais ADUT01910.jpg, Isis-Aphrodite, polychrome terracotta, Alexandria
Alexandria ( or ; ar, ٱلْإِسْكَنْدَرِيَّةُ ; grc-gre, Αλεξάνδρεια, Alexándria) is the second largest city in Egypt, and the largest city on the Mediterranean coast. Founded in by Alexander the Great, Alexandria ...
, first century CE
File:Isis-Fortuna Walters 54751.jpg, alt=Metal figurine of a woman, Bronze figurine of Isis-Fortuna with a cornucopia and a rudder, first century CE
File:MANNapoli 8836 Isis Fortune painting.jpg, alt=Fresco of a woman standing with her foot on a blue sphere, Fresco of Isis wearing a crescent headdress and resting her foot on a celestial sphere, first century CE
File:Casa degli Amorini Dorati. Fresco. 09.JPG, Anubis
Anubis (; grc, Ἄνουβις), also known as Inpu, Inpw, Jnpw, or Anpu in Ancient Egyptian () is the god of death, mummification, embalming, the afterlife, cemeteries, tombs, and the Underworld, in ancient Egyptian religion, usually depict ...
, Harpocrates
Harpocrates ( grc, Ἁρποκράτης, Phoenician: 𐤇𐤓𐤐𐤊𐤓𐤈, romanized: ḥrpkrṭ, ''harpokrates'') was the god of silence, secrets and confidentiality in the Hellenistic religion developed in Ptolemaic Alexandria (and also ...
, Isis and Serapis
Serapis or Sarapis is a Graeco-Egyptian deity. The cult of Serapis was promoted during the third century BC on the orders of Greek Pharaoh Ptolemy I Soter of the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt as a means to unify the Greeks and Egyptians in his r ...
, fresco from Pompeii
Worship
Adherents and priests
Like most cults of the time, the Isis cult did not require its devotees to worship Isis religious exclusivism, exclusively, and their level of commitment probably varied greatly. Some devotees of Isis served as priests in a variety of cults and underwent several initiations dedicated to different deities. Nevertheless, many emphasized their strong devotion to her, and some considered her the focus of their lives. They were among the very few religious groups in the Greco-Roman world to have a distinctive name for themselves, loosely equivalent to "Jew" or "Christian", that might indicate they defined themselves by their religious affiliation. However, the word—''Isiacus'' or "Isiac"—was rarely used.
Isiacs were a very small proportion of the Roman Empire's population, but they came from every social class in ancient Rome, level of society, from slavery in ancient Rome, slaves and freedmen to high officials and members of the imperial family. Ancient accounts imply that Isis was popular with lower social classes, providing a possible reason why authorities in the Roman Republic, troubled by struggles between classes, regarded her cult with suspicion. Women were more strongly represented in the Isis cult than in most Greco-Roman cults, and in imperial times, they could serve as priestesses in many of the same positions in the hierarchy as their male counterparts. Women make up much less than half of the Isiacs known from inscriptions and are rarely listed among the higher ranks of priests, but because women are underrepresented in Roman inscriptions, their participation may have been greater than is recorded. Several Roman writers accused Isis's cult of encouraging promiscuity among women. Jaime Alvar suggests the cult attracted male suspicion simply because it gave women a venue to act outside their husbands' control.
Priests of Isis were known for their distinctive shaven heads and white linen clothes, both characteristics drawn from Egyptian priesthoods and their requirements of ritual purity. A temple of Isis could include several ranks of priests, as well as various cultic associations and specialized duties for lay devotees. There is no evidence of a hierarchy overseeing multiple temples, and each temple may well have functioned independently of the others.
Temples and daily rites
![Isiac water ceremony](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Isiac_water_ceremony.jpg)
Temples to Egyptian deities outside Egypt, such as the Red Basilica in Pergamon, the Temple of Isis at Pompeii, or the Iseum Campense in Rome, were built in a largely Greco-Roman style but, like Egyptian temples, were surrounded by large courts enclosed by walls. They were decorated with Egyptian-themed artwork, sometimes including antiquities imported from Egypt. Their layout was more elaborate than that of traditional Roman temples and included rooms for housing priests and for various ritual functions, with a cult statue of the goddess in a secluded sanctuary. Unlike Egyptian cult images, Isis's Hellenistic and Roman statues were life-size or larger. The daily ritual still entailed dressing the statue in elaborate clothes each morning and offering it libations, but in contrast with Egyptian tradition, the priests allowed ordinary devotees of Isis to see the cult statue during the morning ritual, pray to it directly, and sing hymns before it.
Another object of veneration in these temples was water, which was treated as a symbol of the waters of the Nile. Isis temples built in Hellenistic times often included underground cisterns that stored this Sacred waters, sacred water, raising and lowering the water level in imitation of the Nile flood. Many Roman temples instead used a pitcher of water that was worshipped as a cult image or manifestation of Osiris.
Personal worship
Roman ''lararia'', or household shrines, contained statuettes of the ''penates'', a varied group of protective deities chosen based on the preferences of the members of the household. Isis and other Egyptian deities were found in ''lararia'' in Italy from the late first century BCE to the beginning of the fourth century CE.
The cult asked both ritual and moral purity of its devotees, periodically requiring ritual baths or days-long periods of sexual abstinence. Isiacs sometimes displayed their piety on irregular occasions, singing Isis's praises in the streets or, as a form of penance, declaring their misdeeds in public.
Some temples to Greek deities, including Serapis, practiced incubation (ritual), incubation, in which worshippers slept in a temple hoping that the god would appear to them in a dream and give them advice or heal their ailments. Some scholars believe that this practice took place in Isis's temples, but there is no firm evidence that it did. Isis was, however, thought to communicate through dreams in other circumstances, including to call worshippers to undergo initiation.
Initiation
Some temples of Isis performed Greco-Roman mysteries, mystery rites to religious initiation rites, initiate new members of the cult. These rites were claimed to be of Egyptian origin and may have drawn on the secretive tendencies of some Egyptian rites. However, they were mainly based on Greek mystery cults, especially the Eleusinian mysteries dedicated to Demeter, colored with Egyptian elements. Although mystery rites are among the best-known elements of Isis's Greco-Roman cult, they are only known to have been performed in Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor. By giving the devotee a dramatic, mystical experience of the goddess, initiations added emotional intensity to the process of joining her following.
''The Golden Ass'', in describing how the protagonist joins Isis's cult, gives the only detailed account of Isiac initiation. Apuleius's motives for writing about the cult and the accuracy of his fictionalized description are much debated. But the account is broadly consistent with other evidence about initiations, and scholars rely heavily on it when studying the subject.
Ancient mystery rites used a variety of intense experiences, such as nocturnal darkness interrupted by bright light and loud music and noise, to overwhelm their senses and give them an intense religious experience that felt like direct contact with the god they devoted themselves to. Apuleius's protagonist, Lucius, undergoes a series of initiations, though only the first is described in detail. After entering the innermost part of Isis's temple at night, he says, "I came to the boundary of death and, having trodden on the threshold of Proserpina, I travelled through all the elements and returned. In the middle of the night I saw the sun flashing with bright light, I came face to face with the gods below and the gods above and paid reverence to them from close at hand." This cryptic description suggests that the initiate's symbolic journey to the world of the dead was likened to Osiris's rebirth, as well as to Ra's journey through the underworld in Egyptian myth, possibly implying that Isis brought the initiate back from death as she did her husband.
Festivals
Roman calendars listed the two most important
festivals
A festival is an event ordinarily celebrated by a community and centering on some characteristic aspect or aspects of that community and its religion or cultures. It is often marked as a local or national holiday, mela, or eid. A festival co ...
of Isis as early as the first century CE. The first festival was the
Navigium Isidis
The ''Navigium Isidis'' or ''Isidis Navigium'' (trans. ''the vessel of Isis'') was an annual ancient Roman religious festival in honor of the goddess Isis, held on March 5. The festival outlived Christian persecution by Theodosius (391) and Ar ...
in March, which celebrated Isis's influence over the sea and served as a prayer for the safety of seafarers and, eventually, of the Roman people and their leaders. It consisted of an elaborate procession, including Isiac priests and devotees with a wide variety of costumes and sacred emblems, carrying a model ship from the local Isis temple to the sea or to a nearby river. The other was the Isia (festival), Isia in late October and early November. Like its Egyptian forerunner, the Khoiak festival, the Isia included a ritual reenactment of Isis's search for Osiris, followed by jubilation when the god's body was found. Several more minor festivals were dedicated to Isis, including the Pelusia in late March that may have celebrated the birth of Harpocrates, and the Lychnapsia, or lamp-lit festival, that celebrated Isis's own birth on August 12.
Festivals of Isis and other polytheistic deities were celebrated throughout the fourth century CE, despite the Christianization of the Roman Empire, growth of Christianity in that era and the Persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire, persecution of pagans that intensified toward the end of the century. The Isia was celebrated at least as late as 417 CE, and the Navigium Isidis lasted well into the sixth century. Increasingly, the religious meaning of all Roman festivals was forgotten or ignored even as the customs continued. In some cases, these customs became part of the combined classical and Christian culture of the Early Middle Ages.
Possible influence on Christianity
![Figure-6-Fresco-of-Isis-lactans-at-Karanis-fourth-century-CE-Karanis-Tran-Tam-Tinh](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dc/Figure-6-Fresco-of-Isis-lactans-at-Karanis-fourth-century-CE-Karanis-Tran-Tam-Tinh.png)
A contentious question about Isis is whether her cult influenced Christianity. Some Isiac customs may have been among the pagan religious practices that were Interpretatio Christiana, incorporated into Christian traditions as the Roman Empire was Christianized. Andreas Alföldi, for instance, argued in the 1930s that the medieval Carnival festival, in which a model boat was carried, developed from the Navigium Isidis.
Much attention focuses on whether traits of Christianity were borrowed from pagan mystery cults, including that of Isis. The more devoted members of Isis's cult made a personal commitment to a deity they regarded as superior to others, as Christians did. Both Christianity and the Isis cult had an initiation rite: the mysteries for Isis, baptism in Christianity. One of the mystery cults' shared themes—a god whose dying-and-rising deity, death and resurrection may be connected with the individual worshipper's well-being in the afterlife—resembles the central theme of Christianity. The suggestion that Christianity's basic beliefs were taken from mystery cults has provoked heated debate for more than 200 years. In response to these controversies, both Hugh Bowden and Jaime Alvar, scholars who study ancient mystery cults, suggest that similarities between Christianity and the mystery cults were not produced by direct borrowing of ideas but by their common background: the Greco-Roman culture in which they all developed.
Similarities between Isis and Mary, the mother of Jesus, have also been scrutinized. They have been subject to controversy between Protestant Christianity, Protestant Christians and the Catholic Church, as many Protestants have argued that Catholic
veneration of Mary
Marian devotions are external pious practices directed to the person of Mary, mother of God, by members of certain Christian traditions. They are performed in Catholicism, High Church Lutheranism, Anglo-Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Orient ...
is a remnant of paganism. The classicist R. E. Witt saw Isis as the "great forerunner" of Mary. He suggested that converts to Christianity who had formerly worshipped Isis would have seen Mary in much the same terms as their traditional goddess. He pointed out that the two had several spheres of influence in common, such as agriculture and the protection of sailors. He compared Mary's title "Mother of God" to Isis's epithet "mother of the god", and Mary's "queen of heaven" to Isis's "queen of heaven (antiquity), queen of heaven". Stephen Benko, a historian of early Christianity, argues that devotion to Mary was deeply influenced by the worship of several goddesses, not just Isis. In contrast, John McGuckin, a church historian, says that Mary absorbed superficial traits from these goddesses, such as iconography, but the fundamentals of her cult were thoroughly Christian.
Images of Isis with Horus in her lap are often suggested as an influence on the Madonna (art), iconography of Mary, particularly images of the Nursing Madonna, Mary nursing the infant Jesus, as images of nursing women were rare in the ancient Mediterranean world outside Egypt. Vincent Tran Tam Tinh points out that the latest images of Isis nursing Horus date to the fourth century CE, while the earliest images of Mary nursing Jesus date to the seventh century CE. Sabrina Higgins, drawing on his study, argues that if there is a connection between the iconographies of Isis and Mary, it is limited to images from Egypt. In contrast, Thomas F. Mathews and Norman Muller think Isis's pose in late antique panel paintings influenced several types of Marian icons, inside and outside Egypt. Elizabeth Bolman says these early Egyptian images of Mary nursing Jesus were meant to emphasize his divinity, much as images of nursing goddesses did in ancient Egyptian iconography. Higgins argues that such similarities prove that images of Isis influenced those of Mary, but not that Christians deliberately adopted Isis's iconography or other elements of her cult.
Influence in later cultures
![Auguste Puttemans Isis 2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/41/Auguste_Puttemans_Isis_2.jpg)
The memory of Isis survived the extinction of her worship. Like the Greeks and Romans, many modern Europeans have regarded ancient Egypt as the home of profound and often mystical wisdom, and this wisdom has often been linked with Isis. Giovanni Boccaccio's biography of Isis in his 1374 work ''De mulieribus claris'', based on classical sources, treated her as a historical queen who taught skills of civilization to humankind. Some Renaissance thinkers elaborated this perspective on Isis. Annio da Viterbo, in the 1490s, claimed Isis and Osiris had civilized Italy before Greece, thus drawing a direct connection between his home country and Egypt. The Borgia Apartments painted for Annio's patron, Pope Alexander VI, incorporate this same theme in their illustrated rendition of the Osiris myth.
Western esotericism has often made reference to Isis. Two Roman esoteric texts used the mythic motif in which Isis passes down secret knowledge to Horus. In ''Kore Kosmou'', she teaches him wisdom passed down from Hermes Trismegistus, and in the early alchemical text ''Isis the Prophetess to Her Son Horus'', she gives him alchemical recipes. Early modern esoteric literature, which saw Hermes Trismegistus as an Egyptian sage and frequently made use of texts attributed to his hand, sometimes referred to Isis as well. In a different vein, Apuleius's description of Isiac initiation has influenced the practices of many secret societies. Jean Terrasson's 1731 novel ''Life of Sethos, Sethos'' used Apuleius as inspiration for a fanciful Egyptian initiation rite dedicated to Isis. It was imitated by actual rituals in various Masonic and Masonic-inspired societies during the eighteenth century, as well as in other literary works, most notably Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 1791 opera ''The Magic Flute''.
From the Renaissance on, the veil of Isis, veiled statue of Isis that Plutarch and Proclus mentioned was interpreted as a personification of nature, based on a passage in the works of Macrobius in the fifth century CE that equated Isis with nature. Authors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ascribed a wide variety of meanings to this image. Isis represented nature as the mother of all things, as a set of truths waiting to be unveiled by science, as a symbol of the pantheist concept of an anonymous, enigmatic deity who was immanent within nature, or as an awe-inspiring sublime (philosophy), sublime power that could be experienced through ecstatic mystery rites. In the dechristianization of France during the French Revolution, she served as an alternative to traditional Christianity: a symbol that could represent nature, modern scientific wisdom, and a link to the pre-Christian past. For these reasons, Isis's image appeared in artwork sponsored by the French First Republic, revolutionary government, such as the Fontaine de la Régénération, and by the First French Empire. The metaphor of Isis's veil continued to circulate through the nineteenth century. Helena Blavatsky, the founder of the esoteric Theosophy (Blavatskian), Theosophical tradition, titled her 1877 book on Theosophy ''Isis Unveiled'', implying that it would reveal spiritual truths about nature that science could not.
Among modern Egyptians, Isis was used as a national symbol during the Pharaonism movement of the 1920s and 1930s, as Egypt gained independence from history of Egypt under the British, British rule. In works such as Mohamed Naghi's painting in the parliament of Egypt, titled ''Egypt's Renaissance'', and Tawfiq al-Hakim's play ''The Return of the Spirit'', Isis symbolizes the revival of the nation. A sculpture by Mahmoud Mokhtar, also called ''Egypt's Renaissance'', plays upon the motif of Isis's removing her veil.
Isis is found frequently in works of fiction, such as a Isis (DC Comics), superhero franchise, and her name and image appear in places as disparate as advertisements and personal names. The name ''Isidoros'', meaning "gift of Isis" in Greek, survived in Christianity despite its pagan origins, giving rise to the English name Isidore and its variants. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, "Isis" itself became a popular feminine Isis (given name), given name.
Isis continues to appear in modern esoteric and modern pagan, pagan belief systems. The concept of a single goddess incarnating all feminine divine powers, partly inspired by Apuleius, became a widespread theme in literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Influential groups and figures in esotericism, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late nineteenth century and Dion Fortune in the 1930s, adopted this all-encompassing goddess into their belief systems and called her Isis. This conception of Isis influenced the Great Goddess found in many forms of contemporary witchcraft. Today, Kemetism, reconstructions of ancient Egyptian religion, such as Kemetic Orthodoxy or the Church of the Eternal Source, include Isis among the deities they revere. An eclectic religious organization focused on female divinity calls itself the Fellowship of Isis because, in the words of one of its priestesses, M. Isidora Forrest, Isis can be "all Goddesses to all people".
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Further reading
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* Vol. I: ; Vol. II: ; Vol. III: ; Vol. IV: .
* Vol. I: ; Vol. II: ; Vol. III: .
* A–D: ; E–K: ; L–Q: ; R–Z: .
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External links
"Isis and the Name of Ra" as translated by A. G. McDowell.
as translated by Frank Cole Babbitt.
as translated by A. S. Kline.
{{Authority control
Isis,
Middle Eastern goddesses
Egyptian goddesses
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Roman goddesses
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Fertility goddesses
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Hellenistic Egyptian deities
Life-death-rebirth goddesses
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Queens of Heaven (antiquity)
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