Isis

Myth and origin

Isis first appears in the Pyramid Texts (Old Kingdom, c. 2400-2300 BCE), the oldest religious writings known, where she protects the dead king and helps to assemble his body for resurrection. Her name is written with the hieroglyph of a throne, and her original function may have been the personified seat of pharaonic power. The Coffin Texts (Middle Kingdom, c. 2000 BCE) and the Book of the Dead (New Kingdom, c. 1550 BCE onward) develop her role enormously. The fullest narrative version of her myth, however, survives only in Plutarch's Greek treatise On Isis and Osiris (c. 100 CE), composed for a friend who had been initiated into her mysteries.

According to Plutarch and the Egyptian sources he draws on, the god-king Osiris ruled Egypt with his sister-wife Isis, civilising humanity. His jealous brother Seth tricked him into a coffin and threw it into the Nile; the chest drifted to Byblos in Lebanon, where it became part of a tree later cut for a palace pillar. Isis travelled to retrieve it, brought Osiris back to Egypt, but Seth seized the body and dismembered it into fourteen (or sixteen, or forty-two) pieces, scattering them across Egypt. Isis searched and assembled the parts—all but the phallus, which she fashioned anew—and through her magical knowledge revived Osiris long enough to conceive Horus. She then hid in the Delta marshes at Khemmis to raise her son in safety.

Attributes and stories

You recognise Isis by the throne-hieroglyph headdress, the sun disk between cow horns (after she absorbed Hathor's iconography), her great wings spread in protection, the tyet or "Isis knot" (a looped amulet resembling an ankh with arms lowered), and the sistrum rattle used in her worship. She is often depicted nursing the infant Horus, an image so powerful it has been argued (with caveats) to have influenced Christian iconography of the Madonna and Child. Her great temple at Philae, on an island in the Nile near Aswan, was the last functioning Egyptian temple, closed by Justinian only in 537 CE—nearly two centuries after Christianity became the imperial religion.

Her narratives emphasise her magical mastery (heka). The story of how she learned Ra's secret name by tricking him with a serpent of his own spittle made her the most powerful magician in the pantheon. She protected her infant Horus from Seth's assassins through countless spells, and the so-called "Cippi of Horus" (small magical stelae from the Late Period onward) preserve her healing incantations. She is the mistress of grief: her lamentations over Osiris became the model for Egyptian funeral mourning. The "Tale of the Two Brothers" and dozens of magical papyri preserve her speeches and spells. Her cult expanded with Ptolemaic Egypt, and Iseum temples appeared in Rome, Pompeii, Londinium, and across the empire. Apuleius' Golden Ass (Book 11) describes her apparition to her initiate Lucius and her self-revelation as the goddess of a thousand names.

Modern reception

In Jungian terms, Isis is the great mother archetype in her most integrated form: nurturing, sorrowful, magically powerful, and capable of remaking what death has dismembered. Erich Neumann's The Great Mother (1955) gives her extensive treatment. Marie-Louise von Franz traced the Isis-Osiris myth as a paradigm of integration. R. T. Rundle Clark's Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt (1959) and Jan Assmann's The Mind of Egypt (2002) provide the modern Egyptological framework. Esoteric reception is enormous: from the late eighteenth century, Western occultism (Cagliostro, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the Fellowship of Isis founded 1976) has placed her at the centre of operative magic.

Astrologically, Isis is associated with the star Sirius (Sothis), whose heliacal rising marked the New Year and the flooding of the Nile, and with the Moon in its maternal aspect. The asteroid 42 Isis (discovered 1856) carries her name. Her affinities reach toward Cancer as the sign of nurturance and toward Virgo as the celestial mother. In contemporary goddess spirituality she is invoked for healing, grief work, fertility, and the magical arts. The mythological deity test can show whether she is presently calling.

Symbolic depth

In the tarot, Isis corresponds most directly to The High Priestess (Arcanum II)—the veiled goddess between the pillars who guards the hidden book—and to The Empress (III) as the universal mother. The World (XXI) carries her cosmic completeness, the goddess who has gathered all pieces. The Queen of Cups speaks her sorrow and healing. On the Kabbalistic Tree of Life she resonates with Binah, the supernal mother, and with Da'ath as the keeper of magical knowledge.

Symbolically, Isis teaches that love is stronger than dismemberment. What death scatters, the loving and magically skilled can gather, name, and revive. Her search for the pieces of her beloved is the work of every grieving lover and every soul-maker. Her hidden raising of Horus in the marshes models the necessary protection of new life in dangerous circumstances. Her shadow is the mother whose magic cannot let the dead truly go, or the protector whose secrecy isolates. Working with her invites you to gather what has been scattered in your own life and to trust the slow magic of devotion. Continue with Osiris, Horus, and Hathor, or return to the main glossary.

Also known as

• Aset
• Eset
• Isis Myrionymos
• Stella Maris
• Mut-Netjer