Category Archives: Isis & Io

Is Isis a Virgin Goddess?

Seen this about a million times? Yeah, me, too.

It’s that time of year when we (once again) see all those articles comparing the Divine Mother Mary with the Divine Mother Isis, followed by either outrage or approbation, depending on who’s doing the writing.

Recently, in relation to this, a friend of this blog asked a very excellent question. It had to do with Isis’ status as a Virgin Goddess. Basically, is She or isn’t She? She is often compared with the famously Virgin Mary, and the images of the two Goddesses, nursing Their holy babes, are strikingly similar. And then there’s all of this.

Well, as is often the way with Goddesses, the answer is both no and yes.

Art by A-gnosis; see more work here.

We’re all pretty familiar with the sexual relations between Isis and Osiris. All the way back to the Pyramid Texts we hear about it, rather explicitly we might add. Pyramid Text 366 says, “Your [Osiris] sister Isis comes to You rejoicing for love of You. You have placed Her on your phallus and Your seed issues into Her…” Plutarch, in the version of the story he recorded, tells us that Isis and Osiris were so in love with each other that They even made love while still within the womb of Their Great Mother Nuet. And, of course, we have the sacred story of how Isis collected the pieces of the body of murdered-and-dismembered Osiris, all except the phallus. Crafting a replacement of gold, the flesh of the Gods, She was able to arouse Her Beloved sufficient for the conception of Horus. The mourning songs of Isis and Nephthys have Her longing for His love. The priestess, in the Goddessform of Isis, sings that “fire is in Me for love of Thee” and She calls Him Lord of Love and Lord of Passion. She pleads, “Lie Thou with Thy sister Isis, remove Thou the pain that is in Her body.” (For more on the Songs or Lamentations, go here.)

So, is that all there is to it? Isis is not a virgin?

Well, not quite. Because Isis is a Goddess.

Isis is the Goddess of 10,000 Names and 10,000 Forms. Among those forms are the sexual Lover of Osiris and the Mother of Horus. Among Her many Names are syncretisms with famously virginal Goddesses such as Artemis, Hekate, and Athena, as well as heroines such as Io, a virgin priestess of Hera (a Goddess Who Herself renews Her virginity on the regular). Isis is identified with both Demeter the Mother and Persephone the Kore, the Young Girl, Who were sometimes seen as a single unit, Mother-Daughter, containing All in Themselves. Goddesses can be many things, all at once, without any contradiction—or perhaps with every contradiction, which is one of the ways of Goddesses.

Perhaps no text shows us these Divine Feminine contradictions/not-contradictions as clearly as “The Thunder, Perfect Mind,” a text found among the Nag Hammadi texts. It is a long poem in the voice of a Feminine Divine Power that some scholars have linked to Isis; or at least that Her worship influenced the content of the text. Could be, but in my opinion, the Divine Speaker may be better understood as Sophia—with Whom Isis is also identified. The Coptic (late Egyptian) manuscript from which the text comes is dated to roughly 350 CE. Here’s a brief excerpt from this amazing work:

For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the mother and the daughter. I am the members of my mother. I am the barren one and many are her sons. I am she whose wedding is great, and I have not taken a husband.

The Thunder, Perfect Mind

Clearly, Isis is identified with Virgin Goddesses throughout the Mediterranean world. And it is not at all unusual for such Goddesses to be both virginal and associated with fertility. What about Egyptian sources?

The ancient Egyptians were not quite so concerned with virgins—by which I mean, in this case, a young person who has not yet had sex—as were the Greeks and some other Mediterranean peoples. For instance, there was no requirement that young women, or young men for that matter, be sexually inexperienced when they married. Many young women probably were—particularly those who were married very young to older husbands. But prior to marriage, young people might engage relatively freely with each other. After marriage, sexual exclusivity with demanded, especially for women. The penalties for non-compliance could be very harsh, especially for women.

The Two Sisters

This is not to say that Egyptian virginity was not valued or even required under certain circumstances. The text that included the lamentation songs of Isis and Nephthys noted above specifies that the priestesses taking the roles of Isis and Nephthys be “pure of body and virgin” and also that they are to have their body hair removed, wigs on their heads, tambourines in their hands, and the names of Isis and Nephthys inscribed on their arms.

This text, one of very few we have, is from the Ptolemaic period, when Egypt had been influenced by Greek rule. I wonder whether virginity would have been considered necessary earlier. Perhaps the priestesses would have only had to abstain from sex for a period of time before their ritual service. We know that people serving in Egyptian temples had to abstain from sex for a time (at least a day, often a number of days) as part of their purification. But they weren’t virgins.

Ankhnesneferibre, God’s Wife of Amun

The God’s Wife of Amun, the highest of high priestesses and usually a female relation of the king, was virgin for life. Beginning in the 2nd Intermediate Period, the position of the God’s Wife gained a great deal of power, eventually becoming second only to the king. Interestingly, it was an “Isis”—Iset, the virgin daughter of Ramesses VI—who began the tradition of the God’s Wife being celibate. Later, in the Roman period, some Roman priestesses of Isis maintained lifelong virginity. And we know that the Roman Isiacs might maintain a 10-day period of pre-ritual chastity known as the Castimonium Isidis or Chastity of Isis.

Isis Herself is called the Great Virgin in one of the Egyptian hymns to Osiris (I believe it is from the Isis Chapel at Abydos; still checking into it.) In Egyptian, this would is Hunet Weret. Hunet is the word for girl or maiden, weret is the feminine form of great. Hunet is also the name for the pupil of the eye and is connected to the Hermetic treatise known as the Kore Kosmou, the “Virgin of the World.” You can read about those maidenly connections here. (And read about the Kore Kosmou here, here, and here. )Just like Greek parthenos, hunet could mean a virgin, a girl, a maiden, or just youthful. And all Egyptian Goddesses are forever young. A young boy or youth is hunu.

Parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction), was not unknown in Egypt, either. The First Creators in many Egyptian myths, such as the God Atum and the Goddess Neith, created everything from Themselves. Some Egyptian queens, such as Ahmose, Hatshepsut’s mother, were said to have given birth to pharaohs after sexual union with a God.

So, is Isis a Virgin Goddess? Yes. Does She have sex with Her Divine Husband? Yes. She is, as so many Goddesses are, Both And. She is a patroness of marital sexual desire and bliss and She is an ever-renewing, ever-youthful Virgin Goddess. On this holy day and every day, may She bless you with the gifts you most desire.

Is Isis a Virgin Goddess?

Seen this about a million times? Yeah, me, too.

It’s that time of year when we (once again) see all those articles comparing the Divine Mother Mary with the Divine Mother Isis, followed by either outrage or approbation, depending on who’s doing the writing.

Recently, in relation to this, a friend of this blog asked a very excellent question. It had to do with Isis’ status as a Virgin Goddess. Basically, is She or isn’t She? She is often compared with the famously Virgin Mary, and the images of the two Goddesses, nursing Their holy babes, are strikingly similar. And then there’s all of this.

Well, as is often the way with Goddesses, the answer is both no and yes.

Art by A-gnosis; see more work here.

We’re all pretty familiar with the sexual relations between Isis and Osiris. All the way back to the Pyramid Texts we hear about it, rather explicitly we might add. Pyramid Text 366 says, “Your [Osiris] sister Isis comes to You rejoicing for love of You. You have placed Her on your phallus and Your seed issues into Her…” Plutarch, in the version of the story he recorded, tells us that Isis and Osiris were so in love with each other that They even made love while still within the womb of Their Great Mother Nuet. And, of course, we have the sacred story of how Isis collected the pieces of the body of murdered-and-dismembered Osiris, all except the phallus. Crafting a replacement of gold, the flesh of the Gods, She was able to arouse Her Beloved sufficient for the conception of Horus. The mourning songs of Isis and Nephthys have Her longing for His love. The priestess, in the Goddessform of Isis, sings that “fire is in Me for love of Thee” and She calls Him Lord of Love and Lord of Passion. She pleads, “Lie Thou with Thy sister Isis, remove Thou the pain that is in Her body.” (For more on the Songs or Lamentations, go here.)

So, is that all there is to it? Isis is not a virgin?

Well, not quite. Because Isis is a Goddess.

Isis is the Goddess of 10,000 Names and 10,000 Forms. Among those forms are the sexual Lover of Osiris and the Mother of Horus. Among Her many Names are syncretisms with famously virginal Goddesses such as Artemis, Hekate, and Athena, as well as heroines such as Io, a virgin priestess of Hera (a Goddess Who Herself renews Her virginity on the regular). Isis is identified with both Demeter the Mother and Persephone the Kore, the Young Girl, Who were sometimes seen as a single unit, Mother-Daughter, containing All in Themselves. Goddesses can be many things, all at once, without any contradiction—or perhaps with every contradiction, which is one of the ways of Goddesses.

Perhaps no text shows us these Divine Feminine contradictions/not-contradictions as clearly as “The Thunder, Perfect Mind,” a text found among the Nag Hammadi texts. It is a long poem in the voice of a Feminine Divine Power that some scholars have linked to Isis; or at least they think that Her worship influenced the content of the text. Could be, but in my opinion, the Divine Speaker may be better understood as Sophia—with Whom Isis is also identified. The Coptic (late Egyptian) manuscript from which the text comes is dated to roughly 350 CE. Here’s a brief excerpt from this amazing work:

For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the mother and the daughter. I am the members of my mother. I am the barren one and many are her sons. I am she whose wedding is great, and I have not taken a husband.

The Thunder, Perfect Mind

Clearly, Isis is syncretized with Virgin Goddesses throughout the Mediterranean world. And it is not at all unusual for such Goddesses to be both virginal and associated with fertility. What about Egyptian sources?

The ancient Egyptians were not quite so concerned with virgins—by which I mean, in this case, a young person who has not yet had sex—as were the Greeks and some other Mediterranean peoples. For instance, there was no requirement that young women, or young men for that matter, be sexually inexperienced when they married. Many young women probably were—particularly those who were married very young to older husbands. But prior to marriage, young people might engage relatively freely with each other. After marriage, sexual exclusivity with demanded, especially for women. The penalties for non-compliance could be very harsh, especially for women.

The Two Sisters

This is not to say that Egyptian virginity was not valued or even required under certain circumstances. The text that included the lamentation songs of Isis and Nephthys noted above specifies that the priestesses taking the roles of Isis and Nephthys be “pure of body and virgin” and also that they are to have their body hair removed, wigs on their heads, tambourines in their hands, and the names of Isis and Nephthys inscribed on their arms.

This text, one of very few we have, is from the Ptolemaic period, when Egypt had been influenced by Greek rule. I wonder whether virginity would have been considered necessary earlier. Perhaps the priestesses would have only had to abstain from sex for a period of time before their ritual service. We know that people serving in Egyptian temples had to abstain from sex for a time (at least a day, often a number of days) as part of their purification. But they weren’t virgins.

Ankhnesneferibre, God’s Wife of Amun

The God’s Wife of Amun, the highest of high priestesses and usually a female relation of the king, was virgin for life. Beginning in the 2nd Intermediate Period, the position of the God’s Wife gained a great deal of power, eventually becoming second only to the king. Interestingly, it was an “Isis”—Iset, the virgin daughter of Ramesses VI—who began the tradition of the God’s Wife being celibate. Later, in the Roman period, some Roman priestesses of Isis maintained lifelong virginity. And we know that the Roman Isiacs might maintain a 10-day period of pre-ritual chastity known as the Castimonium Isidis or Chastity of Isis.

Isis Herself is called the Great Virgin in one of the inscriptions from the Isis Chapel at Abydos. In Egyptian, this is Hunet Weret. Hunet is the word for girl or maiden, weret is the feminine form of great. Hunet is also the Egyptian name for the pupil of the eye and is connected to the Hermetic treatise known as the Kore Kosmou, the “Virgin of the World.” You can read about those maidenly connections here. (And read about the Kore Kosmou here, here, and here. )Just like Greek parthenos, hunet could mean a virgin, a girl, a maiden, or just youthful. And all Egyptian Goddesses are forever young. A young boy or youth is hunu.

Parthenogenesis was not unknown in Egypt, either. The First Creators in many Egyptian myths, such as the God Atum and the Goddess Neith, created everything from Themselves alone. Some Egyptian queens, such as Ahmose, Hatshepsut’s mother, were said to have given birth to pharaohs after sexual union with a God.

So, is Isis a Virgin Goddess? Yes. Does She have sex with Her Divine Husband? Yes. She is, as so many Goddesses are, Both And. She is a patroness of marital sexual desire and bliss and She is an ever-renewing, ever-youthful Virgin Goddess. On this holy day and every day, may She bless you with the gifts you most desire.

Isis & Io

According to Herodotus, the Egyptians never sacrifice cows…

“…for these are sacred to Isis. For the image of Isis is always made in the form of a woman with the horns of an ox, as Io is pictured by the Greeks; and for that reason all Egyptians are alike in treating cows far more holy than other beasts.”

This painting is from the Temple of Isis in Pompeii and shows Isis receiving the “bull-maiden,” Io

Who is Io and how is she (or She?) connected to Isis?

The story of Io is a Greek myth and apparently an ancient one. Here’s the tale:

Io was a priestess of Hera, even the first priestess of Hera, having established the Goddess’ worship in Argos. Io is also a naiad or water nymph, daughter of the River God, Inakhos.

Theoi.com (a wonderful mythology website) tells us that Io, in the Argive dialect, means “moon.” Other scholars have speculated that Io was a Hellenized version of an Egyptian word for both moon and Moon God, Iah.

In the image above (you can click it to see it larger), from Pompeii’s Temple of Isis, we can see that the woman on the left does indeed have horns as in Herodotus’ description, although Isis, on the right with the cobra, does not. Judging by the details in this painting, it appears the Italian Isiacs were trying to maintain the Egyptian flavor of their rites. Note the diaphanous nature of Isis’ robe, as well as the breast-baring robe of the (probably) priestess behind Her, who holds a sistrum. Another figure, probably a priest, holds a sistrum, wand, and situla.

Zeus turning Io into the white cow; art by Leo & Diane Dillon

It seems more than likely that the artist was depicting the Isiac priestess and priest as he had seem them in the temple of Isis.

Anyway, back to our story. Hera’s ever-unfaithful husband, Zeus, falls in love with the lovely lunar nymph Io—either because of her great beauty or due to the spells of a iynx (a magical wheel sacred to Hekate; also known as Hekate’s Top or Wheel).

Io, meanwhile, had dreams that told her she should indeed surrender to Zeus, but when she told her father about them, he decided a second opinion was in order. Yet after consulting the Delphic oracle and the oracle of Dodona (an oracle of Zeus, by the way, so…), the answer remained the same. Thus, Io went secretly to Zeus and they made love. Now betrayed not only by Her husband but also by Her priestess, Hera was, to say the least, not pleased.

To protect Io from Hera’s anger, Zeus turned her into a beautiful white cow. Hera, pretending ignorance of the true identity of the lovely cow, promptly demanded that Zeus give the cow to Her. He could do nothing but comply. To guard Her new possession, Hera brought in Argos, Who had a hundred watchful eyes. Due to His many eyes, Argos was able to keep permanent vigil and was therefore a formidable guardian. But Zeus enlisted the aid of Hermes to help Io escape, which He finally did by killing Argos.

Io, wandering as a white cow by artist William Bottini

Io, still in the form of a cow, made good her escape, so Hera sent a horsefly or gadfly to torment her until she was driven mad. As a mad cow, she wandered and wandered across the world. In her wanderings, she gave her name to many geographic features. For instance, the Ionian Sea is supposed to be named for her. Finally, the white cow, Io, arrives in Egypt.

There she regained her human form—Aeschylus says Zeus healed her—and bore Zeus’ son, Epaphus. Herodotus gives Epaphus as an alternative name for the Egyptian Apis bull. (Some of you may remember that the Isis-cow is the one who gives birth to the Apis bull.)

Other stories have Io, already in human form, kidnapped by Phoenicians or pirates, and brought to Egypt. But Io’s troubles are not yet over, for Hera next ordered the Kouretes (young Divine warriors Who serve the Mother Goddess) to kidnap Epaphus—so once again, Io wandered, this time, searching for her lost son. At last, she learned that the queen of Byblos was raising Epaphus. Io went to Byblos and eventually returned with Epaphus to Egypt where, according to Apollodorus, Io “dedicated an image to Demeter, called Isis by the Aigyptians, as also they called Io herself.”

The Hesat or White Cow, identified with both Hathor and Isis

Despite a few Egyptian-ish details in Io’s tale, Io’s connection with Isis, or even identification with Her, may, at first, be a bit puzzling. Yet, there are a number of correspondences between Isis and Io. The theme of searching for a loved one, pursued by an enemy is common to both. In fact, both wander twice. Both appear as white cows. Both are associated with the moon. Both are aided by the God of Knowledge; Hermes in the case of Io, Thoth in the case of Isis. In Plutarch’s later version of the Isis-Osiris myth, Isis finds Osiris’ body in Byblos. Io finds her son in Byblos. And in Apuleius’ tale of initiation into Isis’ Mysteries, the theme of being returned to human form after suffering trials in the form of an animal applies to Lucius in Apuleius’ tale and to Io in Her many myths. A 10th century CE lexicon or encyclopedia, known as the Suda (or Suidas), makes the identification complete under the entry for Isis:

Isis: She is called Io. She was snatched by Zeus from Argos and he, fearing Hera, changed her first into a white cow, then into a black one, and then into a one that was violet-coloured. After wandering around with her, he came into Egypt. The Egyptians, then, honour Isis, and for this reason they carve the horns of a cow on the head of her statue, alluding to the change from maiden to cow.

An image of Isis with a lunar crescent crown and tiny Io-like horns protruding from Her forehead; photo by Galdo Trouchky.

It is always interesting to me that when we first see the connections drawn by the ancients between the Deities (for Io becomes a Goddess), we can, at first, find them to be something of a stretch.

Yet if we follow the trail a bit more, the associations become much less strained. Io is certainly a case in point. When we look deeper into the myths and stories, we find the holy correspondences. We see the sacred connections. We glimpse a little more of the Divine interweavings that underlie and interpenetrate all things.

NOTE: It turns out that Io was one of the most frequently cited identifications with Isis in Roman literature. In other words, they were understanding Isis through the story of Io. Some of the Roman poets, separated from their lovers by the Isiac requirement for sexual abstinence before specific rites, complained rather bitterly about said separations. And to tell the truth, they were kinda jerks about it.