Isis

Isis

Wife of Osiris, mother of Horus, the greatest magician of the gods

The goddess who put Osiris back together: sister and wife of the murdered king, mother of Horus, the mourner whose cry raises the dead and the magician who knows the secret name of Ra. Her own name means “throne”, and she wears the throne-sign on her head; the king sat in her lap as a child sits in his mother's. Beginning as a figure in the royal funerary texts, she absorbed Hathor and most of the other goddesses of Egypt and, under the Ptolemies and the Roman emperors, went out to the whole Mediterranean, with temples at Pompeii, Rome and London. Her sanctuary at Philae was the last in Egypt to close, in the sixth century AD.

Family

Parents

Geb Pyramid Texts

the earth
Nut Pyramid Texts; Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride

the sky; born on the fourth of the five added days, in the marshes, says Plutarch

Consort

Osiris Pyramid Texts; Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride

her brother; Plutarch says they loved each other already in the womb

Siblings

Seth The Contendings of Horus and Seth; Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride

her brother and enemy; in the Contendings she harpoons him and then, as her brother, lets him go
Nephthys Pyramid Texts; Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride

her sister, who mourned Osiris beside her; the two kites at the bier

Children

Horus Pyramid Texts; Great Hymn to Osiris

conceived from the dead Osiris; hidden and reared in the marshes of Chemmis

Foster son

Anubis Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride

Nephthys's child by Osiris, whom she found and raised as her guardian

Ancestor

Ra Papyrus Turin 1993

her great-grandfather in the Ennead; she tricked him out of his secret name

Her stories

The search

When the chest with Osiris's body was thrown into the Nile, Isis cut a lock of her hair, put on mourning and wandered in search of it, asking everyone she met, even the children, who had seen it. She found it at Byblos, built into a pillar of the king's palace, and brought it back to Egypt in a boat.

Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 14–16; the lament of Isis and Nephthys was still sung in the Ptolemaic temples (Papyrus Bremner-Rhind)

The kite over the body

Isis and her sister Nephthys took the shape of kites and shrieked over the dead god. With her wings Isis made a wind to bring breath to his nostrils, and she roused him enough to conceive his heir; the child she bore was Horus. From this scene the two goddesses stand at the head and foot of every coffin.

Great Hymn to Osiris (Louvre C 286); Pyramid Texts, Utterance 366 (§ 632)

The child in the marshes

Isis hid Horus from Seth in the papyrus thickets of Chemmis, in the Delta, and went out to beg for food. One evening she found the child dying of a scorpion's sting. Her cry stopped the sun's boat in the sky; Thoth came down with the spells that drew out the poison, and every sufferer stung since is healed by the same words.

Metternich Stela (Thirtieth Dynasty), spells against poison; the stela was itself a cure: water poured over it was drunk

The secret name of Ra

Isis wanted to be as powerful as Ra. She gathered the spittle that dribbled from the old god's mouth, kneaded it with earth into a snake and left it on his path. When it bit him, she offered to cure him only if he told her his true name, and at last he let it pass from his body into hers.

Papyrus Turin 1993 (Ramesside), a spell for scorpion sting in which the reciter speaks as Isis

The widow and the herdsman

At the trial between Horus and Seth, Isis was barred from the court's island; she bribed the ferryman with a gold ring, came as a beautiful widow and told Seth that a stranger was robbing her son of his father's cattle. Seth cried that it was an outrage, and so gave judgement against himself.

The Contendings of Horus and Seth, Papyrus Chester Beatty I (Twentieth Dynasty)

The throne

Mourner, mother and magician

Her name, Aset in Egyptian, is the word for a seat or throne, and the throne is what she wears on her head. The oldest sense of her is probably just that: the king's seat, personified as the mother who holds him. She is there in the Pyramid Texts of about 2350 BC as one of the two sisters who search for the dead Osiris, weep over him and gather his bones, and as the mother of Horus, who takes his father's place. The three roles never left her. Every widow's lament was hers, every sick child was Horus in the marshes, every mummy was Osiris under her wings.

Her weapon is speech. Egyptian magic, heka, was a legitimate power that the gods themselves used, and Isis was “great of magic” beyond all of them. The spells against scorpions and snakes copied on stelae and papyri from the New Kingdom to the Roman period are put into her mouth, and in the best known of them she outwits the sun-god and learns his hidden name. She has an amulet of her own, the tyet, a knot like an ankh with its arms folded down, cut in red jasper and laid at the mummy's throat. Its spell, Book of the Dead 156, says in paraphrase that Isis has her blood, her power and her magic, and that the amulet guards this Great One against wrongdoers.

The mother of the king

Horus in the marshes, Hathor's horns

In the story she is the widow who keeps the kingdom for her son. She hides the infant Horus in the papyrus thickets of Chemmis, near Buto, nurses him, cures him of scorpion sting and fever, and when he is grown argues his case before the gods; in the Contendings of Horus and Seth she is the cleverest person at the trial and once its victim, when her son in a rage cuts off her head; later tellings, Plutarch's among them, have Thoth give her a cow's. The image of Isis seated with Horus at her breast is among the commonest in Egyptian art, cast in bronze by the thousand in the Late Period, and the Christians of Egypt did not have to look far for the type of the Virgin and Child.

From the New Kingdom she takes over Hathor's crown, cow's horns round the sun disc, and with it Hathor's place as nurse of the king and lady of the sky; on the walls of Abydos and Dendera the two goddesses can be told apart only by their captions. By the Ptolemaic period she has the great temples: Philae, on an island at the First Cataract, where the Nubians came to worship her too, and Behbeit el-Hagar in the Delta, begun in dark granite by the last native kings.

Isis in Rome

From Philae to the Thames

Greek settlers in Egypt took her up early. Herodotus called her Demeter; Egyptian merchants were allowed a temple of hers at the Piraeus in 333 BC, and Alexandria's sailors and merchants carried her to Delos and Italy; Pompeii had a temple of Isis before it had a Roman colony. In Rome her altars were pulled down more than once under the Republic and Augustus kept her outside the sacred boundary, but Caligula built her a temple on the Campus Martius, and by the second century AD there were shrines of Isis from Nubia to London. The Greek hymns called aretalogies make her speak for herself: I am Isis, ruler of every land; I gave laws to mankind; I separated the earth from the sky; I showed the stars their paths. Apuleius, in the last book of the Metamorphoses, has her rise from the sea in a black mantle sewn with stars and tell the hero that she is the one goddess whom the whole world worships under different names.

She outlasted the other gods. The last dated hieroglyphic inscription in Egypt was cut in her temple at Philae in AD 394, and the priests there were still serving her when Justinian's officers closed it, about AD 535, and turned it into a church. By then the shape she had given to the grieving mother and the nursing mother had already passed into the new religion.