Category Archives: Egypt

The Seshed Band of Isis

Isis leading Nefertari into the afterlife

I have a new Isis accoutrement for you.

I love it when I find out new things—or new things about an old thing. This one is sort of an expansion on a previous thing.

Many of you may already be familiar with what are known as “black Isis bands,” which are needed in a number of rites in the Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri (aka Papyri Graecae Magicae or PGM).

We can’t be sure, but I’ve theorized that these were made from the black cloth that had previously been used to clothe the sacred images of Isis, once the older robes had been replaced. Since the fabric was black, it would have been from Hellenized images of the Goddess. Egyptians did use cloth, both as offerings and to adorn their sacred images, but black cloth was not among the colors they generally favored.

What I’d like to share with you today is a different type of Isis band, an entirely Egyptian one. This band was given to Isis as an offering (see Offering to Isis, “Black Isis Bands”), and it was also worn by Her as part of one of Her various crowns. The information I’m working from is a dissertation by Barbara Ann Richter on The Theology of Hathor of Dendera. At Dendera, Isis is almost as prominent as Hathor. (And you’ll recall that Isis’ sanctuary at Philae also has a Temple of Hathor. Sisters!)

Isis from Dendera with Double Crown and seshed (the black squiggle at the base of the crown)

On the walls at Dendera, we see scenes with Isis wearing this particular crown, which consists of the Egyptian red and white Double Crown, one or two ostrich feathers, and the “seshed” band, which is wrapped around the base of the red crown—or sometimes around the headdress of Isis.

We even have a 3D image of what this crown with its seshed band may have been like. Near the sacred lake at the Dendera temple, archeologists found a cache of ritual items including a cult statue of Isis with the double crown and seshed band—except in this case, the seshed is around the Goddess’ wig rather than around the base of the crown. (Although, in this picture, it looks to me like there is something—possibly multiple serpents?—around the base of the crown.) There are also two holes in the white crown, which Richter suggests may have been meant to hold real (or separate) ostrich feathers.

Isis with the Double Crown and seshed band with serpent, holes possibly held real or separate ostrich feathers

The crowns and headdresses that the Egyptians represented the Deities wearing have specific meanings. The Double Crown represents rulership over the Two Lands, that is, Lower and Upper Egypt. The ostrich feather is the shut, the symbol of Ma’et—that which is Right, True, and Just. The seshed band is entwined by a uraeus serpent that is both protective and unifying, like the Double Crown.

In the Temple of Birth at Dendera (which I think is the Temple of the Birth of Isis), the king presents this crown to Isis and says, “Take for Yourself the seshed band. It has encircled Your forehead. The uraeus is united with Your head. The red crown and the white crown—they join together on Your forehead, the two feathers united beside them.” This crown emphasizes the unification of the land of Egypt as well as the powerful protection of the uraeus serpent. Since the crown is united with the Goddess, She embodies these qualities. And, of course, the Goddess bestows these same powers on the king in return, so we find the king wearing the seshed band at times, too.

A picture of the whole statue of Isis with crown and seshed

The feathers “united beside them” allude to Isis’ description as “Lady of Ma’et, the uraeus on Her forehead, appearing with Ma’et every day.” In this inscription, however, the word translated as “uraeus” isn’t “uraeus.” It’s Mehenet, which is the feminine version of the protective serpent Mehen, meaning “the Coiled One.” Mehen protects the God Re by encircling Him as He travels through the underworld; He also protects Osiris. Since Isis is a Goddess, She is united with the feminine serpent Mehenet. As a fiery Uraeus Goddess Herself, Isis protects Re and She is also the foremost protectress of Her husband Osiris as well as Her son Horus (and thus, the king). Mehen and Mehenet are sometimes shown with Their tails in Their mouths, making Them the prototype of the ‘serpent biting its own tail’ and later known as the oroboros.

In some of the Coffin Texts spells, Mehen is closely connected to Re. Coffin Text 760 tells us that after Isis brings Mehen, the Coiled One, to Her son Horus, Horus becomes “the double of the Lord of All,” that is, the Sun God Re. The serpents Mehen and Mehenet are solar powers and Their coiling and encircling protects.

Osiris protected by the Coiled One biting His tail

There was a tradition at Dendera that Dendera is the birthplace of Isis. An inscription in the sanctuary there says that Isis’ “mother bore Her on earth in Iatdi [that is, the Temple of the Birth of Isis at Dendera; also another name for Dendera as a whole] the day of the night of the infant in His nest.* She is the Unique Uraeus . . . Sothis in the Sky, [female] Ruler of the Stars, Who Decrees Words in the Circuit of the Sun Disk.” Since Isis is also Sopdet/Sothis/Sirius, the heliacal rising of the Goddess in Her star, just before sunrise, is Her “birth.” Her birth precedes the rebirth of the falcon Re—”the infant in His nest”—as He rises in the sun on the first day of the New Year.

The birth of Isis is also connected with the seshed band. We learn that the “Ritual of Presenting the Seshed Band” takes place on “the Day of the Night of the Child in His Nest.” These seshed bands, presented to Isis for a happy New Year, included inscriptions like “A beautiful year—a million and a hundred-thousand times” and “A happy year, year of joy, year of health, eternal year, infinite year.” In addition to offering the seshed band on Isis’ birthday, it was also given on the first day of the New Year.

The seshed band must have been—at least originally—a fabric band, for it was tied around the head and knotted with the two long ends of the band hanging down in back. The knot at the back was surely intended to be magical, emphasizing the ability of magical knots to secure and protect, while the band itself surrounds and protects like Mehenet.

I don’t know whether this is actually a seshed, but the metal headband with streamers down the back looks like it may have been intended to mimic knotted fabric. This was on the head of Tutankhamun’s mummy.

The Pyramid Texts mention a powerful red headband with which the deceased identifies. Another Pyramid Text mentions a red and green headband that was woven from the Eye of Horus. While some Egyptologists connect these headbands with the seshed, I can’t be sure because I’m only looking at the English translation of the texts.

However, from Dendera, we do have an inscription that specifically describes a seshed band made of electrum. It is also possible that the fabric headbands had metal pieces, suitable for engraving with blessings, attached to them. It seems likely that the serpent that entwined the seshed would have been made of metal.

Egyptian Egyptologist Zeinab El-Kordy suggests that the word seshed is the active participle of shed, meaning “to draw or pull out” or “to cause to come.” She therefore connects it with drawing the Inundation out from its source and causing the flood to come. This could mean that the seshed band, especially when offered at the birth of Isis and the New Year, is a magical tool for helping to bring the much-desired Nile flood.

The seshed band protects and unifies. It is given as a talisman for New Year’s prosperity—which I think we can easily extend to good luck and blessings in general. And it is associated with rebirth and renewal. We also have scenes that connect it with birth as well as rebirth. They show the birthing mother, her midwives, and protective Birth Goddesses like Isis, Taweret, and Hathor, all wearing seshed bands.

Egyptian woman giving birth assisted by Hathoru; crowns, but no seshed bands

Given this, I would suggest that if we are working with Isis in any of these areas—protection, unification, birth, rebirth, renewal, and even good fortune and good outcomes in general—we would be eligible to wear the seshed as part of our ritual gear. Although a custom-made uraeus serpent is probably out of reach for most of us, a fabric band in red (power and protection) or green (growth, change, benevolence) with a piece of inexpensive serpent jewelry attached to it, would be a perfectly serviceable seshed band for our work with Isis.

* Sources such as the Cairo Calendar connect the Night of the Child in His Nest with the 5th epagomenal day and the birth of Nephthys, while Isis’ birth is on the 4th epagomenal day. But at Dendera, Isis must have been considered to have been born on the 5th and last epagomenal day, rising as Sothis just before the sun. When the sun rises, the 5th epagomenal day officially ends and the new day and New Year begins. As is so often the case with Egypt, the myths and traditions could vary from place to place.

Offering to Isis Now Available for Pre-Order

Dear friends and fellow Isians,

I’m very—very!—excited to let you know that Offering to Isis, Knowing the Goddess through Her Sacred Symbols is available for pre-order from Azoth Press at the Miskatonic Books website right now. If you’d like to go directly there, here’s the link.

I know a lot of you are familiar with Isis Magic, but maybe you haven’t yet come across Offering to Isis. I may be a tad bit partial, but I really like this book a lot, too.

Offering to Isis is about how we can connect with, honor, and grow our relationship with Isis through the ancient and eternal practice of making offering. Offering is one of the most important ways we human beings have always communicated with our Deities. It was vitally important in ancient Egypt and it’s just as important for those of us interested in or devoted to Isis today.

If you’ve ever wondered exactly what sort of things to offer to Isis, Offering to Isis includes in-depth explanations of 72 sacred symbols associated with Isis—symbols that make ideal offerings to Her.

We’ll also talk about the how and why of Egyptian offering practices, including the important and genuinely ancient Egyptian technique of “Invocation Offering.” There’s information on exactly how the ka energy inherent in every offering is given to and received by Isis—and what to do with offerings once they’ve been received. You’ll also find a selection of offering rituals, from simple to complex, for a variety of purposes. Most rites are for solitary devotees, so I think you’ll find one that works just right for you.

You can download a complete copy of the Table of Contents by clicking here.

If you’re curious and want to know exactly what’s in the book, you can download a PDF copy of the full Table of Contents by clicking on the caption under the “Contents” image.

The largest section of the book details the 72 sacred symbols of Isis. You’ll add to your knowledge of Isis and Her ancient worship by learning more about Her through Her important sacred symbols. You’ll see how each one is intimately connected with Her and how they may be used in offering rites for Her. Every entry also includes an Invocation Offering that you can use for your own offerings to Isis.

One of the things I especially like about this book is that you can just open it at random and you’ll likely find something you hadn’t known about Her, something that I hope will inspire you in your own devotions. For instance, how did the Knot of Isis come to be Her knot? What stones are associated with Her? What animals are connected with Her? Why are dreams especially important when it comes to Isis?

As it’s been a few years since this book was first published, the text has been thoroughly updated. All the hieroglyphs associated with the offerings have been re-illustrated and are much more accurate—and much more beautiful, if I may say so—in this new edition, too. There’s also a handy appendix in the back for quick reference in finding any offering you may need.

This is what a typical page in the sacred symbols section looks like.

This new Azoth Press edition can be purchased only through the Miskatonic Books website. (If you go to Amazon, you will be ordering a 20-year-old paperback edition published by Llewellyn in 2005, which people are trying to sell at very inflated prices.) Oh yes, and if you’d like, you can take advantage of Miskatonic’s installment plan that lets you pay over several months so it doesn’t take a big bite out of your budget. Plus, the new hardback edition is priced A LOT lower than those overpriced, out-of-print first editions that I’ve seen out there.

When you go to the Miskatonic site, you’ll see two different Azoth Press Offering to Isis editions. For the high rollers, there will be 36 copies in a gorgeous leather-bound and numbered collector’s edition. For the rest of us, there will be 650 numbered, limited edition copies in a cloth-bound hardcover. Both editions are two-color throughout, and more than 400 pages.

Thank you so much for letting me tell you about this new edition. And would you please do me a favor and share this information with anyone who you think might be interested? And please feel free to ask me any questions about Offering to Isis that you’d like.

I’m looking forward to getting my own copy of this beautiful, new edition of Offering to Isis. And while you might think it’s strange, even though I wrote the book, I still use it for reference when I’m making offering to Isis. I hope this new edition will serve you well, too.

Under Her Wings,

Isidora

Syncretism & Isis

The worship of Isis is one of the most important examples of religious syncretism in the world. Whenever the topic of syncretism arises, you will inevitably find a discussion of Isis included.

When it comes to religion, talking about syncretism often centers on whether it is a good thing or a bad thing.

But maybe, syncretism just is—unless a culture or religion is completely isolated. Because anytime peoples and cultures and religions encounter each other, there has always been—among at least some of those peoples and cultures and religions—some form of syncretism.

The Isis keystone on the Egyptian Museum in Cairo

And yes, of course, you’re right; it’s time for a definition. So, what is syncretism?

When we look at the various definitions, we see that it is usually said to be the combining, attempting to unify, assimilating, blending, fusing, reconciling, harmonizing, mixing, and other similar terms, the various aspects of two or more religions or Deities. Sometimes, religious syncretism is called theocrasia, Greek for “God-mixing.”

At the time of the rise in the popularity of the worship of Isis, interchanges between Egyptian, Greek, and Roman cultures— trade, technologies, philosophies, and yes, spiritualities—were also flourishing.

The influence of those cultures upon each other is often given as a primary example of syncretism on a broader scale. The ancient Egyptian city of Alexandria is an example of a highly syncretic—or we might say, multicultural or diverse—city. Christianity, also developing at about the same time as the spread of Isis’ worship, is another example of a syncretic worship, both in its origins and in its much later expressions, as it absorbed and transformed many of the Pagan traditions it encountered, forcibly or not.

Those who consider religious syncretism bad generally point to a “watering down” of the original tradition; there is also a legitimate concern with appropriation. Those who say religious syncretism is good generally associate it with positive innovation in religion rather than corruption. Others suggest that we retire the term entirely, because this kind of mixing is simply inevitable. Yet others prefer to retain the term since studying how it happens is valuable in researching the development of many of the world’s religions.

Interestingly, it may have been the Greek priest Plutarch—who wrote down a Greek narrative version of the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris—who coined the term syncretism. He used it to describe how the various Cretan tribes came together as one when faced with external threats. So, for him, it was positive mixing toward a greater good for Crete.

Isis of Coptos, wearing the Horns & Disk crown associated with Hathor

Syncretism was one of the ways Isis gained many of Her 10,000 names. Yet this all started within Egypt itself.

Those of you who have been following along with this blog already know how the Egyptian Deities are liable, at most any time, to morph into each other, to combine with each other, or to appear as each other. It is—as I have said so many times that you’re tired of reading it—one of my favorite things about the ancient Egyptian conception of the Divine. It is fluid. It can change. It can show Itself to us in myriad forms. For me, this fluidity is a genuine reflection of the Divine nature.

Egyptian combinations of Deities could demonstrate similarity: Isis-Hathor. Another might enable a Deity to express power in a specific way: Isis-Sakhmet. Mostly, in Egypt, Goddesses could flow only into other Goddesses, Gods into other Gods. Isis is unusual in that She could combine with Gods as well. We find an Isis-Anubis in the later mythological texts, as well as an Isis-Horus.

An image of Demeter, but with the tiny horns of Isis-Io upon Her forehead

In this way, Isis could be almost any other Egyptian Goddess as well as some Gods. We discover many of Her names in the Oxyrhynchus hymn, which gives us Her names and epithets, first within Egypt, then throughout the Mediterranean.

Outside of Egypt, one of the first important Deities Isis is syncretized with is the Greek Great Goddess Demeter. This went as far back as the 5th century BCE when the historian Herodotus declared that Isis IS Demeter and that Isis and Osiris were the only Deities worshiped throughout all of Egypt. (This wasn’t strictly true, but that was his impression.)

The Isis myth, as recorded and interpreted by Plutarch, gives us the perfect example of a syncretic myth.

As Plutarch tells it, the wanderings of Isis include episodes similar to those in Demeter’s story of wandering in search of Persephone. Like Demeter, Isis (in disguise as a human woman) weeps at a spring (in Demeter’s case, a well) and is invited into the royal house to be the nurse of a royal infant. At night, She tempers the child in a fire, making him immortal.

One night, the queen sees this process and, quite understandably, screams bloody murder, thus interrupting the magic and prohibiting her child from gaining immortality.

But let’s go one step further into this particular syncretism. Some Egyptologists believe that this “burning baby” episode may actually have originated in Egypt—with what they call the “burning Horus” formula—and from there it was imported into Demeter’s myth. So, in this case, both cultures were inspired by the other and each added a detail from the other Great Goddess’ myth to their own story.

There are numerous images that show Isis combined with Goddesses other than Demeter from throughout the Mediterranean region. We find Isis-Aphrodite, Isis-Astarte, Isis-Selene, Isis-Sophia, Isis-Artemis, Isis-Rhea, Isis-Fortuna, and many more. Just as She had within Egypt, now Isis flowed into Goddesses far beyond Egypt. So much so that She eventually became THE Goddess to many people, both within and without Her native land.

The human pathos of Isis’ story, Her fierceness in defending both Her husband and Her child, Her powers of resurrection and rebirth, and the magic that always clings to Isis like a potent perfume—all contributed to the spread of Her religion in the Greco-Roman world. People saw Her in their own Goddesses and they saw their own Goddesses in Her, eventually adopting Her as their own. Syncretism.

For today, I’d like to leave you with a syncretic hymn to Isis. It is one of four written in Greek and carved on the temple of Isis-Hermouthis (Hermouthis is a Hellenized form of the Cobra Goddess Renenutet) in the Egyptian Faiyum, where She was paired with the Crocodile God Sobek. The hymn was written by a man named Isidorus; judging by his name, he was at least a devotee. He may have been a native Egyptian who was either given or adopted a Greek name. Some researchers even think he could have been a priest of Isis, but we just don’t know.

Here is one of his four Faiyum hymns to Isis:

O wealth-giver, Queen of the Gods, Hermouthis, Lady,
Omnipotent Agathē Tychē [“Good Fortune”], greatly renowned Isis,
Dēo, highest Discoverer [generally, this means “creator”] of All Life,
Manifold miracles were Your care that You might bring livelihood to mankind and morality to all.

You taught customs that justice might in some measure prevail;
You gave skills that men’s life might be comfortable,
And You discovered the blossoms that produce edible vegetation.
Because of You, heaven and the whole earth have their being; and the gusts of the winds and the sun with its sweet light.

By Your power the channels of Nile are filled, every one,
At the harvest season and its most turbulent water is poured
On the whole land that produce may be unfailing.
All mortals who live on the boundless earth,
Thracians, Greeks, and Barbarians,
Express Your fair Name, a Name greatly honored among all, but
Each speaks in his own language, in his own land.

The Syrians call You: Astarte, Artemis, Nanaia [Mesopotamian Love Goddess closely associated with Inanna];
The Lycian tribes call You: Leto, the Lady;
The Thracians also name You as Mother of the Gods;
And the Greeks call You Hera of the Great Throne, Aphrodite,
Hestia the Goodly, Rheia and Demeter.
But the Egyptians call You Thiouis [from Egyptian Ta Uaet, “the Only One”] because they know that You, being One, are all other Goddesses Invoked by the races of men.

Mighty One, I shall not cease to sing of Your great Power.
Deathless Savior, many-named, mightiest Isis,
Saving from war cities and all their citizens: men, their wives, possessions, and children.
As many as are bound fast in prison, in the power of death;
As many as are in pain through long, anguished, sleepless nights,
All who are wanderers in a foreign land,
And as many as sail on the Great Sea in winter
When men may be destroyed and their ships wrecked and sunk,
All these are saved if they pray that You be present to help.

Hear my prayers, O One whose Name has great Power; prove Yourself merciful to me and free me from all distress. —Isidorus wrote it*

If you would like to hear a poetic and profound piece on syncretic Deities, I invite you to listen to this episode of the wonderful podcast The Emerald: Let Us Sing of Syncretic Gods, of Outcasts and Wanderers. Yes, of course, Isis is mentioned.

*Translation from Vera Vanderlip, The Four Greek Hymns of Isidorus & the Cult of Isis.

The Magical Hair of Isis

We are not immune to the charms of a beautiful head of hair—and the ancient Egyptians weren’t either.

But they took appreciation for hair, especially feminine hair, to a whole new level of magnitude. For them, hair was magical. And, of course, Who would have the most magical hair of all? The Goddess of Magic: Isis Herself.

A beautiful woman with beautiful hair — The charm of beautiful hair

I have always understood that the long hair of Isis in Egyptian tradition—disarrayed and covering Her face in mourning or falling in heavy, dark locks over Her shoulders—to be the predecessor of the famous Veil of Isis of later tradition. Ah, but there is so much more.

In ancient Egypt, it was a mourning custom for Egyptian women to dishevel their hair. They wore it long and unkempt, letting it fall across their tear-stained faces, blinding them in sympathy with the blindness first experienced by the dead. As the Ultimate Divine Mourner, this was particularly true of Isis. At Koptos, where Isis was notably worshipped as a Mourning Goddess, a healing prayer made “near the hair at Koptos” is recorded. Scholars consider this a reference to Mourning Isis with Her disheveled and powerfully magical hair.

Mourners use various mourning gestures and dishevel their hair

It is in Her disheveled, mourning state, that Isis finally finds Osiris. She reassembles Him, fans life into Him, and makes love with Him. As She mounts His prone form, Her long hair falls over Their faces, concealing Them like a veil and providing at least some perceived privacy for Their final lovemaking. As the Goddess and God make love, the meaning of Isis’ hair turns from death to life. It becomes sexy—remember those big-haired “paddle doll” fertility symbols?

A mourning woman with her hair over her face from the tomb of Minnakht

This pairing of love and death is both natural and eternal. How many stories have you heard—or perhaps you have a personal one—about couples making love after a funeral? It’s so common that it’s cliché. But it makes perfect sense: in the face of death, we human beings must affirm life. We do so through the mutual pleasure of sex and, for some couples, the possibility of engendering new life that sex provides. The lovemaking of Isis and Osiris is the ultimate expression of this. Chapter 17 of the Book of Coming Forth by Day (aka the Book of the Dead), describes the disheveled hair of Isis when She comes to Osiris:

“I am Isis, you found me when I had my hair disordered over my face, and my crown was disheveled. I have conceived as Isis, I have procreated as Nephthys.” (Chapter 17; translation by Rosa Valdesogo Martín, who has extensively studied the connection of hair to funerary customs in ancient Egypt.)

There is also a variant of this chapter that has Isis apparently straightening up Her “bed head” following lovemaking:

“Isis dispels my bothers (?) [The Allen translation has “Isis does away with my guard; Nephthys puts an end to my troubles.]. My crown is disheveled; Isis has been over her secret, she has stood up and has cleaned her hair.” (Chapter 17 variant, translation by Martín, above.)

This lovemaking of Goddess and God has cosmic implications for its result is a powerful and important new life: Horus. As the new pharaoh, Horus restores order to both kingdom and cosmos following the chaos brought on by the death of the old pharaoh, Osiris.

Not only is hair symbolic of the blindness of death and the new life of lovemaking; the hair of the Goddesses is actually part of the magic of rebirth. Isis and Her sister, Nephthys, are specifically called the Two Long Haired Ones. The long hair of the Goddesses is associated with the knotting, tying, wrapping, weaving, knitting, and general assembling necessary to bring about the great Mystery of rebirth. Hair-like threads of magic are woven about the deceased who has returned to the womb of the Great Mother. The Coffin Texts give the name of part of the sacred boat of the deceased (itself a symbolic womb) as the Braided Tress of Isis.

Mourners, probably Isis and Nephthys, throw Their hair over the Osiris

In some Egyptian iconography, we see mourning women, as well as the Goddesses Isis and Nephthys, with hair thrown forward in what is known as the nwn gesture. Sometimes they/They actually pull a lock of hair forward, especially toward the deceased, which is called the nwn m gesture. It may be that this gesture, especially when done by Goddesses, is meant to transfer new life to the deceased, just as Isis’ bed-head hair brought new life to Osiris. It is interesting to note that the Egyptians called vegetation “the hair of the earth” and that bare land was called “bald” land, which simply reiterates the idea of hair is an expression of life.

Spell 562 of the Coffin Texts notes the ability of the hair of Isis and Nephthys to unite things, saying that the hair of the Goddesses is knotted together and that the deceased wishes to “be joined to the Two Sisters and be merged in the Two Sisters, for they will never die.”

Isis and Nephthys pull a lock of hair toward the deceased

The Pyramid Texts instruct the resurrected dead to loosen their bonds, “for they are not bonds, they are the tresses of Nephthys.” Thus the magical hair of the Goddesses is only an illusory bond. Their hair is not a bond of restraint but rather the bonding agent needed for rebirth. Like the placenta that contains and feeds the child but is no longer necessary when the child is born, the reborn one throws off the tresses of the Goddesses that had previously wrapped her or him in safety.

The Egyptian idea of Isis as the Long-Haired One carried over into Her later Roman cult, too. In Apuleius’ account of the Mysteries of Isis, he describes the Goddess as having long and beautiful hair. Her statues often show Her with long hair, and Her priestesses were known to wear their hair long in honor of their Goddess.

This is sketched from a coffin from Gebelein, 13th dynasty where either a long-haired female image or a long-haired female is spreading her hair over the deceased.

This little bit of research has inspired me to want experiment with the magic of hair in ritual. In Isis Magic, the binding and unbinding of the hair is part of the “Lamentations of Isis” rite (where it is very powerful, I can tell you from experience), but I want to try using it in some solitary ritual, too. I have longish hair, so that will work, but if you don’t and are, like me, inspired to experiment, try using a veil. It is most certainly in Her tradition. (See “Veil” in my Offering to Isis.)

If you want to learn more about the traditions around hair and death, please visit Rosa Valdesogo Martín’s amazing and extensive site here. That’s where most of these images come from…many of which I had not seen before. Thank you, Rosa!

I have her book on the subject on order, but the publisher has postponed its release several times. Here’s hoping it arrives sometime soonish.

The Goddess Werethekau & Isis

“O, Isis, Great of Magic, deliver me from all bad, evil, and typhonic things…” —Ebers Papyrus, 1500 BCE

Werethekau as a winged Cobra Goddess (photo by Mark Williams)

One of Isis’ most powerful epithets is “Great of Magic,” which you may also see translated as Great One of Magic, Great Sorceress, or Great Enchantress. In Egyptian, it is Weret Hekau or Werethekau. (“Wer” is “great” and “et” is the feminine ending. “Hekau” is the plural of “magic,” so you could also translate it as Great of Magics.)

Isis is not the only Goddess Who is called Great of Magic. Indeed, many of the Great Goddesses bear that epithet: Hathor, Sakhmet, Mut, Wadjet, among others. Gods are also Great of Magic, notably Set in the Pyramid Texts.

There is also a Werethekau Who is a Goddess in Her own right, rather than an epithet. As so many Deities were, She was associated with the king, and especially during his coronation. There had been some doubt among Egyptologists about whether Werethekau was indeed a separate Goddess. But recently, Ahmed Mekawy Ouda of Cairo University has been doing a lot of work tracking Her down. He’s gathered references to a priesthood and temples for Her that seem quite clear. More on all that in a moment.

In addition to the Great of Magic Deities, there are objects called Great of Magic, especially objects associated with the king, such as the royal crowns. In the Pyramid Texts, the king goes before a very personified Red Crown:

“The Akhet’s door has been opened, its doorbolts have drawn back. He has come to you, Red Crown; he has come to you, Fiery One; he has come to you, Great One; he has come to you, Great of Magic—clean for you and fearful because of you . . . He has come to you, Great of Magic: he is Horus, encircled by the aegis of his eye, the Great of Magic.”

—Pyramid Texts of Unis, 153

A Lioness-headed Werethekau from Karnak — A lioness-headed Werethekau from Karnak

Some amulets, including a vulture amulet, a cobra amulet, and, as in the example above, the Eye of Horus amulet are also called Great of Magic. So is the adze used in the Opening of the Mouth ceremony.

With all this great magic going for him or her, the king or queen becomes Great of Magic, too. King Pepi Neferkare is told, “Horus has made your magic great in your identity of Great of Magic” (Pyramid Texts of Pepi, 315). Queen Neith is told, “Horus has made your magic great in your identity of Great of Magic. You are the Great God” (Pyramid Texts of Neith, 225).

I wonder whether there might be some primordial connection between the Great of Magic royal crowns and the Great of Magic royal throne—Who is Iset, the Goddess Throne. There is a votive stele that shows Werethekau and gives Her the epithet Lady of the Throne of the Two Lands. Perhaps we can understand the accouterments of kingship as personified extensions of the Power, Divinity, and Magic of the Living Great Goddesses, which were empowered by Them in order to bestow upon the king his own power, divinity, and magic.

A cobra-headed Werethekau...also from Karnak. Lots of Great of Magics at Karnak, eh? — A cobra-headed Werethekau…also from Karnak. Lots of Great of Magics at Karnak, eh? Or should that be Greats of Magic?

The magic of the crowns is enhanced by the protective uraeus serpents often shown upon them. They’re not just snakes, of course; They’re Goddesses. Most often, the Uraeus Goddesses are Wadjet and Nekhbet or Isis and Nephthys, representing Lower and Upper Egypt. But Werethekau is a Uraeus Goddess, too. The uraei are also known as “Eyes” due to the similarity between the Egyptian word for “eye” (iret) and the word for “the doer” (iret)—because it is the Eyes of the Deities that are the Divine Powers which go out to do things. (Very similar to the active and feminine Shakti power in Hinduism.)

The Pyramid Texts of King Merenre associate the Eyes with the crowns:

“You are the god who controls all the Gods, for the Eye has emerged in your head as the Nile Valley Great-of-Magic Crown, the Eye has emerged in your head as the Delta Great-of-Magic Crown, Horus has followed you and desired you, and you are apparent as the Dual King, in control of all the Gods and Their kas as well.”

—Pyramid Texts of Merenre, 52

The human-headed Cobra Goddess Werethekau nursing Tutankhamum

The Uraeus Goddesses or Eyes are powerful, holy cobras Who emit Light and spit Fire against the enemies of the king and the Deities. Learn more about Isis as Uraeus Goddess here.

When Werethekau is an independent Goddess, She may have the body of a woman and head of a cobra, be in full cobra form, and we even have a few instances of the Goddess in full human form. Among Tutankhamun’s grave goods is a figure of Werethekau with a human head and cobra body nursing a child Tut.

She also has a lioness form. We know of a lionine Isis-Werethekau from the hypostyle hall at Karnak. A number of the Goddesses with a feline form—Sakhmet, Mut, Pakhet—were also known as Great of Magic, so we can understand that powerful magic has not only a protective and nurturing side, but also a fierce and raging one. Which seems about right if you ask me; magic can be very positive and healing or, if used unwisely, a real mess.

Isis-Werethekau from the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak. You can read Her name in the hieroglyphs above Her. Click to enlarge.

So far, I haven’t tracked down the oldest reference to Isis as Great of Magic. Since She has always been a Goddess of great magical power, the association is ancient. Perhaps it has always been. Perhaps there’s something to my guess about The Great-of-Magic Throne. Or perhaps Professor Ouda will come to my rescue if I can ever get a copy of his thesis about this.

In Ouda’s article outlining some of the references to Werethekau’s priesthood and temples, several of the extant references to Werethekau also tie-in Isis and Her Divine family.

For instance, on a stele of a chantress of Isis, the chantress is shown playing the sistrum and adoring Isis-Werethekau. The inscription reads, “adoring Werethekau, may They [Isis and Werethekau?] give life and health to the ka of the chantress of Isis, Ta-mut-neferet (Isis the Beautiful Mother).” In fact, on the less-than-a-dozen votive stele we have and on which Werethekau is named or depicted, many of them are stele for people who served Isis in some priestly capacity; they may have also served Osiris and Horus, too.

Ta-mut-neferet holds the hand of a man identified as “the servant of Osiris.” Another stele calls Werethekau “Lady of the Palace” and is dedicated by a chantress of Osiris, Horus, and Isis. A man who was Second God’s Servant of Osiris, God’s Servant of Horus, and God’s Servant of Isis was also God’s Servant of Werethekau, Lady of the Palace.

Iset Werethekau in hieroglyphs...three different ways — Iset Werethekau in hieroglyphs…three different ways

Ouda also notes that Lady of the Palace may be Werethekau’s most common epithet. That is quite interesting in light of the fact that Lady of the Palace (or House or Temple) is the very meaning of Nephthys’ name. (Learn more about that here.) And of course, She, too, is called Great of Magic. Together, Isis and Nephthys are the Two Uraeus Goddesses and the Two Greats of Magic.

So if the question is, “is Werethekau an independent Goddess, a personified object, or an epithet of other Deities?”, the answer is, “yes”. With the beautiful and, to my mind, admirable fluidity of the Egyptian Divine, She is all these things…and most especially, a powerful aspect of Isis, the Great Enchantress.

The Divine Bread of Isis

I offer bread to the Goddess — Offering bread to the Goddess

Here in the famously cloudy Pacific Northwest, I find myself thinking of a hot bowl of soup and a slice, well buttered, of bread. So today, I write today in honor of bread—both as a worthy offering to Isis and Her Divine family and as a powerful symbol of transformation.

Indeed, the offering tables of ancient Egypt fairly groaned beneath the weight of loaves of offered bread. In tomb paintings you can see them, baked into neat, conical or oval shapes and piled high upon the altars. “Thousands of loaves” were promised to Deities and deceased pharaohs. Excavations have shown that actual loaves of bread were among the grave goods of kings and commoners alike. In the Book of Coming Forth by Day, the deceased declares he will live on the bread of the Goddesses and Gods.

An offering table with the bread and wine already on it — An offering table with the round loaves of bread and pitchers of wine already and eternally upon it

As in so many places in the world, bread in ancient Egypt was a basic, even archetypal, food and the grain from which it was made, an essential, as well as symbolic, food crop. To the ancient Egyptians, a loaf of bread came to symbolize all types of food offerings and all good things.

Both Isis and Osiris are strongly connected with bread and the grain from which it is made. A number of Isis’ epithets attest to this. She is the Lady of Bread and Beer, Lady of Green Crops, Goddess of the Fertility of the Field, and the Lady of Abundance. (And by “bread and beer” the Egyptians meant more than just a sandwich wrapper and a drink. The phrase meant every good thing; Egyptians would even greet each other by saying, “bread and beer,” thus wishing each other prosperity.)

Lady and Lord of Abundance — Lady and Lord of Green Crops

For Osiris’ part, like so many Gods, He is identified with the cycle of the living and dying grain. The Coffin Texts connect Osiris and grain with immortality: “I am Osiris . . . I live and grow as Neper [“Corn” or “Grain”], whom the august gods bring forth that I may cover Geb [the earth], whether I be alive or dead. I am barley, I am not destroyed.” The texts also tell us that the deceased, identified with Osiris as the Divine grain, nourishes the common people, makes the Gods Divine, and “spiritualizes” the spirits. Thus bread and grain are more than just bodily sustenance; they are spiritual sustenance as well.

I am emmer wheat and I will not die — I live and grow as Grain…

Temple walls show grain growing out of the body of the dead Osiris while His soul hovers above the stalks. But it is not enough that the grain sprouts and grows. It must also be transformed so that Osiris Himself may also be transformed. And, as in the main Isis and Osiris myth, the Goddess is the one Who transforms the God. In the myth, She does this by reassembling His body and fanning life into Him with Her wings. Using the grain metaphor, Isis becomes the Divine Baker Who transforms the raw grain into the risen and nourishing bread. In the Book of Coming Forth by Day, the deceased person asks for a funeral meal of “the cake that Isis baked in the presence of the Great God.”

Emmer wheat, the most common type from which the ancient Egyptians made bread

As a symbol of transformation and ongoing life, grain has magical properties. Some of the funerary texts have the deceased rubbing her body with barley and emmer wheat in order to partake of these magically transforming properties.

In several temples where important festivals of Osiris were held, the priests made a complex form of bread, called Divine Bread, that was molded in the shape of Osiris. (In fact, the ancient Egyptians were quite adept at using molds to bake bread in a variety of shapes and forms.) The Osirian Divine Bread was made from grain and a special paste consisting of ingredients such as Nile mud, dates, frankincense, fresh myrrh, 12 spices with magical properties, 24 precious gems, and water.

A "corn Osiris" ... perhaps molded like the Divine Bread — A “corn Osiris” … perhaps molded like the larger Divine Bread of Mendes?

At Denderah, this Divine Bread was modeled into the shapes of the pieces of the body of Osiris and sent to the various cities in which Isis was said to have enshrined them.

At Mendes (which is where, we must note, the phallus of Osiris was enshrined), a sacred marriage was part of the Osirian celebrations. It took place between the Goddess Shontet, a form of Isis, and Osiris as the grain. In the Goddess’ holy of holies, Her sacred statue was unclothed and grain was strewn on a special bed before Her. After allowing some time for the Goddess and God to unite, the grain was gathered up, then wrapped in cloth, watered, and used to model a full-body figure of Osiris Khenti-Amenti (“Osiris, Chief of the West,” that is, the Land of the Dead). Finally, Osiris the Divine Bread was buried with full ceremony, including a priestess who took the role of Isis to mourn Him and work the transforming magic of the Goddess.

Several ancient writers describe an entirely different type of bread also associated with Isis. It is lotus bread. According to Herodotus, the Egyptians who lived in the Delta gathered the lotuses that grow profusely there. They dried the centers containing the seeds then pounded them into flour that was made into bread. Lotus-seed bread was made from both the white and the blue water lilies. The lily rhizomes were also used; they were dried, then ground into flour for bread making—though the rhizome version was likely to have been less palatable than the seed bread. In Diodorus’ account of Egyptian prehistory, he mentions that lotus bread was one of the Egyptian subsistence foods and that the “discovery of these is attributed by some to Isis.”

Isis is the Lady of Abundance Who gives us the bread of earthly life; and She is the Divine Baker Who makes the magical bread that gives us eternal life. She is the Goddess Who regenerates the Grain God as She guides the transformation of Her Beloved from the threshed grain into the ever-living Green God Osiris. She is the Goddess of Divine Bread Who feeds our bodies and souls and Her sacred bread is a pleasing offering to Isis, Goddess of Transformation.

Let’s get baking!

Is Isis a Moon Goddess or Sun Goddess?

Isis as a Lunar Goddess by artist Mikewildt. Visit him on Deviant Art here.

As we approach the time when night and day, moon and sun come into a brief and beautiful balance, let’s talk about Isis’ lunar and solar natures.

Many modern people first think of Isis as a Moon Goddess. And, it’s true, in later periods of Her worship, She was indeed associated with the moon—and, in fact, that’s how She entered the Western Esoteric Tradition. Yet, this Isis-moon connection isn’t all that new. It first started when Egypt came under Greek rule in the 3rd century BCE, following the conquest by Alexander the Great. To the Greeks, Goddesses were the lunar Deities, so as Isis made Her way into Greek culture and hearts, Her new devotees naturally associated Her with the moon.

But in Egypt, Osiris, Khons, Thoth, and I’ah were the Deities most associated with the moon. Isis, for Her part, was connected with the star Sirius as far back as the Pyramid Texts; the star was said to be Her ba, or soul. Yet Isis is also linked with the sun.

As the Sun was the image of one of the most important Gods to the ancient Egyptians, it should not be surprising to find that Isis, one of the most important Goddesses, also has strong solar connections. In some places—notably, Her famous temple at Philae—Isis was worshipped specifically as a Sun Goddess. Among Her solar epithets are Female Re (Re-et) and Female Horus (Horet).

Isis’ most common solar manifestation is as the Eye of Re, the Uraeus, the Cobra Goddess Who coils upon the Sun God’s brow to protect Him; and Who fights a constant cosmic battle against His great opponent, Apop (Gr. Apophis). An inscription at Philae calls Isis “Neseret [fiery]-serpent on the head of Horus-Re, Eye of Re, the Unique Goddess, Uraeus.” A hymn from Philae calls Her “Eye of Re who has no equal in heaven and on earth.” The Eye of Re is His active power. While He maintains His place in the sky, the solar power—the Eye Goddess—goes forth to manifest His Divine will. In this way, Isis and the other Uraeus Goddesses (such as Nephthys, Wadjet, and Tefnut) are similar to Shakti, the active, feminine Power related to the God Shiva in some Hindu sects. Isis is also one of the Deities Who travels with Re in His solar barque as it moves through the Otherworld. Again, Her function is to protect Him and help battle His foes.

A vintage illustration of Isis learning the name of Re by H. m. Brock.

Isis is also associated with the Sun God and the Sun in several of Her important myths. In the tale of Isis and Re, Isis gains power equal to Re’s by learning His secret name, first by poisoning, then by healing the ailing God. In another, with Her magical Words of Power, Isis stops the Boat of the Sun in the sky in order to receive aid for Her poisoned child, Horus.

But it was at Isis’ influential temple at Philae that She was most clearly worshiped as a Sun Goddess and even as the Sun itself. A Philae hymn to Isis praises Her saying, “You are the one who rises and dispels darkness, shining when traversing the primeval ocean, the Brilliant One in the celestial waters, traveling in the barque of Re.” An inscription on the first pylon (gate) at Philae says Isis is the “One Who illumines the Two Lands with Her radiance, and fills the earth with gold-dust.” (Blissful sigh. I absolutely adore this praise of Her…She fills the earth with gold dust.)

Like many other Egyptian Deities, Isis was often envisioned with immortal, golden, solar skin. Some of Her sacred images would have been covered with gold, earning Her, like Hathor, the epithets The Gold and the Golden One. A Philae hymn addresses Her, “O Golden One; Re, the possessor of the Two Lands, will never be far from you.” Some scholars believe that the holy of holies at Philae may have once been gold-leafed so that it always appeared filled with golden, solar light. Wow; to bathe in Her gold dust there!

At Her Philae temple, Isis is first of those in heaven: “Hail to you, Isis, Great of Magic, eldest in the womb of her mother, Nuet, Mighty in Heaven Before Re.” She is the “Sun Goddess in the circuit of the sun disk” and Her radiance outshines even that of Re. At Denderah, She is the power of the sun: “She Who shines as the Right Eye during the day,” and “She Who rises everyday.” She is also the Aten, the Solar Disk itself.

From Her great temple at Philae, Isis’ identity as a Sun Goddess flowed back up the Nile to Her temples at Memphis and Isiopolis in the delta. From there, it entered into the Graeco-Roman culture in the famous aretalogies (self-statements) of Isis. From a papyrus found in Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, we learn that one of Isis’ many names is Name of the Sun and that She is responsible for the rising of the Sun: “Thou [Isis] bringest the sun from rising unto setting, and all the Gods are glad.” In an aretalogy from Kyme, in modern Turkey, Isis says of Herself, “I ordered the course of the sun and the moon.” And later in the same text She says, “I am in the rays of the sun” and “I inspect the courses of the sun.”

Yet even in Egypt itself, Isis is known to rule both sun and moon. An inscription from Denderah calls Her “the great female Ra in the dual course of the sun and the moon.” She gives birth to the Sun God and His Solar Disk, according to inscriptions now in the British Museum and the temple of Esna.

As a Great Goddess, Isis ever reveals more of Herself to Her devotees. We can see Her in the golden sun and in the silver moon…and of course, in diamond starlight, too.

Magical Images & Isis

A female image in ivory from the early predynastic period in Badari — A female image in hippopotamus ivory from the early predynastic period from Badari

As with so many things in Egyptology, there’s controversy surrounding the many female figurines that have been found throughout Egypt and spanning its long history.

These figurines take several forms. Some are standing females, usually nude with sexual characteristics emphasized (eyes, breasts, vulva). Some are abstracted into what have been called “paddle dolls”; more on them shortly. Some show a woman lying on a bed, often with a baby or child beside her. Others show a woman nursing a child.

The old gentlemen of early Egyptology initially guessed that the nude females and paddle dolls—some of them found in tombs—were “spirit concubines” for deceased Egyptian men. Because of course they did. However, the fact that they have been found in the tombs of women and children, too, throws a significant monkey wrench into that interpretation.

There’s also the more modern controversy about whether ancient female figurines should be interpreted as images of Goddesses or even as representations of an all-encompassing Mother Goddess. In opposition are those who regard the figures as devoid of divinity altogether and more likely to have been toys, ancestor figures, tools for sex instruction, or as mentioned above, the ever-popular post mortum concubines.

While the idea of a singular worldwide Goddess cult goes farther than strict interpretation of the evidence can take us (and, in fact, that is not what most proponents of the Goddess interpretation claim), the virulence of the opposition makes me question its objectivity as well. The truth is, we just don’t know. We have no ancient texts explaining these figures for us. Yet, at the very least, the ubiquity of the female figurines as well as their greater numbers in comparison to extant male figurines indicates a keen interest in the feminine by our ancient siblings.

Female figurines in Egypt

Another cache of these images that has received study come from the temple precinct of the Great Mother Mut. Of the small handful of votive images that include inscriptions, all are requests for children. In addition to temples and tombs, these figures have also been found in ancient homes and in domestic shrine settings.

19th dynasty image of a woman and child on a bed

Many modern Egyptologists have come to the consensus that the female figurines are symbols of fertility in its the broadest sense, which includes the ideas of general health and well-being, rebirth and regeneration—in addition to concerns with human reproduction.

There are some other interesting ideas as well. One that I hadn’t come across before is the idea that the paddle dolls are related to a specific type of royal and sacred musicians and dancers.

Paddle dolls

Paddle dolls are flat images with truncated arms, no legs, an emphasized vulva, decorative painting on the body, big hair—and sometimes no head, just a large mop of beaded hair. (See more on the magical importance of Isis’ hair here.) They were first called paddle dolls because of the flat, paddle-like body shape and dolls because they were thought to be toys; some even looked to the archeologists like they had been played with by a child. The largest number of paddle dolls have been excavated from the cemeteries around Thebes in Egypt.

In a paper on the subject, Ellen F. Morris follows a variety of interesting lines of evidence to conclude that the paddle dolls were meant to be representations of the khener-women. Members of the khener were once thought to be part of the pharaoh’s harim, but now are understood to have been skilled and respected musicians and dancers.

Married women and men could also be part of a khener. The khener could be connected to the royal household, to temples of the Deities, and to mortuary temples. When associated with the temples, it seems reasonable to think of them as priest/esses of music and dance.

The story of the birth of the three kings told in the Westcar Papyrus indicates that the women of the khener might also serve as midwives. In this tale, Isis, Nephthys, Heqet, Meshkhenet, and Khumn are specifically said to be disguised as a khener when They deliver the three children of Reddjedet. By the time of the New Kingdom, we know that a khener was part of the worship of Isis.

On several of the paddle dolls and on a number of examples of the female figurines, cross-shaped marks were found on the upper body. Some researchers have correlated these cross marks to similar cross marks seen on the bodies of partially nude female mourners in some New Kingdom tomb paintings. In some of these, two of the mourners are specifically identified as Isis and Nephthys. Scholars have theorized that the partial nudity may refer to Isis’ use of Her arousing sexuality to help bring Osiris back to life. This strengthens the argument that at least some of the female figurines were tools of resurrection, imbued with the arousing power of Isis. This ability of the nude or partially nude figures to induce (male, heterosexual) arousal may hold a key to the reason why they may be considered fertility figures. For potency—in life or after life—the male must be aroused and the female must arouse him.

A particularly beautiful 12th dynasty image from Thebes

Magical images

There are other possible uses for these figurines as well. Some researchers have suggested that they were purposely generic so that they could be assigned magical roles as need be. Healing seems to have been a common use. We have a ritual text that instructs the sufferer to recite a particular spell “over a woman’s statue of clay.” The spell, in the Leiden Papyrus (3rd century CE), is to cure a bellyache. Once the spell is spoken, the papyrus says that “the affliction will be sent down from him into the Isis-statue until he is healed.” (Would you like that in Egyptian? It is repyt Iset, “a female image of Isis.”)

We also find images of Isis used in relation to healing from snakebite. A spell in the Turin Papyrus (First Intermediate Period) instructs the ritualist to use “this clay of Isis that has come forth from under the armpit of Selket” to ward off a snake. In this case the spellworker is to enclose a knife and a particular herb within the clay. We can’t be completely sure whether the “clay of Isis” was in the form of Isis or used to form an image of the Goddess. Some scholars think that it likely was in the form of the Goddess and that the spell in full should read “this clay figure of Isis.”

A Ptolemaic beeswax image of one of the sons or Horus

In addition to clay, magic workers also used beeswax to form their magical images. Figurines made of beeswax are known from the magical papyri and, in specific relation to Isis, from Diodorus Siculus (1.21, 5-6). He says that the Goddess used wax to create multiple figures of Osiris, which She then gave into the keeping of priests throughout Egypt so that Osiris could be buried in locations throughout the land and thus to be widely honored.

A number of the female figurines we’ve found are broken. Originally this was thought to have been accidental. Now scholars are more inclined to think the state is purposeful. Why? Well, if they were being used in healing spells like the one in which the bellyache “went down into” the Isis statue, then to keep the bellyache from returning, it would be reasonable to break the image, permanently obliterating the bellyache with it. Modern magic workers often do the same sort of thing. Once the magic is accomplished, the talisman is dismantled, de-charged, or destroyed.

One of the books I’ve been reading on this conjectures that, given Her role in healing and protection, many of the generic female images may have been used specifically as Isis figures. The image “became” Isis with the recitation of the spell. The crude fashioning of many of the images is to be explained by the fact that, in many cases, they were intended to be disposable. Once broken and disposed, the images were no longer Isis, but simply a container for the affliction.

A copper image from the Middle Kingdom now in Berlin; an inscriptions identifies it as Isis nursing Horus — A copper image from the Middle Kingdom now in Berlin; an inscription identifies it as Isis nursing Horus

Images of the nursing woman

The female figure of a woman nursing an infant is easily seen as Isis nursing Horus. Stephanie Budin argues, however, that we should not understand this specifically as Isis and Horus until the late New Kingdom. Before that time, the image reflected a variety of Divine Wet Nurses nourishing the king.

She also discusses the fascinating idea that images such as the nursing woman—as well as the other female figurines we have been discussing—might have been used to intensify magic and prayers. She refers to them as “potency figures.” (This idea is also discussed by Elizabeth Waraksa, who has studied these images from the Mut temple.) In other words, the images were a kind of magical battery that empowered the ritual.

I like this idea very much. It’s also excellent magical practice. Modern priest/ess magicians would call it adding “correspondences” to the rite. Colors, stones, herbs, and symbols that relate to the ritual purpose can be used to help the magic worker “tune in” to the divine powers that can assist in accomplishing the magic of the rite. In the case of the nursing woman images, our ancient Egyptian might be tuning in to the nurturing or protective powers of Isis.

Budin also suggests that, alternatively, the nursing-woman images (for example, the one now in Berlin pictured above) may have been used as prayer intensifiers when honoring Isis and Horus. In this case, the image would serve as an offering as well as a magical battery.

All of these are interesting ideas and each makes sense in certain contexts. To me, it seems likely that the answer is “all of the above.” Egypt was an image-intensive society. The images were probably used in a wide variety of ways, some of which we may have deduced, some of which, as yet, we have not.

Isis & Her Dark Twin, Nephthys

A stunning modern Nephthys by—appropriately—a pair of artist sisters, Katya and Lena Popovy, dollmakers — A stunning modern Nephthys by—appropriately—a pair of artist sisters, Katya and Lena Popovy

Let us have a little Nephthys today. It is early September and there is melancholy in the air. Not to mention that there is some serious s*it going down all around us. Sometimes we look to our Dark Goddesses in such times.

And sometimes, when we look to Them, we find surprising things.

For instance, older Egyptological books informed us that Nephthys was never worshipped alone and had no temples of Her own. But that was only because they hadn’t found any yet.

We now know of several Nephthys temples, a smaller New Kingdom one within a Set temple precinct at Sepermeru, halfway between Heracleopolis and Oxyrhynchus (where that huge cache of texts, including magical texts and a praise of Isis was found), and a Ptolemaic and Roman-era temple at Komir, near Esna.

In Her Komir (Egy. Pr Myr) temple, there is a lengthy hymn to Her that identifies Her with many other Goddesses, just as Isis is known by many names. She is “the Great, the Most Excellent, dwelling in the Beautiful Country—the abode of Her brother Osiris, Who comes to life again in Her, She Who renews for Him the body that once was, in Her name of Renewing of Life.” She is invoked as Meshkenet, the Birth Goddess, Hathor, Mistress of Drunkeness and Joy, Tefnut “in the moment of Her wrath,” and Seshet, Lady of Writing and “of the Entire Library.” She is Mut and Mafdet and Meret and Heket. She is the one Who “utters divine decrees, Great of Magic, who rules in the Mansion of Archivists.” She is Excellent of Kindness and unites Herself with Ma’et. She is the Mother of Amun and the Daughter of Re. She is Mighty, Formidable, Beautiful.

In a papyrus known as the Book of Hours—Ptolemaic and probably from Memphis—praises are recorded for a select group of Deities, including Nephthys. There She is called Kindly of Heart, Mistress of Women, the Valiant, the Strong-Armed, Who Begat Horus, Potent of Deeds, the Wise, the Acute of Counsel, and the Sad at Heart.

A wonderful Nephthys by Jeszika Le Vye. Get your copy here.

Interestingly, Her epithets in this papyrus do not parallel those of Isis, Who is In All that Comes Into Being at Her Command, Lady of What Exists, Sharp of Flame, Who Fills the Land with Her Governance, Who Pleases the Gods with What She Says, the Savior, Isis-Bast and Isis-Sakhmet, the Sister of the Great One, Who Comes at Call, and the Living North Wind.

As Twin Goddesses, Isis and Nephthys are often called “the two” this or that. You’ll find a list of those twosome names in a previous Isis and Nephthys post here. We often think of Isis as the Bright Twin and Nephthys as the Dark Twin. And it’s true. Sort of.

For instance, the Pyramid Texts instruct the deceased king to

Ascend and descend; descend with Nephthys, sink into darkness with the Night-barque. Ascend and descend; ascend with Isis, rise with the Day-barque.
Pyramid Text 222

The Two Goddesses bear light and dark children to the same God. Osiris fathered the bright God, Horus, with Isis while with Nephthys, He fathered the dark God, Anubis. The Two Goddesses also manifest their Divine power differently. While Isis guides and sheds light on the hidden paths of the Otherworld, the Coffin Texts tell us that Nephthys speaks and they are obscured: “Hidden are the ways for those who pass by; light is perished and darkness comes into being, so says Nephthys.”

While Isis summons the Barque of the Day, Nephthys is “a possessor of life in the Night-barque.” As in Pyramid Text 217, Nephthys is paired with Set, a God of dark moods and dark reputation and associated with Upper Egypt, while Isis is paired with the benevolent God Osiris and connected to Lower Egypt. In the tomb of Tuthmosis III, Nephthys is said to be the Lady of the Bed of Life, by which was meant the embalming table. She is also Queen of the Embalmer’s Shop. Plutach preserves the tradition that Nephthys was associated with the desert and the fringes of the earth, while Isis is that part of the earth made fertile by the Nile.

But wait. As with most Things Egyptian, it’s not that simple. It’s not that black-and-white nor dark and light.

Isis is not just about rebirth and sunrise. She is also the Great Mooring Post, the one Who calls each of us to our deaths. She is the Goddess “ruling in the perfect blackness” of the Otherworld and She has Her own wrathful and fiery moods. Nephthys, on the other hand, is not only about descent in the Night-barque. She is right there with Isis at the sunrise rebirth. And She is a Goddess for Whom festivals of drunkenness and joy were celebrated. She is the Lady of Beer and while Isis, too, can be so called, I know of no festivals of Divine inebriation celebrated for Her, even given Her close connection to Hathor, the original Queen of Divine Drunkenness.

Nephthys in Her protective stance, mirroring Isis — Nephthys in Her protective stance, a mirror of Isis

The Two Sisters are not so much opposites as complements to each other. It is interesting that Isis and Nephthys seem to have become attached to different aspects of Hathor in Their association with Her. Sad at Heart Nephthys became connected with Hathor, Lady of Joy and Divine Intoxication. Lady of Governance Isis became connected with Hathor the soft-eyed Cow Mother, the Mother of the God, and the Lady of Amentet. Yet, as always, these roles are fluid and the Two Sisters flow into one another, even as They express different aspects of Their Divinity.

People sometimes wonder whether Isis and Nephthys are two different Goddesses or one Goddess? For me, the answer is, “Yes. And no.” They are One and They are Two. In my personal work with the Two Sisters, I can’t say that Nephthys feels very much different than Isis (though there are differences), but that may be because I pay a lot of attention to Isis’ own darker aspects. That admission inspires me to take some time this weekend to honor Nephthys, Excellent of Kindness, and see what more She may wish me to know.

Serving Isis: a responsibility to know and to experience

The Temple of Philae; photo by Ivan Marcialis from Quartucciu, Italy and used under Wiki Creative Commons usage guidelines — The Temple of Isis, a temple of learning; photo by Ivan Marcialis, Quartucciu, Italy; used under Wiki Creative Commons usage guidelines

There is a saying in the western esoteric initiatory tradition that seems particularly apt for the ministrant of Isis: “I desire to know in order that I may serve.” In means that we are not entering into our service simply because we’re greedy for secrets or status. It means that we seek knowledge so that we can better serve the Goddess, our communities, and our world.

Since ministerial service is essentially about giving, improving our own knowledge base and experience also means we will have something valuable to give.

Knowledge

Of course, those who serve the Goddess have always been expected to have some special knowledge, for example, knowing how to properly conduct the rites required to create and maintain a relationship with Isis. But this devotion to learning goes beyond that, too. The Greek philosopher, Porphyry, in his work On Abstinence, paraphrases the Stoic philosopher Chaeremon’s observations on the Egyptian priesthood:

“But they divided the night into the observation of the celestial bodies, and sometimes devoted a part of it to offices of purification; and they distributed the day into the worship of the Gods, according to which they celebrated them with hymns thrice or four times, viz. in the morning and evening, when the sun is at his meridian altitude, and when he is declining to the west. The rest of their time they devoted to arithmetical and geometrical speculations, always laboring to effect something, and to make some new discovery, and, in short, continually exercising their skill. In winter nights also they were occupied in the same employments, being vigilantly engaged in literary pursuits…”
Porphyry, On Abstinence, book 4, section 8

Seshat, Goddess of Wisdom, Knowledge, and Writing, shown with Her stylus

Thus, being a ministrant means not only knowing the proper rites, but also pursuing knowledge of all kinds, striving always to “make some new discovery.” There can be no doubt that teaching went on in the Egyptian temples. Of course, this was knowledge only for a very select group of people. Yet it informed the work of the priesthood so that they could be more effective in their service on behalf of Egypt and the people as a whole.

The Mysteries, such as the Mysteries of Isis or the Mysteries of Eleusis, were open to a wider group of people—as long as you could afford the travel and other expenses. Here, too, the officiants were expected to have special knowledge and understanding. Furthermore, they were expected to share that information with the initiates.

It was, in part, for this special knowledge that one undertook the Mystery rites. Initiates might expect the revelation of certain secrets regarding the Deities of the Mysteries. They might learn about new aspects of the Deities or be taught secrets of myth or ritual. Many would have been given important information about how to ensure a happy afterlife, as were Orphic initiates who were instructed on the proper spring from which to drink on their journey toward rebirth. In fact, it was quite commonly expected that the ritual guides of the Mysteries guided their clients to knowledge.

You may recall that in Apuleius’ tale of initiation into the Mysteries of Isis, he was shown certain books (seemingly in hieroglyphs) that contained the instructions for his preparations for initiation. In fact, one of Isis’ late epithets is Lady of the Book. The aretalogy from Oxyrhynchus says that She was called Understanding at the town of Apis; and Isis has always been a Lady of Wisdom. Isis is a Goddess Who encourages learning and wisdom in Her devotees, and especially in Her ministrants.

Alas, modern Isiacs have no great temples in which to study or established Mysteries of our Goddess in which to serve.

As is our path in general, our course of study in Her honor must be more individualized. As one who serves Isis in this deeper capacity, there are things we should know. As far as it is possible, we should know the history of Her worship, how people honored Her in the past, what they thought and said about Her. That is one of the reasons I wrote Isis Magic. To be Her ministrant, I needed to know these things; and then, I needed to pass them on. That was one of Her tasks for me. Acquiring that knowledge formed a large part of my personal training. Even so, there is much Isis-related scholarship out there in the world and I still find out new things about Her and how people have related to Her throughout history. I try to share those new discoveries here on Isiopolis.

As a ministrant of Isis, you will likely be in a position to influence others. If you are teaching, you will need to know something in order to be able to teach it. As your students learn, you will have to continue learning so that you may always have something new to teach them. If we don’t keep on learning, we become dry vessels—not only for any thirsty students we may have the privilege to teach, but for ourselves as well. To keep our intellectual and spiritual juices flowing, we must keep learning.

And Experience

But “book learnin” is just one of the ways of knowing. The other is experience. This means we must develop our personal relationship with Isis; we must experience Her. This is a subtle kind of learning. It is different for each individual. And yet, there are commonalities. It is these subtle commonalities that let us know we’re connecting with Isis specifically.

This is even trickier when it comes to Isis because She is a Great Goddess. She has many, many aspects and different people may connect with different aspects. Still, there is a feeling commonality. I’m pretty sure that if you connected with Isis as Great Mother and I connected with Her as Great of Magic—and we could share each other’s feelings—as Her experienced ministrants, we would know that we were both experiencing Isis.

In the grand scheme of explaining things, that doesn’t help much, does it? Yet that’s what experience does. As a ministrant of Isis, you should be able to tell. On the other hand, we can’t let our experiential knowledge be used to deny someone else’s experience, even if we don’t agree with it, or to boost our own egos because we have the “right” answer. Our experience should be used to guide, and only with the permission of the guided (as in a teaching relationship).

Priest making offering — A priest purifying

The Pagan internet has been lit up in the last few years with a good deal of theological soul-searching about the nature of the Divine and our relationship to the Divine. It is very exciting that we have grown to the extent that it is time to have these discussions; I just wish we could have them without so many arguments.

Our experiences as devotees and as ministrant of Isis will lead us to find our own answers to these important questions. Our experiences can add value to the ongoing discussion about the nature of the Divine and our relationship with It. Our experiences may be used to guide others as they begin their own paths and until they find their own answers. But we must use our experiences wisely. Developing that wisdom is part of our Work as people who serve Isis.

What does it mean to serve the Goddess Isis?

The pharaoh, as High Priest, makes offering to Isis

With a number of us gearing up to serve as ritualists in an upcoming Pacific Northwest Fall Equinox Festival, I’m re-running an older post on what it means to serve Isis as Her priest/ess. (Also, I’m scrambling to get the ritual written before our next Festival Crewe gathering, so bear with me.)

Of course, not all of our Festival ritualists will desire a relationship with Isis beyond the festival. Probably most won’t; they may already have important Divine connections in their lives. But for those who may, I offer these next few posts as starting thoughts for discovering a specific type of relationship with Her.

Oh, and another thing. As these are older posts, they used the gendered terms “priestess” and “priest.” As a community, we haven’t yet settled on a gender non-specific title for the intensely connected relationship with the Goddess that I will be talking about. So I’m going to try out a new one…and we’ll just see how that goes.

In ancient Egypt, the terms were very gendered; you really can’t get around that. One was either a Male Servant (hem) of the Goddess or one was a Female Servant (hemet) of the Goddess. So we’re not going to rely on ancient Egyptian terms, but English.

And now, here’s the older post with updates…

A priestess shakes the sistrum to please the Goddess — A Servant of the Goddess shakes the sistrum to please Isis

Of course, we can all have a deeply meaningful personal relationship with the Deity or Deities of our choice in whatever capacity we choose. But being a ministrant of the Deity is a particular kind of relationship; a particularly worthwhile one if you find yourself attracted to Isis.

If you already serve a specific Deity, you have likely already done some thinking on this topic. If not yet, you may decide, sometime in the future, that you’d like to have a deeper, more formal relationship with Isis as Her ministrant.

But what does it mean to serve Isis in this way? The easy answer is that it means different things to different people. The more difficult, and truer, answer is that we each have to figure out for ourselves what it means to us.

So how do we do that?

A good place to start is with what it has meant to serve the Goddess in this intensely connected manner. So over the next few posts, we’ll talk about some of the things we know about ancient Servants of Isis as well as some of the ways we can discover for ourselves what being Her ministrant may mean to us today.

Serving the Goddess

Service has been part of a ministrant’s job description as far back as we know. In one sense “one who serves” is the very definition of this role. This is true of our English word “minister.” To minister is to serve and, as you can see, it is the basis of the non-gender-specific word I’m trying out here. Generally, a ministrant’s service goes two ways: to the Divine and to the greater circle of worshippers.

A priest of Isis carries a sacred vessel in veiled hands

For people in mainstream religions, which have very prescribed ways to serve, things are—in at least this way—easier. For example, if you are a Catholic priest (you can’t be a Catholic priestess), you would have a very clear idea of what it meant in your particular religion to “serve God.” You would have gone through specific training meant to teach you precisely this.

Having precise ways to serve was true in ancient temples of Isis, too. Besides the upkeep and maintenance of the temple complex, there were particular ritual acts that had to be performed every day; for example, opening the shrine of the sacred image of Isis each morning and “putting Her to bed” each night. And of course, there were offerings to be made, festivals to be celebrated, and funerals to conduct. A ministrant of Isis might play the role of the Goddess in certain rituals. The Servants of Isis would learn the words to the sacred songs and invocations and how to perform them properly in the rites. Some served as sacred musicians.

A priestess carries a sacred vessel in veiled hands

But this type of formal structure of service is not available to us today. In a non-mainstream, more informal type of spirituality—such as those of the modern Pagan-Polytheist-Wiccan-Witch-insert-your-identifier-of-choice-here communities—things are less clear. It means that this path, if truly and deeply followed, is more difficult than those of mainstream religions because we have to blaze our own trail. It also requires a significant degree of perseverance and self-honesty to be able to make the important decisions that we must make when creating a personal path.

To take this alternative path, we need perseverance because we will not always know which branch of the path to take…or it will be dark…or it will even be boring. We need self-honesty because we often walk this path alone. And walking alone, with no one to consult, we can sometimes take a wrong turn. We can delude ourselves into not seeing things about ourselves or a situation that we should be seeing.

On the other hand, this path can be extremely rewarding precisely because it is difficult. Whereas in mainstream religions there tend to be established answers to the Great Questions, we must find our own answers—fresh and new every time. What happens after death? What does it mean to serve Isis? Why is there evil in the world? What is the nature of reality? What is the nature of humanity? What is the nature of the Divine?

All these are important questions that spiritual people have tried to answer from the beginning of time, and for which we still seek answers today. It is worth our time, as lovers of Isis, to seek our own answers to these questions.

Roman sacerdotes of Isis in sacred procession

Some will define service as “doing Goddess’ will on earth.” That’s a valuable insight; but how do you know if you’re doing Her will? Is it as simple as listening to your inner voice? Perhaps. Yet how do you know you’re hearing correctly and not coloring it with your own personal psychology or desires? I can tell you for a fact, it will ALWAYS be colored by your own personal psychology and desires. That’s not a disaster; it just brings us back to that self-honesty thing.

So how do you get around yourself? Discovering how to do that is part of the work of a ministrant of Isis. For some, it may be the key part. So I’m going to come back and talk about this some more when I come to the topic of personal spiritual development in a later post. For now, back to service.

A modern priestess of Isis enters the temple at Isis Oasis — A modern Isian enters the temple at Isis Oasis

What about the other kind of service—service to the greater circle of worshipers?

You’ll find a wide variety of expressions of service in this area. Some ministrants are always available to help those in their circle, whether with spiritual or personal problems. Some take the responsibility of organizing a circle and keeping it running as their service, but don’t expect to be called on the solve personal problems. Some represent their tradition to the greater Pagan community by organizing large festivals. Some organize or moderate blog communities. Some teach. Some don’t.

Again, it is a personal decision as to how you might decide to serve. Yet I do think that we are obligated to do some service of this type. By serving other people in these ways, we acknowledge the importance—the value—of other people. By serving people, we integrate this knowledge in a deep, intimate, and personal way. (I hear some of you moaning right now. People are SO difficult. Yes. Yes, they are. And complicated. You bet they are. But they are also very worth your time and care. So very, very worth it.)

The same is true of service to others who are not a part of your circle; humanity as a whole. Many religions—most religions, actually—place value on helping those in need. Feeding the hungry. Clothing the cold. Sheltering those without shelter. This sort of service is appropriate for the ministrant of Isis as well. Caring in this way makes us aware of other people and their needs and problems. It encourages our compassion and discourages our ego-centered-ness. At the very least a Servant of Isis should give money to charity—anonymously, if possible. Do other good deeds. Help people. Help the earth. And be aware of doing whatever it is you are doing in the spirit of service—with an open, compassionate heart. In this, we do our best to imitate the compassion of Isis Herself when She healed the child of the woman who refused Her shelter or withdrew the spear from Set even as He threatened Her own son, Horus.

Ultimately, serving others makes this world a better place one person at a time. Spread kindness and you will serve Isis.

The Keeper of the Pharos Lighthouse

An artist's depiction of reincarnation — An artist’s depiction of reincarnation

I don’t know whether I believe in reincarnation; at least in the usual contemporary sense. Oh, I like the idea of it…and it’s quite true that there are some amazing stories people tell of past lives.

Egyptologists, however, are almost unanimously certain that the ancient Egyptians did not believe in reincarnation; presumably, they had enough going on in their afterlives already.

On the other hand, we do have ancient Greek reports of Egyptian belief in reincarnation or the “transmigration of the soul.”

Herodotus writes,

The Egyptians say that Demeter [that is, Isis] and Dionysos [that is, Osiris] are rulers of the world below; and the Egyptians are also the first who reported the doctrine that the soul of man is immortal, and that when the body dies, the soul enters into another creature which chances then to be coming to the birth, and when it has gone the round of all the creatures of land and sea and of the air, it enters again into a human body as it comes to the birth; and that it makes this round in a period of three thousand years. This doctrine certain Hellenes adopted, some earlier and some later, as if it were of their own invention, and of these men I know the names but I abstain from recording them. (Herodotus, Histories Book II, 123)

Diodorus Siculus also reported prominent Greeks who adopted Egyptian teachings, including the transmigration of the soul:

Lycurgus also and Plato and Solon, they say, incorporated many Egyptian customs into their own legislation and Pythagoras learned from Egyptians his teachings about the gods, his geometrical propositions and theory of numbers, as well as the transmigration of the soul into every living thing. (Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Book I, 98)

Plutarch mentions it, too:

The Egyptians, believing that Typhon was born with red hair, dedicate to sacrifice the red coloured oxen, and make the scrutiny so close that if the beast should have even a single black or white hair, they consider it unfit for sacrifice; because such beast, offered for sacrifice, is not acceptable to the gods, but the contrary (as is) whatsoever has received the souls of unholy and unjust men, that have migrated into other bodies. (Plutarch, “On Isis & Osiris,” 31)

It may be that Herodotus misinterpreted the post mortum transformations of the dead (“Becoming a Hawk of Gold,” for example) as transmigrations of the soul. It may be that Diodorus and Plutarch, writing after Herodotus, just picked up his idea.

Empedokles, a contemporary of Herodotus, refers to “polluted daimons” who are forced to wander the world in many forms “changing one toilsome path of life for another,” though he does not refer to this as being an Egyptian conception. (Empedokles, Katharmoi)

In a number of his works, Plato mentions transmigration as punishment that souls suffer for bad deeds in life. The idea entered the Roman world as well. It can be seen in Virgil’s Aeneid, where reincarnation was seen as a reward for a good soul rather than a punishment for a bad one.

For the Egyptians, the transformations of the dead were simply part of an active and happy afterlife. The dead could become a hawk, a lotus, a serpent…and godlike. Louis Zabkar (an Egyptologist who made an important study of the Isis hymns at Philae) believes that this was a way of ensuring the ba of the person had unlimited freedom to come and go at will on earth and in the otherworld.

Several pharaohs took the name Repeater of Births, which sounds like a reference to reincarnation, but probably isn’t. For Seti I, it apparently meant that he intended to usher in an Egyptian renaissance of sorts. Or it may have referred to the pharaoh’s divine rebirths, which occurred at certain festivals of renewal, or to the the king’s connection to the Sun God Re Who is reborn daily.

All that said, I’d like to share with you one of my (possible?) past life stories.

During a vacation period a while ago, I had the luxury of frequent invocation of the Goddess. While working the Opening of the Ways ritual , I “saw” a flash of a scene that had a deju vu feeling about it, so I decided to follow up on that vision with Isis. Under Her wings, I traveled back in the Boat of Millions of Years to locate the life that included the scene that had touched me. Here is that tale…

A woman of about 20 is looking out across the Alexandrian harbor. Her name is Ankesphilia and she is the priestess of the Pharos, the Lighthouse of Alexandria. Her duty is to perform something like the Opening of the Ways ritual—but for the opening of the Alexandrian harbor and for fair, “open” weather. This is done within the Pharos itself, about halfway up the structure. That’s where the scene that first caught my attention is from: halfway up the Pharos, overlooking the harbor.

And while Isis is the Goddess of the Lighthouse, it is not Isis who is in Ankesphilia’s heart. Instead, it is her duty to the city that occupies her. Ankesphilia has almost no personal freedom and must stay on Pharos Island at all times, except when there are great festivals in the city. Then she may go to see the processions. I have the feeling that she was “given” or vowed to the Pharos, though it was not her own vow; perhaps her parents? In a way, it reminds me of the later Christian anchorites.

An artist's vision of the Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria — An artist’s vision of the Pharos lighthouse of Alexandria

The priestess is from a wealthy, but not noble, family. Her parents own a shipping business, but now her father has retired to the priesthood and her mother runs the business. Her father sometimes visits Ankesphilia at the Pharos. She rarely sees her mother. She has two brothers, both in the military. Though she has had no choice in her fate, I sense no rebellion or resentment in her. I have the feeling she is perhaps not very well educated, bright, or curious. She simply does the duty that has been given to her without complaint and with conscientiousness.

Ankesphilia died in her 30s after contracting a disease that came into the harbor city from overseas.

And that’s it. Past life? Fantasy? I don’t know, but either way, it tells me something about myself.

Invocation Offerings to Isis

A king offering incense and pouring a libation

It seems we have always made offering to our Deities. Many have also honored their dead with offerings, as the ancient Egyptians did. Our ancestors offered the choicest cut of meat to the Great Hunter Who had helped them in their hunt. They gave the first handful of ripe berries to the Wild Mother Who had guided them to the mouth-watering cache. They shared their holy days and good fortune by offering feasts to their dead. They filled temples with sumptuous meals and beautiful scents for the Goddesses and Gods. They created art in enduring stone and precious metals and offered it to the Divine Houses.

From Christian tithing to Hindu puja to the stargazer lilies I grow and place upon Isis’ altar, we humans continue to make offering. Perhaps there is something of an inborn impulse to do so.

The Seattle Troll; that's a real VW Beetle in his left hand and a real bridge over his head — The Seattle Troll; that’s a real VW Beetle in his left hand and a real bridge over his head

I came across what I take as an example of that innate impulse one day when visiting the Seattle Troll. Large enough to hold a VW Beetle in one hand and staring out of a single, glassy eye, the Seattle Troll lives beneath the Aurora Bridge in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood. He was originally a work of art funded by the city, but he has become something more. He has become a Work of Art and now receives offerings from passersby and neighborhood residents.

The day I visited—not a special day, just a weekday like any other—the Troll was supplied with an amazing array of offerings. There were fresh flowers, smoked almonds, jewelry, coins, jams, a bag of fresh cherries, a whole watermelon, a bright pink-orange slab of raw salmon, a whole Dungeness crab, a bar of soap, a pack of cigarettes, two coffee mugs, and two t-shirts. These offerings were fresh, too, the flowers and food as yet unwilted. At first, it looked like someone had temporarily left their picnic. But no. The votives were carefully arranged upon the enormous hands of the Troll. They were clearly presented, and no picnickers were to be found. The items were offerings and nothing less.

Two of the six Devas making continual offering in Hong Kong — Two of the six Devas making continual offering to the Buddha in Hong Kong

I doubt that any of those who offer to the Troll see him as a Deity—at most, he’s a quirky neighborhood spirit. Yet people leave offerings just the same.

Perhaps it’s because when we make offering we are seeking relationship. In the case of the Troll, perhaps we seek connection with the progressive spirit of the neighborhood. Maybe the Troll’s mere existence gave us a chuckle and we offer a gift of thanks, connecting with those who share our amusement or with the Troll’s artist-creators. Perhaps the offerings were intended to be discovered by someone in need, as Hekate’s Supper offerings were meant.

In a divine context, making offering can be a joyful sharing of blessings with the Deity or spirits with whom we have or seek a relationship. As an act of gift giving, offering is a universal way to create the sweet bonds of interconnection and ongoing reciprocity between giver and receiver. Offering encourages generosity in the giver. Some Tibetan Buddhists say that it is this growing generosity in ourselves that pleases the Deities, rather than the actual offerings. Offering can be a meditation, a prayer, a way to honor tradition, an act of devotion, a method of giving thanks, a path to greater openness of spirit.

Making offering was essential to the Egyptian relationship with the Divine while the relationship itself was essential to the proper functioning of the universe. The Egyptians knew that the universal order hinged upon the ongoing, interwoven relationship between Divine and human, natural and supernatural. If human beings failed to provide right worship to the Deities—a significant part of which was the act of making offering—the world would dissolve into chaos and the Goddesses and Gods would not have the energy required to maintain and renew the physical universe. The exchange of energy, the building of relationship made the act of offering an ongoing renewal of the world in partnership with the Deities.

In fact, offering was considered such a key part of the functioning of the universe that there are numerous representations of Deities making offering to each other. From Isis’ temple at Philae, we learn that the Goddess made libation offerings to Her beloved Osiris every 10 days. The temple calendar from Esna notes that She also made offering to Osiris (and to another Deity Whose name is lost) on the 10th day of the first month of the season of Inundation.

In ancient Egyptian temples, the offerings were often food and drink, flowers, incense, perfume, and even special items associated with the particular Deity: jewelry for Hathor, hawk feathers for Horus. Symbolic offerings were given too. The Eye of Horus, for example, could represent many different types of offerings and statuettes of Ma’at were given to represent the offerant’s dedication to upholding the Right and the Just and the True, which is the Being and Nature of the Goddess Ma’at.

But today, I’d like to talk about a particular type of offering, one that may be especially appropriate to Isis as Lady of Words of Power and, as She was called in Busiris, Djedet Weret, the Great Word. Egyptologists today call it an “invocation offering.” Egyptians called it peret kheru, the “going forth of the voice.”

We’ve talked many times about the power of the word in Egyptian practice. Isis conceives something in Her heart, then speaks it into existence. Words can establish, they can move magic, they can nourish and renew the spirit. A Hermetic text from the early centuries of the Common Era expressed the genuinely ancient Egyptian tradition that the quality of the speech and the very sound of the Egyptian words contain the energy of the objects of which they speak and are “sounds full of action.” This is precisely why words are powerful: they contain the energy of the objects they name, which is the energy of original Creation.

Because of their power, many of the most important words were preserved in Egypt’s great temple complexes in structures known as the Per Ankh, the House of Life. Primarily, the House of Life was a library containing information about all the things that sustained life and nourished the soul and spirit—from magic to medicine to religious mysteries.

The sacred words contained in the Houses of Life were sometimes understood as the food of the deceased as well as of the Deities, particularly of Osiris as the Divine prototype of all the dead. One of the funerary books instructs the deceased that his spiritual “hw-food” is to be found in the library and that his provisions “come into being” in the House of Life. A papyrus known as the Papyrus SALT says that the books in the House of Life at Abydos are “the emanations of Re” that keep Osiris alive. An official who claimed to have restored the House of Life at Abydos said that he “renewed the sustenance of Osiris.”

Because of the nourishing and sustaining power of the word, tomb inscriptions not only asked visitors to speak the name of the deceased, but might also ask them to recite an offering formula so that the offerings would be “renewed.” Egyptologists know this as the “appeal to the living.” The deceased assures the living that he or she need only speak the formula with the “breath of the mouth” and that doing so benefits the one who does it even more than the one who receives it.

By speaking the words and naming the offerings, the spiritual essence and magic of those offerings was re-activated and reconnected with its non-physical source so that it could once again feed the spirit of the deceased. It was as if the tomb visitor had given the offerings anew. Since both the human giver and the spirit receiver gained during this process, the act of making offering in this way reinforced and promoted the reciprocal blessings between the material and spiritual worlds.

Thus the peret kheru is an offering where no material object was given, but magically potent words were spoken. Because of the essential spiritual unity of an object, its representation, and the words that describe and name it, the Egyptians considered invocation offerings to be fully as effective and fully as valuable as physical offerings. Invocation offering is a genuine, traditional Egyptian form of offering.

Magical Images & Our Lady of Magic

As with so many things in Egyptology, there’s controversy surrounding the many female figurines that have been found throughout Egypt and spanning its long history.

The old gentlemen of early Egyptology initially guessed that the nude females and paddle dolls, a number of them found in tombs, were “spirit concubines” for deceased Egyptian men. (However, the fact that they have been found in the tombs of women and children, too, throws a significant monkey wrench into that interpretation.)

Female figurines in Egypt

These images are also commonly interpreted as general “fertility symbols.” This makes sense due to the emphasized sexual characteristics of many figurines and the connection with the child in others, as well as the fact that a number of them seem to have been given as votive offerings to the Great Goddess Hathor, one of Whose concerns is fertility. (It should be noted that Hathor also received what one Egyptologist described as “baskets full” of clay phalluses.) Another cache of these images that has received study come from the temple precinct of the Great Mother Mut. Of the small handful of votive images that include inscriptions, all are requests for children. In addition to temples and tombs, these figures have also been found in ancient homes and in domestic shrine settings.

There are some other interesting ideas as well. One that I hadn’t come across before is the idea that the paddle dolls are related to a specific type of royal and sacred musicians and dancers.

Paddle dolls

Paddle dolls are flat images with truncated arms, no legs, an emphasized vulva, decorative painting on the body, big hair—and sometimes no head, just an abundance of beaded hair. (See more on the magical importance of Isis’ hair here.) They were first called paddle dolls because of the flat, paddle-like body shape and dolls because they were thought to be toys; some even looked to the archeologists like they had been played with by a child. The largest number of paddle dolls have been excavated from the cemeteries around Thebes in Egypt.

In a paper on the subject, Ellen F. Morris follows a variety of very interesting lines of evidence to conclude that the paddle dolls were meant to be representations of the khener-women. Members of the khener were once thought to be part of the pharaoh’s harim, but now understood to have been skilled and respected musicians and dancers. Married women and men could also be part of a khener. The khener could be connected to the royal household, to temples of the Deities, and to mortuary temples. When associated with the temples, it seems reasonable to think of them as priest/esses of music and dance.

On several of the paddle dolls and on a number of examples of the female figurines, cross-shaped marks were found on the upper body. Some researchers have correlated these cross marks to similar cross marks seen on the bodies of partially nude female mourners in some New Kingdom tomb paintings. In some of these, two of the women are specifically identified as Isis and Nephthys. Some scholars have theorized that the partial nudity may refer to Isis’ use of Her arousing sexuality to help bring Osiris back to life. This strengthens the argument that at least some of the female figurines were tools of resurrection, imbued with the arousing power of Isis. This ability of the nude or partially nude figures to induce (male, heterosexual) arousal may hold a key to the reason why they may be considered fertility figures. For potency—in life or after life—the male must be aroused and the female must arouse him.

Magical images

We also find images of Isis used in relation to healing from snakebite. A spell in the Turin Papyrus (First Intermediate Period) instructs the ritualist to use “this clay of Isis that has come forth from under the armpit of Selket” to ward off a snake. In this case the spellworker is to enclose a knife and a particular herb within the clay. We can’t be completely sure whether the “clay of Isis” was in the form of Isis or used to form an image of the Goddess. Some scholars think so and that the spell in full should read “this clay figure of Isis.”

Images of the nursing woman

It’s also excellent magical practice. Modern magicians would call it adding “correspondences” to the rite. Colors, stones, herbs, and symbols that relate to the ritual purpose can be used to help the magic worker “tune in” to the divine powers that can assist in accomplishing the magic of the rite. In the case of the nursing woman images, our ancient Egyptian might be tuning in to the nurturing or protective powers of Isis.

Isis the Mother

10_luxor_museum_-_Mut_-_dated_19_dynasty_c_1279_to_1213_BC — The Mother

Here are some lines (though not all of them) from a particularly interesting New Kingdom hymn to the Goddess.

I have simplified some of the lacunae and made the appropriate capitalizations.

See if you can guess which Goddess the hymn praises:

“…great of sunlight, Who illumines [the entire land with] Her rays. She is His Eye, Who causes the land to prosper, the glorious eye of Harakhti, the Ruler of What Exists, the Great and Powerful Mistress, life being in Her possession in this Her name […]
[…] in the circuit. The Gods are in … Great of Might. Her Eye has illumined the horizon. The Ennead, Their hearts are glad because of Her, the Mistress of Their Joy, in this Her name of Heaven.
She is in their hearts, they being glad when She ascends to Her abode, Her temple. She has appeared and has shone as the Woman of Gold […] of best pure silver. All lands give Her their divine property in Her name, and their standards of their places. They rejoice for Her and Her beauty which belongs to Her. Everyone comes into existence through Her when he is created, say the Living in this temple.
There exists no one like Her on earth. She who lives by the might of Her word.
[…] the Great One of the Throne […] She is […] of forms, Great of Property, Mistress of That Which Exists. The papyrus flourishes.”

This Goddess is also called Mistress of the Gods, Queen of Heaven, Great Goddess, Mighty Goddess, Lady of the Two Lands.

The hymn could well be used to praise Isis. Because it seems that all the Great Goddesses, at one time or another, were called by each other’s epithets and even by each other’s names. (See how that applies to Nephthys here.) Louis Zabkar, who has studied the Isis hymns at Philae extensively, traced how a number of the texts at Philae were adapted from preexisting sources to suit both the space they had available at Philae and the Goddess they were praising.

But this particular hymn is in praise of Mut; and it is especially interesting because it is in the form of a crossword. Known as the Crossword Hymn to Mut (obviously enough), the instructions say to read it “three ways.” Indeed, it can be read horizontally and vertically. Scholars guess that the third way might be around the edges, but the artifact is too damaged to be sure that works.

Mut with a phallus from the Book of Doors oracle deck

Mut’s name means simply “Mother.” It is spelled with the vulture hieroglyph, which also connects Her with one of the Two Ladies of Egypt, Nekhebet the Vulture Goddess Who was the protectress of Upper Egypt.

According to Horapollo, supposed to be an Egyptian magician of the fourth century CE, Egyptian tradition had it that there were no male vultures. Female vultures were thought to remain virgin, but to become pregnant by exposing their vulvas to the north wind. Thus Mut is a Virgin Mother. In Her Crossword Hymn, we see Her both as the maiden Daughter of Re and the Great Mother, since everyone comes into existence through Her.

But Mut also has a powerful lioness aspect. In this form, She is one of the Raging and Returning Goddesses, like Sakhmet, Hathor, and Tefnut. In the Book of the Dead, Spell 164, a magical image of Mut is described as having three faces: a vulture, a woman, and a lioness. Not only that, She has a phallus and wings and lion’s claws. The Crossword Hymn shows Her as a fierce and awesome Mother when protecting the dead. Yet it also calls Her Mistress of Joy, Mistress of Peace, and the Beloved One.

Isis with the head of a lioness from the Ombos temple

It almost goes without saying that Isis is a Mother Goddess. Specifically and significantly, She is the mother of Horus, Mut Nutdjer, “Mother of the God.” But She also reveals Herself as Mother of the Gods and as the Great Mother of All. As Great Mother, Isis has inspired the devoted worship of women and men throughout history. During the Græco-Roman period, Her motherliness toward humanity was expressed in the novel The Golden Ass by Her initiate, Lucius, who declared that Isis brings “the sweet love of a mother to the trials of the unfortunate.” This conception of Isis endures today when, for many, Isis is the very model of the Mother Goddess.

Isis from Abydos wearing the Vulture Headdress

It should be no surprise then that Mother Isis and the Goddess Whose name is simply “Mother” would become identified. In Isis’ Roman-era temple at Shenhur, Isis is represented in four forms: as “Isis the Great, Mother of the Gods,” as “The Great Goddess Isis,” as Mut, and as Nephthys Nebet-Ihy (a festive form of Nephthys). In Mut’s Crossword Hymn, Mut is said to be “under the king as the throne,” just as Isis’ very name means “Throne.”

As Isis the Kite protects Osiris by enfolding Him in Her wings, so in one of the Books of the Dead, a vulture-headed Mut is shown enfolding Osiris in the same way. On a pectoral found in Tutankhamon’s funerary equipment, a vulture, labeled “Isis”, guards the king. In the Book of the Dead, the “vulture of gold” to be placed at the neck of the deceased is associated with Isis. Both Isis and Mut wear the Vulture Headdress, though Mut wears over it the combined Red and White Crowns. Both are Eye Goddesses and Uraeus Goddesses and as such are assimilated with Bast and Sakhmet. Both, as Great of Magic, take the prominent place of the divine barque to defend and protect the Sun God. And of course, both are Divine Mothers; Isis of Horus and Mut of Khonsu. Isis and Mut are considered to be the mother of the pharaoh and They ultimately mother those of us devoted to Them.

I started this post because I wanted to share with you the amazing Crossword Hymn of Mut. But now I am being struck by this idea of the correspondences of the Great Goddesses (and the Great Gods, for that matter). The more I study, the more I find that They share mythology, share epithets, and share the ability to appear as each other “in Her name of fill-in-the-blank.” This capacity, along with the ancient Egyptian idea that the Deities could combine Their identities or be the Ba-soul of another Deity points at an underlying unity of the Divine, even in the midst of a thriving polytheism. Works for me.

“Isis with the Lapis Lazuli Head”?

22nd dynasty; Isis and Horus protect Osiris, seated on a lapis lazuli pillar

Weird.

That’s what I thought, too, the first time I saw that description. Why does Isis have a lapis lazuli head? And what does that mean anyway? We will definitely look into that in today’s post, inspired by a friend of this blog who asked about stones associated with Isis…

You may already know about Isis’ connection with carnelian, the red-orange stone from which Her famous Knot amulet was often made.

But another stone associated with Her is the beautiful gold-spangled blue stone called lapis lazuli. The name comes from the Latin for “stone” (lapis) and the Medieval English possessive case version (lazuli) of the Medieval Latin version (lazulum) of the Arabic version of the original Persian name of the stone, “lāžward.” It is also the ultimate origin of our word azure, meaning blue. More than you wanted to know, right? But words are interesting.

And the fact that the stone originally has a Persian name does indeed tell us something about it. Most of the lapis lazuli in the world has always come from what is today Afghanistan, once part of the Persian Empire. There are also deposits in Russia, Chile, Mongolia, Italy, and even the US, but most of it is from Afghanistan. So even back in the day, the ancient Egyptians had to import the pyrite-flecked dark-blue stone they so loved.

Lapis from Afghanistan in its natural state

In fact, of all the semi-precious stones, lapis lazuli was the most highly prized by the ancient Egyptians. Egyptian artists used lapis lazuli in jewelry and amulets, as inlay in sacred statuary, and even ground it fine and mixed it into paint and cosmetics as a coloring agent. Long afterwards—until the 19th century, in fact—lapis lazuli provided the deep-blue pigment in ultramarine paint throughout much of the world.

Apart from its sheer beauty, lapis lazuli was valuable to the ancient Egyptians as an image of the heavens. Its dark-blue coloration was the indigo of the night sky while the white-gold flecks of pyrite represented the imperishable stars. A stone of heaven, lapis lazuli was sacred to the all-encompassing Egyptian Sky Goddess—whether She is Nuet or Her starry daughter, Isis-Sothis. (Hathor is also a Sky Goddess and certainly may be honored with lapis lazuli—in fact, images of Her were also made of lapis lazuli—though She is more closely associated with green turquoise and malachite.)

One of the beautiful ways the Egyptians used lapis lazuli

To the Egyptians, lapis lazuli represented all good things. In later periods, the Egyptian word for lapis lazuli, khesbedj, became a synonym for “joy” and “delight.” In the Book of Coming Forth by Day, lapis lazuli is connected with abundance as in this passage: “O you who sweeten the state of the Two Lands, you with whom are provisions, you with whom is lapis lazuli.” Another text repeats the association then connects the deceased, “the bull of lapis lazuli,” with the Star Goddess, Sothis. “I am the bull of lapis lazuli, unique and exalted, Lord of the Field, Bull of the Gods. Sothis speaks to me in her good time.” Because of its positive associations, lapis lazuli was used in many different types of amulets, but was especially employed for the heart amulet. Egyptian judges were known to wear lapis lazuli stones about their necks inscribed with the word “truth,” that is, ma’et.

This heavenly blue stone may be associated with Isis as Goddess of Heaven. Several Egyptian terms for “heaven” actually incorporate Her name, Throne (Iset ). Heaven was called Iset Weret, the Great Throne, and Iset Hert, the High Throne or High Place. With their love of punning and double meanings, surely the Egyptians would not have missed the opportunity to interpret these terms not only as “Heaven,” but also as “Great Isis” and “High or Heavenly Isis.”

An Isis-Nursing-Horus amulet carved in lapis lazuli

Isis is not only the Throne and Place of Being on Earth (see my post on that here), but the Throne of Heaven, too—as indeed She was considered. The Egyptians frequently reinforced the association of the Throne with the heavens by painting Isis’ throne hieroglyph in lapis-lazuli blue.

The heavens aren’t the only important association with lapis blue; the life-giving waters were also represented as being blue. Like Isis’ throne symbol, the hieroglyphs for water and the ankh of life were frequently colored blue—as was the skin of many of the life-giving Deities associated with the Nile. The association of lapis-lazuli blue with the waters, and thus with fertility, life, rebirth, and regeneration, once again brings it into the sphere of Isis, Lady of the Inundation and Goddess of Rebirth. These same qualities were, in turn, connected with the color black so that the colors blue and black became interchangeable. This is why, in art, the hair of the Deities—which if represented naturalistically would be Egyptian black—can also be colored blue. The Gods and Goddesses were said to have gold skin, silver bones, and lapis-lazuli hair. (You, no doubt, see where we’re going with this now.)

And you are correct. In the early Ptolemaic period, there was a temple and cult of Iset Khesbedjet Tep, Isis with the Lapis-Lazuli Head. The epithet surely refers to the specific sacred image in which the hair of the Goddess was inlaid with precious lapis lazuli.

Ah look! A lapis lazuli head; 19th dynasty. This is supposed to be a wig, but not sure you could wear this...looks more like a wig for a statue — Oh look! A lapis lazuli head; 19th dynasty. This is supposed to be a wig, but I’m not sure you could actually wear it; looks more like a wig for a statue, stranger things….

Today, we still associate lapis lazuli with some of the same qualities that the ancient Egyptians did. We, too, associate the heaven-blue stone with the heavenly qualities of spirituality and psychism. Just as the Egyptians associated it with joy, today’s metaphysicians say that lapis lazuli helps relieve melancholy. And just as the ancient Egyptians connected lapis lazuli with fertility, regeneration, and abundance, so we understand it to give an abundant boost to creativity.

Isis is the Great Throne of Heaven, the Lady of the Life-Giving Waters, and the Goddess of the Lapis-Lazuli Head. Sacred unto Her is the beautiful stone of the heavens and the waters, lapis lazuli.

The Divine Bread of Isis

With so many of us “Covid baking” these days, I write today in honor of bread—both as a worthy offering to Isis and Her Divine family and as a powerful symbol of transformation.

At Denderah, this Divine Bread was modeled into the shapes of the pieces of the body of Osiris and sent to the various cities in which Isis was said to have enshrined them.

Let’s get baking!

Hail to Thee, Isis, Lady of the Star

If you’ve been following this blog, you know I write a lot about Isis as Lady of the Holy Star. In my area, Portland, Oregon, Her heliacal rising is a week from today.

I will be in my local high place (I am fortunate to have one near my home), awaiting Her reappearance with offerings in hand at 4:30 in the morning. I will watch as the Mystery unfolds and the Goddess emerges once more from the Underworld into the dawning light.

But for now, I watch the morning skies in anticipation of the pre-dawn reappearance of the beautiful and brilliant star of Isis, Sirius.

Thanks to the wonders of modern online astronomical calculators, we can know pretty precisely when the Fair Star of the Waters will rise before the sun in our area. (To use the calculator, just enter your email and the password: softtests. You will need to know the latitude and altitude of wherever you are observing Her rise. This info is easily google-able.)

If you want to know more about Sirius and Isis, here are some links to previous posts, all in one place:

At Denderah, Sothis is a cow with the star between Her horns, and surrounding Her — At Denderah, one image of Sopdet shows Her as a cow with Sirius between Her horns, and stars surrounding Her

The basic information on Isis and Her holy star and why it is called the “dog star”.

Meditations on Isis and Her Mother during this time of waiting.

Why Sirius is appropriately the heavenly marker of our modern New Year, too, and about temples oriented to Sirius.

The experience of my sister priestess and me one year as we watched Her rise.

About the symbol of the star in Egyptian spirituality and being “joined” to yours.

And a ritual for beginning the process of “being joined to your star.”

Sothis from Isis temple at Philae — Sopdet from Isis’ temple at Philae

The rise of the Star of Isis was important in ancient Egypt for it marked coming of the fertilizing Nile Inundation and the day of the New Year. It was also the end of the epigominal days, those days out of time when the the Cairo Calendar tells us that the birthdays of Osiris, Horus the Elder, Set, Isis, and Nephthys were celebrated.

Thus, if you wish to celebrate the Birth of Isis, it is two days before New Year’s Day.

There are a number of options for choosing our New Year’s Day.

For instance, perhaps you’ve seen a date of July 19th given for the rising of Sirius? This comes from a 1904 calculation by Eduard Meyer, who was the first modern person to have noticed ancient Egypt’s Sothic Cycle.

Isis-Sothis, Lady of the Dog-Star, riding on Her dog, from an Alexandrian coin

You may recall that the Sothic Cycle is a period of 1,461 ancient Egyptian years during which the 365-day Egyptian year, which is one quarter-day too short, loses enough time so that the Egyptian New Year, once again coincides with the rise of Sirius.

Meyer was trying to calculate the date of the star’s rising from the ancient Egyptian calendar and translate it to the modern Julian so that the reigns of the pharaohs could be more accurately dated. The Sirius rising date he came up with was July 19—but that would have been for 140-142 CE.

You may certainly use that date if you prefer a firm date for planning your celebrations. That would make New Year on July 19th and Isis’ birthday on July 17th.

Personally, I like to use the date when Isis’ star may actually be seen in the morning skies in my area. You can use the calculator link above to find out when She rises in your area.

The jumble of stone blocks that is, today, Isiopolis — You could mark the rise of Isis’ star at Isiopolis…

Another option might be to use the modern rising time at either of Isis’ major sacred temple sites in Egypt.

At Her Lower Egypt temple of Isiopolis in the delta, that was on August 8th this year.

At Her Upper Egypt temple of Philae/Agilika, that was on August 2rd.

So you can see that latitude makes a great deal of difference as to when the rising of the Goddess’ star may be actually observed.

If you wish to join me in celebration of Her rising, you’ll need to be at your observation point about an hour before sunrise in order to see Her. We may chant Her name—Iset-Sopdet, Isis-Sothis—as She rises. We may offer Her milk and lotuses. Or we may watch in beautiful silence as She comes, She comes.

Bodies, Sexuality, Strength, and Badass Sorcery

I rarely post anything political on this blog. That’s not what it’s for. But sometimes—like when your city has been invaded by goon squads kidnapping citizens—it’s hard to write about anything else. And so, for a lead-in to today’s post about ancient Egyptian sexuality and Isis, I am proud to introduce you to “Naked Athena.”

THIS. This is why I love this city. This is the power of a vulnerable, naked human body. This is the power of Art.

Portland protestor calls out police in a stunning display of what one Twitter poster called “badass sorcery.” Damn right, it was. In confusion, the cops actually backed off after this. See more here.

Now, here’s another photo of the same kind of vulnerable power:

This is Ieshia Evans. Learn more about Evans and that protest here. (Photo info: A demonstrator protesting the shooting death of Alton Sterling is detained by law enforcement near the headquarters of the Baton Rouge Police Department in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, U.S. July 9, 2016. REUTERS/Jonathan Bachman)

What is the difference between the stories of these two photos taken four years apart? Naked Athena was not arrested for her protest (nudity is officially illegal in Portland, but court rulings have made exceptions for protests). Ieshia Evans was. It is blatantly obvious that there’s a lot of justice work to be done, folks. Ma’et calls us to it and Black Lives Matter.

Deep breath.

Of course, we do not always use our naked and vulnerable bodies for powerful protest. And so today I also bring you…

Sexuality, Sacred Sexuality & Isis, Part I

If you’ve ever looked into the topic of ancient Egyptian sexuality, you’ll know that they were pretty comfortable with sexuality. Sex was part of the great cycle of creation, life, death, and rebirth. You’ve no doubt read some of the famous ancient Egyptian love poetry with passionate lines like these:

Egyptians...having sex! — Part of an Egyptian erotic papyrus

“Your love has penetrated all within me, like honey plunged into water.” “To hear your voice is pomegranate wine to me—I draw life from hearing it.”

As well as some that are an appreciation of the sheer physical beauty of the beloved:

Of course the lotus was a symbol of sexuality — Yes, of course the lotus was a symbol of sexuality!

“Sister without rival, most beautiful of all, she looks like the star-goddess, rising at the start of the good New Year. Perfect and bright, shining skin, seductive in her eyes when she glances, sweet in her lips when she speaks, and never a word too many. Slender neck, shining body, her hair is true lapis, her arm gathers gold, her fingers are like lotus flowers, ample behind, tight waist, her thighs extend her beauty, shapely in stride when she steps on the earth.”

The ancient Egyptians present a puzzling picture when it comes to homosexuality. On one hand, we have copies of the negative confession in which the (male) deceased declares that he has not had sex with a boy. Because he had to declare it, can we assume that some men were having sex with boys? That I do not know. The only reference to lesbianism comes from a dream-interpretation book in which it is bad omen for a woman to dream of being with another woman. And most references to man-on-man sex refer to the rape to which a victor may subject the vanquished enemy.

Royal servants and confidents of the king...and most likely, a gay couple. — Royal servants and confidents of the king…and most likely, a gay couple.

And yet we have two instances of what seems to indicate a consensual homosexual relationship that seem to be okay: King Neferkare goes off with his general and it is implied that they do so for sex. We also have the tomb of what used to be called The Two Brothers. More modern researchers have suggested that the men, who were royal servants and confidents, were a gay couple. This is based on their tomb paintings, which show them embracing each other or in placements usually reserved for a husband and wife. The men are shown with their children, but their wives, the mothers of the children, are very de-emphasized, almost to the point of being erased. Some scholars say, yes, they probably were a gay couple, other say no.

Yet I want to talk not about ancient Egyptian sexuality in general, but about sexuality and religion, and especially sexuality in relation to Isis.

Temple Prostitution? Nope.

First, let us put the whole “temple prostitutes” thing right out of our heads when it comes to Egypt. There is no evidence of the practice in Egypt. Yes, I know. It was very exciting for the old gentlemen to contemplate the ever-so-Pagan goings on in those richly colored temples in days of old. But it may not have been quite how the old gentlemen envisioned it. (Please see my kindly rant on the old gentlemen of Egyptology here.) In fact, the one specific reference comes from the Greek geographer and historian Strabo (64 or 63 BCE-24 CE). Here’s the passage in its Loeb 1930s translation:

“…but to Zeus, whom they hold highest in honor, they dedicate a maiden of greatest beauty and most illustrious family (such maidens are called ‘pallades’ by the Greeks); and she prostitutes [or “concubines,” pallakeue] herself, and cohabits [or “has sex” synestin] with whatever men she wishes until the natural cleansing of her body takes place; and after her cleansing she is given in marriage to a man; but before she is married, after the time of her prostitution, a rite of mourning is celebrated for her.” (Strabo, Geographies, 17.1.46)

Well, it’s right there, ain’t it? But let’s take another look. The keys are the Greek word pallades that Strabo says the Greeks called such maidens, its relation to another Greek word, pallakê, and how it was translated, and the old gentlemen who did the original translating.

Pallades means simply “young women” or “maidens.” As in Pallas Athena. Virginity is often implied, but it doesn’t have to be. Pallakê originally meant the same thing; a maiden. However, pallakê had long been translated as “concubine” due to contextual evidence in some non-Egyptian texts. A highly influential scholar of near eastern and biblical texts, William Mitchell Ramsay—one of our old gentlemen, indeed—took the term to mean “sacred prostitute” and so-translated it when he first published these non-Egyptian texts in 1883. He based the translation on his own belief in ancient sacred prostitution and two Strabo passages: one about Black Sea sacred prostitutes and the one about the pallades we’re discussing. Ramsay was so influential that his definition became the reigning one. THE Greek-English dictionary, by Liddell and Scott, had “concubine for ritual purposes” as the first definition of pallakê. Now it is the second one.

"Offering to Isis" by Sir Edward john Poynter, 1866; more like our young palladê? — “Offering to Isis” by Sir Edward John Poynter, 1866; more like our young *palladê* perhaps?

A non-sexualized translation of the Strabo passage has been made by Stephanie Budin in Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World, edited by Christopher Farone and Laura McClure. Here it is:

“But for Zeus [Amun], whom they honor most, a most beautiful maiden of most illustrious family serves as priestess, [girls] whom the Greeks call ‘pallades’; and she serves as a handmaiden and accompanies whomever (or attends whatever) she wishes until the natural cleansing of her body; and after her cleansing she is given to a man (or husband); but before she is given, a rite of mourning is celebrated for her after the time of her handmaiden service.”

Sounds quite different, doesn’t it? Would it not be more likely that a highborn girl who has not yet had her period would serve as a handmaiden in the temple, attending whatever rites she wishes—perhaps even getting an education—until she proves herself marriageable by having her first period, rather than expecting an inexperienced girl to immediately start having sex with “whomever she wishes”? (And who would that be in the temple; the priests who were required to abstain from sex during their temple service?) Even the “rite of mourning” is explicable as a kind of farewell to childhood that the young woman would celebrate with her fellow handmaidens and priestesses as she left the temple to take up her married life.

What’s more, sex in an Egyptian temple was taboo. Even Herodotus knew of the prohibition against sex in Egyptian temples when he says that the Egyptians were the first to make it a matter of religion not to have sex in temples and to wash after having sex and before entering a temple. (Histories, 2.64)

Alternatively, Budin wonders whether Strabo might have been hearing stories about the Divine Adoratrice or God’s Wife of Amun, powerful and high-ranking priestesses of the centuries before Strabo’s visit. But at least in the later dynasties, these priestesses were celibate and tended to rule long past their first menstrual period.

Sacred Sexuality? Yep.

Well. This post is long enough for today—and haven’t even gotten to Isis yet. So we’ll do that next time with more on sexuality in Egyptian religion…and we will indeed get to Isis.

Big Magic for Hard Times, Again…

Art seems to capture Kheperu best; this is The Lotus Soul by Frantisek Kupka, 1898. This is what the energy feels like in Kheperu

The Key to Egyptian Magic, Part 2

Last week, we talked about Kheperu or “Transformations” as the key to Egyptian magic. This is the technique by which a human magician, priest/ess, or other adept practitioner, may briefly partake of Divine powers through the use of sacred images, ritual speech, and right action. It is a way of empowering our magic.

To develop this technique, a society would need to understand that human beings could become godlike—which ancient Egypt did—and further, that human and Divine beings naturally interact with each other and mutually affect each other.

This is a magical and participatory world. In Jeremy Naydler’s book The Temple of the Cosmos, he comments that the Egyptians believed human beings depended on the Deities, but that the Deities also depended on human beings—even to the extent of relying on human action to help mobilize heka (“magic”) in the universe through the temple rites. Both Deities and humanity must uphold Ma’et (“Rightness,” “Truth”) or the universe will be thrown into chaos. Thus human beings have an innate power and influence, although we cannot hope to match that of the Goddesses and Gods. In this world view, it is theoretically possible for a human being—especially one who had acquired a lot of heka, because one can acquire it—to cause change or even chaos in the universe. If humans are part of the universal order, we can affect the universal order.

This interconnectedness is why we sometimes find threats made against the Deities in Egyptian magical formulæ. This was one of the things that freaked out Greek magic workers when they encountered it. To them, claiming godlike power was hubris—and the Gods were sure to smack you down for it rather than help you out.

Nuet, the Heavens, joined to Geb, the Earth

Yet the idea that human beings have the power to affect the universe stems from the interrelatedness and interdependence of the human and the Divine worlds in Egyptian tradition. In the same way that the Great Goddess of Magic, Isis, threatens to stop the Boat of the Sun in its tracks unless Her son Horus is healed, so the human magicians sometimes threatened the Deities with a similar upset to the cosmic order unless their desires were met. “The expertise of the magician lay in bringing together the spiritual and material levels in a deliberately engendered and powerful coalescence. Magic did not function exclusively on the physical or the psychic or the spiritual planes but on all three together,” writes Naydler. And a most effective way of joining all three worlds is through the technique of Kheperu.

Some Examples of Kheperu

"I put on the cloak of the Great Lady, and I AM the Great Lady." — “I put on the cloak of the Great Lady, and I AM the Great Lady.”

In his excellent study, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt, the One and the Many, Egyptologist Erik Hornung defines Egyptian Deities by three criteria: Onoma (the name of the Deity), Logos (words or knowledge about the Deity), and Eidolon (the image of the Deity). All three, combined with ritual, are also used in Kheperu as we see it expressed in Egyptian texts.

A longish passage from the Coffin Texts illustrates these principles and highlights some of the characteristics of Kheperu (CT Formula 484, Faulkner translation):

“The Sistrum-Player is in my body, the pure flesh of my mother, and the dress will enclose me. I don the dress of Hathor, my hands are under it to the width of the sky, my fingers are under it as living uraei, my nails are under it as the Two Ladies of Dep, and I kiss the earth, I worship my mistress, for I have seen her beauty. She creates the fair movements which I make when the Protector of the Land comes; the gods come to me bowing and praise is given to me by the gods, they see me at my duty, and I am initiated into what I did not know, I cross the retinue of this Great Lady to the western horizon of the sky, I speak in the Tribunal. [. . .]
“The god who protects the land comes,” say the horizon dwellers concerning me. “The god comes, having gone aboard the bark,” say they who are about the shrine, who sit in the sides of the bark, who eat their food. They see me as the Sole One with the secret seal. I don the dress, I wear the robe, I receive the wand, I adorn the Great Lady in her dignity. Her Sistrum-Player is on her lap, and he has built mansions among your great ones, he has presented offering cakes, so that he may live thereon and that he may celebrate the monthly festival in his hour in company of those who are in linen, for he has looked at his face. So says the occupant of the throne of the Great Lady concerning me.”

God-blasted; beautiful art by Andrew Gonzales; you can buy prints, yay! — God-blasted; beautiful art by Andrew Gonzales; you can buy prints like I have, yay!

We can be sure that the deceased is intended to be in the Kheper of Form of the Goddess because when he “dons the dress of Hathor,” “the Sistrum-Player is in my body,” and it is She Who “creates the fair movements which I make,” and the horizon dwellers “see me as the Sole One with the secret seal.” He employs the Onoma, the names and epithets, of Hathor in his formula. He has knowledge of Her Logos for he describes Her place in the sacred barques of the Gods. He also uses Her Eidolon, symbolized as the dress of Hathor, building up the Goddess’ image through the description in the text and putting on Her dress or image.

As in this example, Kheperu is often characterized by a multiplied consciousness. Here, the deceased perceives as a human being, as Hathor, and as Her son, the Sistrum-Player. The deceased is at once the Great Lady, Her Divine Child, and Her worshipper. So can we be both human being and Divine Being, mediating between Heaven and Earth, partaking of and blending both.

Another excellent example is a Coffin Text formula “for the Soul of Shu and for Becoming Shu” (CT Formula 228, Faulkner translation):

“I am the soul of Shu the self-created god, I have come into being from the flesh of the self-created god. I am the soul of Shu, the god invisible of shape, I have come into being from the flesh of the self-created god, I am merged in the god, I have become he.”

In the rest of this formula, the magician spends considerable time making statements that identify them with Shu. The magician recites the full myth of Shu, and beautifully ends the formula with “I am invisible of shape, I am merged in the Sunshine-God.”

In the following example, the deceased is identified with Re, quality by quality—which allows ample ritual time for visualization (Book of the Dead, Formula 181, Faulkner translation):

“His sun disk is your sun disk;
His rays are your rays;
His crown is your crown;
His greatness is your greatness;
His appearings are your appearings;
His beauty is your beauty. . .”

In Formula 78 of the Book of the Dead, the deceased says:

“Horus has invested me with his shape [. . .] I am the falcon who dwells in the sunshine, who has power through his light and his flashing. My arms are those of a divine falcon, I am one who has acquired the position of his lord, and Horus has invested me with his shape. “

And another Gonzales, because, damn beautiful

Once the Kheper is assumed, the Deity could be perceived within: “Hail to you, Khopri within my body” states Formula 460 in the Coffin Texts.

I have no doubt that if you worked these spells today—as written and while in the proper frame of mind—you could indeed assume the Form of Hathor or Shu or Re or Horus…or, importantly for us, of Isis.

This is really a huge topic and, once again, I have taken up enough of your time for today.

One of the most important things about this technique is that it persisted. From ancient Egypt to the magic of the Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri to the Hermetica to early Christian magic to Medieval magic to Qabalah and Christian mystics to modern ceremonial magic, Kheperu is there. And it is there because it works.

Why Does Isis Have Wings?

Well, dang it. It appears our Oregon stay at home rules have been extended through September…which means no Isia Festival this year. It had been planned for this September. So we will just postpone a year and pick things up next time. Sigh. My many thanks to the over 20 people who so graciously and enthusiastically joined the Isia Crewe. We shall meet again next time!

______________________

THE most popular post on this blog is the one I’m reposting today: Why Does Isis Have Wings? Please read on for my answer, but I would love to hear about your experiences with Her wings in the comments. They are indeed magical and powerful.

So why DOES Isis have wings? Or perhaps it would be more accurate to ask why images of Isis have wings. As a Goddess, Isis takes whatever form She likes, of course. So the question is, what do the wings mean to us that makes them important in images of Her?

The first and easiest answer is that Isis is a Bird Goddess. Her most important sacred animal is a bird of prey. The Goddess often takes the form of Her sacred raptor; the kestrel (the most common falcon in Egypt) or the black kite.

The powerful Black Kite, the sacred raptor of Isis

In Egyptian art, when Isis and Nephthys are not shown as women, They are shown in full bird-form or sometimes as woman-headed kites or kestrels sitting or hovering by the bier of Osiris. As birds, Isis and Nephthys mourn Osiris, screeching Their shrill bird cries to express Their sorrow. Even quite late, Isis and Nephthys were shown with wings attached to Their arms—which is the way we are most used to seeing Isis’ wings portrayed—or wearing a garment of stylized wings that wrap gracefully around Their bodies.

Soon there are two Kites—specifically identified as Isis and Nephthys in the Pyramid Texts. The Kites not only lamented and purified Osiris, but also were responsible for ferrying Him to the Otherworld. It is not until the New Kingdom that we find illustrations of Isis and Nephthys as kestrels.

Black kites are fairly large, dark-plumed birds that feed on both live prey and scavenge for carrion. They are sociable, intelligent, and aggressive birds—and would even attack wounded human beings. It may have been the bird’s fierceness that inspired one of the earliest Pharaohs to take the name Kite.

Isis is fierce in protecting Osiris. And both Sisters are fierce in Their lamentations for the God. The black kite’s cry—a shrill, plaintive, screeching—may have sounded to the ancient Egyptians like wailing, lamenting women. It may have been that the ancients saw a correspondence between the kite’s scavenging for carrion and Isis’s scavenging for the scattered pieces of Her husband Osiris’ body in order to assemble them for renewal. Or perhaps in the cleverness of the black kite the Egyptians saw a reflection of the cleverness of the Goddess Isis as She tricked the enemy Set time and again.

Isis fans life into Osiris with Her wings

On a magical level, Isis’ wings are the means by which She fans renewed life into Osiris. They are the protection spread out over the deceased in the tomb. Their shadow is our shelter in this life and the next. For human beings, wings have always exerted a strong fascination and engendered intense longing. We are in awe of the ability of winged creatures to fly under their own power. Even today when flight is available through mechanical means, many, many people still have “the flying dream.” In the dream, we fly on our own, our arms held out to our sides like huge wings, soaring like great, wild birds. Yet beyond physical flight, wings also commonly symbolize spiritual flight—ascent to the Heavens. And since feelings of rising, floating, or flying upwards can accompany spiritual experience, it is quite natural for cultures throughout the world to conceive of spirit beings—from angels to faeries—as winged.

In Egypt, a very ancient conception of the cosmos envisioned the Heavens as the enormous wings of the great falcon God Horus. These heavenly wings, attached to the disk of the Sun, were a common Egyptian protective motif. In fact, the image of the winged disk of Egypt was so powerful that other peoples, such as the Babylonians and the Hittites, adopted it. Some scholars believe that the beautiful Hebrew biblical phrase “the sun of righteousness shall arise with healing in his wings” may have been inspired by the Egyptian symbol of the winged solar disk.

This protective aspect of the symbol of wings was key in Egyptian thought; so almost invariably, when you see the open wings of a Deity, the wings are intended to protect—and Isis is the protective Goddess par excellence.

Isis mourning with "to fold the wings" gesture — Isis mourning with “to fold the wings” gesture

Furthermore, the Egyptian word for “to fold the wings,” sekhen, also means to embrace. An Egyptian mourning posture mimicked the protective embrace of Osiris by Isis. And surely, it was Isis’ protecting, enfolding, winged arms that the Egyptian mother had in mind when she recited this protective charm for her child: “My arms are over this child—the arms of Isis are over him, as she put her arms over her son Horus.” Nevertheless, the wings of Isis could also be aggressive, one text tells us that Isis “struck with Her wing” and closed the mouth of a river.

The open wings of Isis can also be related to a posture seen in images of the ancient Egyptian Bird Goddess. This is the posture of the famous Neolithic statuette of a so-called dancing woman with her arms raised in an open curve above her head, and which has become a popular amulet among modern Goddess worshippers. The same posture can be seen in the Goddess figures that ride in the curved boats that were a favorite theme of pre-dynastic Egyptian pottery and petroglyphs.

These statues are usually identified as Nile Goddesses, but she may be a dancing priestess with her arms upraised...perhaps in the Wings of Isis — Perhaps a priestess of the Bird Goddess with her arms raised to indicate wings.

According to Egyptologist Louis Breasted, the posture is typical of Egypt. And although these ancient figures do not have obvious wings, their unwinged but upraised arms foreshadow the winged, upraised arms of Goddesses seen in later Egyptian art. These beak-faced figures are often identified as Bird Goddesses, so perhaps the wings are implied—or they may indicate that the figures represent human priestesses who are imitating their Bird Goddess. Whatever the case, the “wing” stance is a posture of great antiquity and numenosity and many researchers consider it to be characteristic of the Divine Feminine. Read more about these ancient images here.

If you wish to experiment with the power of Isis’ wings for yourself, try The Wings & Breath of Isis on page 268 of the new edition of Isis Magic.

The Magic of the Hair of Isis

We are not immune to the charms of a beautiful head of hair and the ancient Egyptians weren’t either.

Mourners using various gestures and dishevel their hair — Mourners use various mourning gestures and dishevel their hair

minnakhtjpg1 — A mourning woman with her hair over her face from the tomb of Minnakht

This pairing of love and death is both natural and eternal. How many stories have you heard—or perhaps you have a personal one—about couples making love after a funeral? It’s so common that it’s cliché. But it makes perfect sense: in the face of death, we human beings must affirm life. We do so through the mutual pleasure of sex and, for heterosexual couples, the possibility of engendering new life that sex provides. The lovemaking of Isis and Osiris is the ultimate expression of this. Chapter 17 of the Book of Coming Forth by Day (aka the Book of the Dead), describes the disheveled hair of Isis when She comes to Osiris:

“I am Isis, you found me when I had my hair disordered over my face, and my crown was disheveled. I have conceived as Isis, I have procreated as Nephthys.” (Chapter 17; translation by Rosa Valdesogo Martín, who has extensively studied the connection of hair to funerary customs in ancient Egypt.)

There is also a variant of this chapter that has Isis apparently straightening up Her “bed head” following lovemaking:

“Isis dispels my bothers (?) [The Allen translation has “Isis does away with my guard; Nephthys puts an end to my troubles.]. My crown is disheveled; Isis has been over her secret, she has stood up and has cleaned her hair.” (Chapter 17 variant, translation by Martín, above.)

Spell 562 of the Coffin Texts notes the ability of the hair of Isis and Nephthys to unite things, saying that the hair of the Goddesses is knotted together and that the deceased has come to “be joined to the Two Sisters and be merged in the Two Sisters, for they will never die.”

Isis & Min

I’m so used to thinking of Isis with Osiris that I can forget She is also paired with other Gods. Today, we’ll look at one of Them: the God of the Upright Phallus, Min.

ancient-egypt-map1

Isis and Min shared a temple complex at Koptos (Gebtu in ancient Egyptian, Qift in modern). It is in Upper Egypt, near Denderah and Thebes. The site is connected to the Red Sea by the Wadi Hammamat (meaning “Valley of Many Baths), a dry riverbed. The wadi contains important 3,000-year-old petroglyphs; in ancient times, it led to major Egyptian mining areas and was a key trade route.

Koptos is also just across the Nile from Naqada, the site of the pre-dynastic culture that takes its name from the site. What is known as Naqada II (3500-3400 BCE) is the period to which the beautiful statuettes of the “Nile Goddess” or “Dancing Woman” are dated.

Koptos is an ancient, ancient sacred site and probably originally belonged to Min alone. Herodotus reports that the Egyptians considered Him their oldest Deity. Yet by at least the time of the New Kingdom, Isis is prominent there as well and Min becomes assimilated with Osiris. The temple to Isis and Min, the ruins of which we see today, was built under Ptolemy II, with additions made under succeeding pharaohs. There are remains of two more temples on the site. One is the Ptolemaic “middle temple” or “Osiris temple.” The other is a temple dedicated to Geb and Isis, probably begun under Nectanebo II and continued under the Ptolemies. There is literary evidence for a temple of Isis and Harpokrates, but its remains have not yet been found.

One of the interesting things about Koptos is that it was a popular oracular site. You can still see the small chamber to the rear of the Isis and Geb temple in which the entranced priest would sit to deliver the words of the Deity. This oracular chapel was built by Kleopatra VII (the famous one). The tradition of oracles at Koptos did not cease with the coming of Christianity. In a work called Theosophia, we have record of an oracle from Koptos that is ostensibly an Egyptian Pagan oracle, but since it discusses the unity of the Logos and the Father, a number of scholars think it was likely a Christian retrofit. Be that as it may, the point is that the tradition of oracles at Koptos was well established.

The so-called Colossus of Koptos...a predynastic form of Min — The so-called Colossus of Koptos…a predynastic form of Min; they found three of these at Koptos

A particular Isiac relic at Koptos seems to have been a lock of Her hair. A Greek dedication to Her says it is “to the Great Goddess, Isis of the Hair.” We also have a record of a healing prayer made “near the hair at Koptos.” Plutarch explains the tradition for us, relating that when Isis first heard of the death of Osiris, She cut off a lock of Her hair and donned mourning dress. He notes that this is why the city there is called Koptos for some derive the name from Greek koptein, meaning “to deprive.” The cutting of hair is a Greek mourning tradition; Egyptian women simply wore theirs long and unkempt. (Read more about that tradition here.) Nevertheless, among both Greeks and Egyptians, Isis of Koptos was particularly known a Mourning Goddess.

The ancient Greek travel writer, Pausanias, in his Description of Greece, mentions Koptos as the site of a tragedy that befell a man who rashly entered Isis’ sanctuary there without a specific invitation from the Goddess:

I have heard a similar story from a man of Phoenicia that the Egyptians hold the feast for Isis at a time when they say she is mourning for Osiris. At this time the Nile begins to rise, and it is a saying among many of the natives that what makes the river rise and water their fields is the tears of Isis. At that time then, so said my Phoenician, the Roman governor of Egypt bribed a man to go down into the shrine of Isis in Koptos. The man dispatched into the shrine returned indeed out of it, but after relating what he had seen, he too, so I was told, died immediately. So it appears that Homer’s verse speaks the truth when it says that it bodes no good to man to see godhead face to face. (Pausanias, Book X, 32, 10-17.)

Koptos must have had strong magical connections as well. If you recall the story of Setna and the magic book, you may remember that the magic book so coveted by Naneferkaptah was to be found at the bottom of the Nile by Koptos.

At Koptos, Isis is sometimes the mother of Min or Min-Hor, sometimes His consort. When Isis and Min are consorts, Min is the father of Hor-pa-khred, Horus the Child. Min is very much a God of male sexual prowess and thus, of course, fertility. Images of Him almost invariably show Him with an erect penis jutting out at an impressive right angle to His body. In the Coffin Texts, the deceased identified himself with “Woman-Hunting” Min to partake of His potent sexuality.

By the 18th dynasty, Min became associated with Amun and was incorporated into the festivals that were intended to revitalize the king. There is an ancient rite of Min called The Going Forth of Min and sometimes The Going Forth of Min to the Khedju, which may mean a type of ritual garden. During these festivals, the sacred image of the God was carried to a symbolic garden so that the God could bless the fields. This blessing was extended to the pharaoh; he took part in the procession as Horus, while the queen participated as Isis.

Although Min is usually shown in anthropomorphic form as a beautiful black man, at Koptos, He was also worshipped in the form of a white bull. Min is called the Beautiful Bull, the Strong Bull, and the Powerful Bull for the bull has always been a symbol of male strength and fertility.

He, Amun, and Horus are also known by the epithet, Kamutef, Bull of His Mother. The epithet has clear sexual connotations. Originally, it seems to have been an epithet of Horus, which was extended to Min when the two Gods were assimilated. It was further extended to Amun when He and Min were assimilated. It points to a primordial conception of the Divine in which the God is both son and lover of the Goddess. In a hymn to Min, a passage says:

Hail to Thee, Min, fecundating Thy mother; secret are Thy dealings with Her when the heavens are dark.

On a 13th dynasty stela, there is a similar inscription about Horus Kamutef:

Thy heart joins with the king as the heart of Horus joined with His mother Isis when He coupled with Her, flank to flank.

This ancient conception perfectly encapsulates the relationship between Isis and Min at Koptos. They are mother and son (sometimes Min is simply called “Min, Son of Isis” just as Horus is Harsiesis, “Horus, Son of Isis”) and They are lovers.

Min is usually shown with His legs tightly mummy-wrapped together but His penis exposed and ready. A flail is shown over His upraised right arm. The flail forms a “V” over His shoulder into the center of which the God places His upraised hand. Some have seen this as a sexual emblem: the vulva-triangle of the flail penetrated by the God’s penis-forearm. Sure, why not? I like it.

In addition to His bull epithets, Min is also known as Lord of Awe and Great of Love, just as Isis can be called Sweet of Love. (Perhaps She calls Him Lord of Awe at times when He has been particularly Great of Love.) In a hymn to Min from Koptos, He is said to love humankind and therefore He made youths (for fertile sex, of course). He is called Fair of Face and Sweet of Love. He is said to abominate the cutting short of the breath of life. He heals the sick and is “beautiful beyond the Gods.” He is also a Lunar God and Protector of the Moon.

I will admit that I have not, to date, done much to honor Min, perhaps because for me, that type of energy comes from Dionysos, to Whom I am also dedicated. Nevertheless, Isis and Min at Koptos make an intriguing pair. Isis is the Beautiful Mourner, the Goddess of the Disheveled Hair. Min is the Lord of Life Who invigorates human beings and agricultural fields alike. As Death and Life, They make a complete cycle. The Bull of His Mother brings renewal to Her in the form of Their Child. She, in turn, nurtures Him as Min, Son of Isis.

Invocation Offerings to Isis

From Christian tithing to Hindu puja to the stargazer lilies I grow and place upon Isis’ altar, we humans continue to make offering. Perhaps there is something of an inborn impulse to do so.

I doubt that any of those who offer to the Troll see him as a Deity—at most, he’s a quirky neighborhood spirit. Yet people leave offerings just the same.

The Divine Bread of Isis

Ahhh. There is absolutely nothing like the smell of fresh bread, hot from the oven. Add butter and I’m in heaven.

Yet with so many of us on gluten-free diets because of gluten intolerance or celiac disease—and with some arguing that eating grain is literally killing us even if we’re not gluten-intolerant or celiac sufferers—well it seems that bread has been both refused and abused of late.

And so today I write in defense of bread—as a worthy offering to Isis and Her Divine family and as a powerful symbol of transformation.

At Denderah, this Divine Bread was modeled into the shapes of the pieces of the body of Osiris and sent to the various cities in which Isis was said to have enshrined them.

Isis & Kore Kosmou, Part 2

For those of you just dropping by, we’re discussing a fragment of an ancient text entitled Kore Kosmou. In it, Isis is the Divine Teacher and She instructs Her “Wondrous Son” Horus in spiritual truths.

So let’s start with the title of the text. Unlike some other ancient texts, it actually does have a title: Kore Kosmou. The simplest translation is Virgin (or Maiden) of the World. “Kore” is “girl, maiden, virgin,” as, for example, Persephone is called Kore—Maiden or Daughter—to Demeter’s Meter—Mother. Kosmou is “of the world, universe.”

Oh, but it ain’t that simple.

As is so often the case when discussing Things Ancient, interpretations vary. In fact, as far as I’ve seen, there has yet to be a single agreed-upon scholarly interpretation of the title, though they all have something to offer us.

So let’s have a look. First of all, who is this Virgin, Maiden, or Daughter of Whom we speak?

The most obvious answer is that She is Isis. Isis is the teacher in this text and She, like so many Egyptian Goddesses, has a youthful Form. In a Hymn to Osiris, Isis is even called the Great Virgin/Maiden (hwn.t or hunet). She is also a Divine Daughter, the daughter of Heaven, Nuet, and of Earth, Geb. What’s more, if the dating of the text to 1st-3rd century CE is correct, Our Goddess is by that time considered a kosmokrator, a universal ruler, so it’s no stretch to consider Isis to be the Maiden of the Universe in the title.

So, problem solved?

Oh, heck no.

What if the Virgin of the Universe isn’t Isis at all? It may be that the Virgin is Nature Herself. Nature is sexually virgin in the tale. She creates Her own abundance from seeds which She Herself supplies to the Sole Ruler and which the Sole Ruler then returns to Her in order to start the chain of fruitfulness upon the earth. We also find identification of Kore with Nature in another Hermetic text, the Perfect Discourse. That text reiterates that the Creator “does not possess the nourishment for all mortal living creatures, for it is Kore Who bears the fruit.” The text is, after all, a creation story, so perhaps the title refers to the creation of the Virgin Universe.

On the other hand, Isis Herself may certainly be considered to be Nature. Plutarch calls Her “the female principle in Nature” (On Isis & Osiris, 53). We have also discussed the idea that Isis’ name of “Throne” may refer to Her as the Original Place of Being. So perhaps we are intended to understand that Isis, Nature, and Kore Kosmou are one.

And that’s all fine. But now we come to the more interesting interpretations.

They revolve around another meaning of the word kore. For it also means “pupil,” as in the pupil of the eye, that black, liquid, bottomless center in the center of the eye.

Now at first, that seems rather strange. How can a maiden and the pupil of the eye be related concepts? But it turns out that many cultures have an expression for the pupil that translates as “the girl in the eye.” In fact, according to ethnologists who’ve studied such expressions, about one-third of the languages in the world have a term for the pupil of the eye that refers to a small human or human-like being. For example, Spanish speakers call the pupil the nina del ojo, the “girl of the eye,” which ultimately derives from Latin, which had the expression: pupilla, the “little girl” of the eye. (“Figurative Language in a Universalist Perspective,” Cecil H. Brown and Stanley R. Witkowski, American Ethnologist, Vol. 8, No. 3, Symbolism and Cognition (Aug., 1981), pp. 596-615.)

The Eye of Horus with its deep, black pupil

The origin of the expression is probably the fact that when we look into someone’s eyes, we can see a tiny reflection of ourselves in the black mirror of the pupil.

The ancient Egyptians had this expression, too. Pyramid Text 155 says to Osiris, “Take to thyself the damsel [girl] who is in the eye of Horus; open thy mouth with her.” (That is Samuel Mercer’s translation; Faulkner translates it “pupil of the eye of Horus.” It is both.) Later, the expression was simplified to “the girl in the eye” and then just “the girl” so that by the time the Kore Kosmou was written, the pupil was frequently just called “the girl.” And yes, the Greek in which our text was written also has the expression: the pupil of the eye is the kore.

Not every language in which this expression occurs sees a girl in the pupil; some see babies, little men, or even angels. But in Egypt, it was a hunet, a young woman. Why?

This is pure speculation, but when it comes to the Eye of Horus, perhaps it is because His mother Isis is the young woman Who is reflected in His own Child God’s eye. Or perhaps it is because of the power of the Uraeus “Eye” Goddesses in Egypt.

There are many myths in which the Divine Eye goes forth in the form of a powerful Serpent Goddess, usually as a great protective power.

Isis is among these Goddesses of the Eye. In the Festival Songs of Isis & Nephthys from the Bremner-Rhind papyrus (Faulkner translation), Isis protects both Osiris and Horus and She is “Mistress of the Universe, Who came forth from the Eye of Horus, Noble Serpent which issued from Re, and which came forth from the pupil in the eye of Atum when Re arose on the First Occasion.”

But there are more mysteries of the eye. A praise of Amun-Re from Hibis demonstrates the power and mystery of the Divine Eye: “O Amun-Re Who hides Himself in His iris/pupil, Ba Who illumines by means of His oracular wedjat-eyes, Who manifests a manifestation: sacred one Who cannot be known. Brilliant of visible forms, Who hides Himself with His mysterious akh-eye: mysterious one, Whose secrets cannot be known.”

As the physical eyes are the organs of perception of the light of the sun and the moon, so the Divine Eyes can illuminate or conceal the deep Mysteries hidden within Their depths, most especially at the core, in the pupil, in the deepest, yet most reflective, part of the eye. For in the darkness of the pupil of the eye lies concealed spiritual illumination.

Thus it seems that the title of our text may also be translated as Pupil of the Eye of the World/Universe and that, as would-be initiates, we should understand the blackness of the pupil to conceal spiritual light. And indeed, in the Kore Kosmou, the Hermetic teacher Isis, begins the process of illuminating Her Wondrous Son, Horus, Who is Himself the possessor of Egypt’s most important eye, the talisman of talismans, the offering of offerings, the Eye of Horus.

The Kore Kosmou teaches about creation, and souls, and reincarnation, and the nature of Divinity. It reveals Mysteries—but not yet all of them—to the Hermetic student, Horus. Thus a title like Kore Kosmou, with its hidden meanings, is quite appropriate to this teaching text.

Isis is the Girl in the Pupil of the Eye. As a Holy Cobra Goddess, She comes forth from the Pupil of the Eye of Atum and She is a Divine Eye Goddess Herself. She knows the secrets of the darknesses of the kosmos (cosmos), a word that not only means “world” or “universe,” but also order, and so perhaps even Ma’et. Thus She is the one Who can appropriately reveal—or conceal—the Mysteries of the creation, ordering, and structure of the universe and the souls within it.

So it seems I am not yet done with the Kore Kosmou. I’m still researching and reading and I think I shall perhaps have some more to say on this subject next time.

The Kore Kosmou, the Pupil in the Eye of the Universe

But on the other hand, perhaps we should understand Horus as the Pupil of the Eye of the World; He is, after all, the student or “pupil” of His mother. And yes, that word is related, too…

Isis Great of Magic; Iset Werethekau

“Great of Magic” is absolutely my favorite and most-used epithet of the Goddess. It is Her power name. It is the one that gives me tingles at the back of my neck when I say it. It is the one that invokes Her deepest core, Her magical heart, the ones that makes me want to kiss the ground before Her beautiful and fierce face. I have turned several Sakhmet sacred images into Werethekau for my altar with the addition of a serpent around Their shoulders. You’ll see why that works below.

“O, Isis, Great of Magic, deliver me from all bad, evil, and typhonic things…” —Ebers Papyrus, 1500 BCE

Isis is not the only Goddess Who is called Great of Magic. Many of the Great Goddesses bear that epithet, too: Hathor, Sakhmet, Mut, Wadjet, among others. Gods are also Great of Magic, notably Set in the Pyramid Texts.

There is also an independent Goddess named Werethekau. As so many Deities were, She was associated with the king, and especially during his coronation. There had been some doubt among Egyptologists about whether Werethekau was indeed a separate Goddess. But recently, Ahmed Mekawy Ouda of Cairo University has been doing a lot of work tracking Her down. He’s gathered references to a priesthood and temples for Her that seem quite clear. More on all that in a moment.

“The Akhet’s door has been opened, its doorbolts have drawn back. He has come to you, Red Crown; he has come to you, Fiery One; he has come to you, Great One; he has come to you, Great of Magic—clean for you and fearful because of you . . . He has come to you, Great of Magic: he is Horus, encircled by the aegis of his eye, the Great of Magic.”

—Pyramid Texts of Unis, 153

I wonder whether there might be some primordial connection between the Great of Magic royal crowns and the Great of Magic royal throne—Who is Iset, the Goddess Throne. Perhaps we can understand the accouterments of kingship as personified extensions of the Power, Divinity, and Magic of the Living Great Goddesses, which were empowered by Them in order to bestow upon the king his own power, divinity, and magic.

The magic of the crowns is enhanced by the protective uraeus serpents often shown upon them. They’re not just snakes, of course; They’re Goddesses. Most often, the Uraeus Goddesses are Wadjet and Nekhbet or Isis and Nephthys, representing Lower and Upper Egypt. But Werethekau is a Uraeus Goddess, too. The uraei are also known as “Eyes” due to the similarity between the Egyptian word for “eye” (iret) and the word for “the doer” (iret)—for the Eyes of the Deities are the Divine Powers that go out to do things (much like the active and feminine Shakti power in Hinduism.)

The Pyramid Texts of King Merenre associate the Eyes with the crowns:

“You are the god who controls all the Gods, for the Eye has emerged in your head as the Nile Valley Great-of-Magic Crown, the Eye has emerged in your head as the Delta Great-of-Magic Crown, Horus has followed you and desired you, and you are apparent as the Dual King, in control of all the Gods and Their kas as well.”

—Pyramid Texts of Merenre, 52

The Uraeus Goddesses or Eyes are powerful, holy cobras Who emit Light and spit Fire against the enemies of the king and the Deities. More about Isis as Uraeus Goddess here.

In Ouda’s article outlining some of the references to Werethekau’s priesthood and temples, several of the extant references to Werethekau also tie-in Isis and Her Divine family.

Is Isis a Moon Goddess or a Sun Goddess?

A lovely painting of a lunar Isis by artist Katana Leigh. Visit her site here.

As we fast approach the time when Night and Day, Moon and Sun come into a brief and beautiful balance, I’d like to share this post about Isis’ lunar and solar natures.

Modern Pagans often think of Isis as a Moon Goddess. And, it’s true, in later periods of Her worship, She was indeed associated with the Moon—and, in fact, that’s how She entered the Western Esoteric Tradition. The Isis-Moon connection first started when Egypt came under Greek rule in the 3rd century BCE, following the conquest by Alexander the Great. To the Greeks, Goddesses were the lunar Deities, so as Isis made Her way into Greek culture and hearts, Her new devotees naturally associated Her with the Moon.

In Egypt, Osiris, Khons, Thoth, and I’ah were the Deities most associated with the Moon. Isis, for Her part, was connected with the star Sirius as far back as the Pyramid Texts; the star was said to be Her ba, or soul. Yet Isis is also linked with the Sun.

Phoenix by the famous illustrator Boris Vallejo; looks like a rather Isiac phoenix to me! — *Phoenix* by the famous illustrator Boris Vallejo; looks like a rather Isiac phoenix to me!

But it was at Isis’ influential temple at Philae that She was most clearly worshipped as a Sun Goddess and even as the Sun itself. A Philae hymn to Isis praises Her saying, “You are the one who rises and dispels darkness, shining when traversing the primeval ocean, the Brilliant One in the celestial waters, traveling in the barque of Re.” An inscription on the first pylon (gate) at Philae says Isis is the “One Who illumines the Two Lands with Her radiance, and fills the earth with gold-dust.” (I absolutely adore this praise of Her!)

Throughout Her worship, Isis has always shown Her life giving, fructifying power in the image of the Sun. She is the Radiant Goddess, the Lady of Sunlight.

Now enjoy this lovely animation of Isis birthing the Sun by Lesley Keen:

Sexuality, Sacred Sexuality & Isis; Part I

Today’s repost is inspired by a Facebook friend’s question about Isis and sex. So let’s dive into that a little bit. We can use having just passed Valentine’s Day and approaching spring—when all things, including love, bloom once more—as an excuse. As if we need one.

“Your love has penetrated all within me, like honey plunged into water.” “To hear your voice is pomegranate wine to me—I draw life from hearing it.”

As well as some that are an appreciation of the sheer physical beauty of the beloved:

We have such poetic passion from the perspective of both the woman and the man. Before marriage, young men and women seem to have had freedom in their love affairs. After marriage, fidelity was expected, though it went much worse for the woman—including death—if she was caught in infidelity. The ancient Egyptians present a puzzling picture when it comes to homosexuality. On one hand, we have copies of the negative confession in which the (male) deceased declares that he has not had sex with a boy. Because he had to declare it, can we assume that some men were having sex with boys? That I do not know. The only reference to lesbianism comes from a dream-interpretation book in which it is bad omen for a woman to dream of being with another woman. And most references to man-on-man sex refer to the rape to which a victor may subject the vanquished enemy.

Yet I want to talk not about ancient Egyptian sexuality in general, but about sexuality and religion, and especially sexuality in relation to Isis.

Temple Prostitution? Nope.

A non-sexualized translation of the Strabo passage has been made by Stephanie Budin in Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World, edited by Christopher Farone and Laura McClure. Here it is:

Sounds quite different, doesn’t it? Would it not be more likely that a highborn girl who has not yet had her period would serve as a handmaiden in the temple, attending whatever rites she wishes—perhaps even getting an education—until she proves herself marriageable by having her first period, rather than expecting an inexperienced girl to immediately start having sex with “whomever she wishes”? (And who would that be in the temple; the priests who were supposed to abstain from sex during their temple service?) Even the “rite of mourning” is explicable as a kind of farewell to childhood that the young woman would celebrate with her fellow handmaidens and priestesses as she left the temple to take up her married life.

And besides, sex in an Egyptian temple was taboo. Even Herodotus knew of the prohibition against sex in Egyptian temples when he says that the Egyptians were the first to make it a matter of religion not to have sex in temples and to wash after having sex and before entering a temple. (Histories, 2.64)

Sacred Sexuality? Yep.

Well, I didn’t know I was going on so much of a tear today. It seems I have used up all of today’s time and space—and haven’t even gotten to Isis yet. So we’ll do that next time with more on sexuality in Egyptian religion…and we will indeed get to Isis.

Why Does Isis Have Wings?

This is one of the most popular posts on this blog. It seems many of us have questions about Isis’ powerful and magical wings. Indeed, the wings of Isis are among Her most dynamic attributes. The widespread wings of the Goddess are the means by which She fans renewed life into Osiris. They are the protection spread out over the deceased in the tomb. Egyptian representations of Isis frequently show Her with wings attached to Her graceful human arms or embroidered into the fabric of the slim-fitting dress that wraps elegantly around Her body.

Keep me, Isis, in the shadow of Your wings.

So why does Isis have wings? The first and easiest answer is that Isis is a Bird Goddess. Her most important sacred animal is a bird of prey. The Goddess often takes the form of Her sacred raptor; the kestrel (the most common falcon in Egypt) or the black kite.

Kites were connected with funeral customs from at least the beginning of the Old Kingdom, if not earlier. Texts speak of a woman called The Kite who was the Pharaoh’s chief female funerary attendant. She was supposed to remove poisons from the deceased, magically purifying him. Soon there are two Kites—specifically identified as Isis and Nephthys in the Pyramid Texts. The Kites not only lamented and purified Osiris, but also were responsible for ferrying Him to the Otherworld. (It is not until the New Kingdom that we find illustrations of Isis and Nephthys as kestrels.)

Black kites are fairly large, dark-plumed birds (although they are more brown than deep black) that feed on both live prey and scavenge for carrion. They are sociable, intelligent, and aggressive birds—and would even attack wounded human beings. It may have been the bird’s fierceness that inspired one of the earliest Pharaohs to take the name Kite.

Isis is fierce in protecting both Osiris and Horus. Both Sisters are fierce in Their lamentations for the God. The black kite’s cry—a shrill, plaintive, screeching—may have sounded to the ancient Egyptians like wailing, lamenting women. It may have been that the ancients saw a correspondence between the kite’s scavenging for carrion and Isis’s scavenging for the scattered pieces of Her husband Osiris’ body in order to assemble them for renewal. Or perhaps in the cleverness of the black kite the Egyptians saw a reflection of the cleverness of the Goddess Isis as She tricked the enemy Set time and again.

On a magical level, Isis’ wings are the means by which She fans renewed life into Osiris. Spread out over the deceased in the tomb, the Wings of Isis protect the dead. Many of those who have connected with Isis in ritual or meditation have known the feeling of Her wings being wrapped protectively about them. Beneath Isis’ wings, we are sheltered in this life and the next.

For human beings, wings have always exerted a strong fascination and engendered intense longing. We are in awe of the ability of winged creatures to fly under their own power. Even today when flight is available through mechanical means, many people still have “the flying dream.” In the dream, we fly on our own, our arms held out to our sides like huge wings, soaring like great, wild birds. Yet beyond physical flight, wings also commonly symbolize spiritual flight—ascent to the Heavens. And since feelings of rising, floating, or flying upwards can accompany spiritual experience, it is quite natural for cultures throughout the world to conceive of spirit beings—from angels to faeries—as winged.

Nevertheless, the wings of Isis could also be aggressive, one text tells us that Isis “struck with Her wing” and closed the mouth of a river.

If you wish to experiment with the power of Isis’ wings for yourself, try The Wings & Breath of Isis on page 268 of the new edition of Isis Magic.

The Goddess of Willendorf

In Search of the Feminine Divine

Category Archives: Egypt

The Seshed Band of Isis

Offering to Isis Now Available for Pre-Order

Syncretism & Isis

The Magical Hair of Isis

The Goddess Werethekau & Isis

The Divine Bread of Isis

Is Isis a Moon Goddess or Sun Goddess?

Magical Images & Isis

Isis & Her Dark Twin, Nephthys

Serving Isis: a responsibility to know and to experience

Knowledge

And Experience

What does it mean to serve the Goddess Isis?

Serving the Goddess

The Keeper of the Pharos Lighthouse

Invocation Offerings to Isis

Magical Images & Our Lady of Magic

Isis the Mother

“Isis with the Lapis Lazuli Head”?

The Divine Bread of Isis

Hail to Thee, Isis, Lady of the Star

Bodies, Sexuality, Strength, and Badass Sorcery

Big Magic for Hard Times, Again…

Why Does Isis Have Wings?

The Magic of the Hair of Isis

Isis & Min

Invocation Offerings to Isis

The Divine Bread of Isis

Isis & Kore Kosmou, Part 2

Isis Great of Magic; Iset Werethekau

Is Isis a Moon Goddess or a Sun Goddess?

Sexuality, Sacred Sexuality & Isis; Part I

Why Does Isis Have Wings?

Simon Magus is coming to