I admit, I don’t spend as much time in Her shrine as I would like. (My guilty conscience says, “as I should.”) Yet, since Her shrine and my office are in the same room, She is always there with me, even if I’m not in active communion.
And I will further admit that, even when I am in active communion, I am often seeking inspiration from Her about how to better communicate Her love, power, wisdom, and magic to others who seek Her.
But it’s important for me—as I suggest it may be for you—to just to be with Her, to feel Her presence, to sense Her Being, to drink Her sunlight, to taste Her magic. With no other agenda.
So, I’d like to share a little of what She’s like for me in such times, and invite you to share what She’s like for you, if you wish.
Something I’ve found very interesting over the years is that the experiences people have with Her are so harmonious. Certainly many discover Her as a loving Divine Mother. It’s a form many Goddesses take for us human beings. But I was really struck, one time in particular, when someone I was talking with described Her as “noble,” a word that I have often used to describe Her to myself. Though we are all so very different people, harmonies like that let me know that, yes indeed, we are all touching the same Goddess. We are all feeling Isis. We are all intuiting beneath Her wings.
So what is She like?
As She arrives, Isis is like the rumble of thunder just after the lightning flash. I feel Her move in the sky above me, in the earth beneath me. I feel Her thunder deep in my belly, in my womb.
Isis is like the face I can’t quite see beneath an obscuring veil. For a moment—a bright moment—She shows Herself to me. And for that instant, I think I know something about Her. And then Her veil is drawn back into place, endarkening Her aspect once more. O, I love that about Her. She makes me want Her.
Sometimes, Isis is like the earth after rain, when the sun comes out suddenly and mist wisps through the grasses in the unexpected heat. Then Isis is like the late-summer sun warming the heart in my naked body. She claims Her Iset Ib, Her Isis-Heart, that is within me.
Isis is like the tears shed for me, shed for the Lost One, shed for all of us. I place myself in Her hands when I am in sorrow and She hears me.
O yes, Isis is noble, Her head uplifted. In turn, She uplifts my face in Her hands that I may look into the profound depths of Her eyes. I see there unending strength and wisdom and love and magic. She makes me aspire to all those things, though I know I am ever-so human.
Isis is sun-golden. Isis is underworld-black. Isis is star-white. Isis is serpent-green. Isis is lapis lazuli-blue. Isis is blood-red.
Isis is like the Mystery that can never be fully described. Her great wings encircle, enfold, illuminate. Each feather is a teaching. Each feather is a world. I feel Her wings brush me softly and I swoon. Her Mystery upholds me, shows me, seduces me.
Isis is the most ancient, ancient. Unknown and untouched are Her depths. She calls me. She captures me. She floods me. She fills me.
And sometimes, just sometimes, that is what Isis is like for me. What is She like for you?
Did you know that the famous tale of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice is an Isis story?
Yep. And She is in Her guise as Great Magician—and a teacher of magicians.
The version you may be familiar with is Disney’s retelling of the tale with Mickey as the apprentice from the animated movie Fantasia. Before that, it was popularized by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in a 14-stanza poem called Der Zauberlehrling.
But that’s not where it originates. The oldest-known version of this tale is from a 2nd-century CE book by Lucian of Samosatos, a Hellenized Syrian known for his satires, rhetoric, pamphlets—and his snarky style. His snark is on full display in his book of dialogs called Philopseudes, or “Lover of Lies,” in which we find the tale of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.
The book begins with the character Tychiades asking why people are so fond of “lies.” (Tychiades means “son of Tyche;” Tyche is the Goddess of Fate and Fortune and She was assimilated with Isis in this time period; there is even an Isityche.) The lies to which he refers are the “superstitious” remedies people are suggesting for a mutual friend, Eukrates, who has fallen ill. This situation serves as a framing story for ten tales of magic and the miraculous that the gathered friends, many philosophers, tell in order to convince Tychiades that the supernatural is not a lie.
An illustration for Goethe’s poem
Lucian seems to have favored the tale of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice as he gave it the most space of any of the included ten tales, and he placed it last to serve as the climax of the entire book. This story Tychiades hears from Eukrates himself.
Eukrates explains that the events he is about to relate are his very own experiences and that when Tychiades hears him out, he will be persuaded of the truth of the tale.
Eukrates story takes place in Egypt, as many ancient tales of magic did. As a young man, Eukrates has been sent on the Grand Tour throughout the Mediterranean world by his father to further his education. He is traveling up the Nile on his way to Koptos, and from there he intends to travel to the Colossoi of Memnon. Ahh, but he never makes it there.
For during his Nile travels, he meets a learned Egyptian scribe. I’ll quote the book now, because this is the part where we find Isis.
“We happened to be accompanied on the voyage up the Nile by a man of Memphis, one of the sacred scribes. His wisdom was marvelous and he had had the full Egyptian training. It was said that he had lived underground for twenty-three years in crypts while being trained in magic by Isis.”
“You’re speaking of Pankrates,” said Arignotus, “He was my teacher: a holy man, always shaven, thoughtful, speaking his Greek with a heavy accent, long and thin, snub-nosed, with protruding lips and rather skinny legs.”
“Yes, that’s Pankrates!” he said. “At first I didn’t know who he was, but when I saw him performing all sorts of miracles every time we put to, most notably riding on crocodiles and swimming with the animals, whilst they fawned upon him and wagged their tails, I realized that he was a holy man, and by being nice to him I became a friend and comrade by gradual and imperceptible stages. As a result, he shared all his secrets with me. Eventually he persuaded me to leave all my servants behind in Memphis, and to accompany him, the two of us on our own. For, he explained, we would not want for attendants. This is how we lived thenceforth.”
And so we learn that the great holy man, Pankrates, was a fully trained Egyptian scribe magician—and trained by our Lady of Magic Herself. Thus, he is capable of all the classic Egyptian magician feats, from riding crocodiles to taming wild beasts. He could probably understand the language of animals, too.
Another illustration of Goethe’s poem
As it turned out, it was quite true that Pankrates and Eukrates did not need any servants. For anytime a task needed doing, Pankrates would take a broom or pestle, bring it to life, and it would do the task perfectly. Interestingly, Eukrates notes that the transformed broom “would look human to everyone else;” something Disney left out because living brooms were way more fun to animate, no doubt.
Of course, the power to create magical servants (ushabtis?) was the power Eukrates most craved and it was the one thing Pankrates withheld. But one night, Eukrates eavesdropped on his master and overheard the first part of the incantation—the part that could turn a broom into a person. But he never learned the second part: how to turn the servant back into a broom.
You know the rest of the story. Water, water, everywhere.
In the end, the holy man returns, restores order, then promptly disappears—giving the hapless Eukrates no further information or instruction.
Mickey screws up
At the conclusion of his tale, one of Eukrates’ friends asks whether he can still conjure magical servants. Oh yes, indeed, Eukrates answers. But he still doesn’t have the off-button and so he’d wreck his home if he actually did the magic.
In an article I’m reading about this, the author compares the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice with a number of other magical tales. Some are Greek, some Egyptian. All share an Egyptian setting, an ambitious young man, a search for magical knowledge, a venerable magician-priest, and often a magical book. You can read about just such an Egyptian tale here and here.
The point he makes is that the Sorcerer’s Apprentice isn’t an outlier tale as some scholars of Lucian have long suggested. Instead, it fits well within a genre of Egyptian-magic-focused tales that were very popular at the time. This is also the time period during which the worship of Isis had spread widely throughout the Mediterranean world.
For me, the enduring popularity of this tale is just another example of the extremely significant influence ancient Egypt—and our Lady Isis (for Who else could be the Great Teacher of Magicians?)—had upon their neighbors.
Many of you who read this blog may have a special relationship with Isis; you may be Her priestess or priest. And perhaps you, like me, have also been searching for a gender-neutral term for that special relationship. Some in our community have adopted “priestex” based on other contemporary gender-neutral endings.
I can offer you an option from ancient Egypt as well.
Now, ancient Egyptian was a highly gendered language: Goddess—Nudjeret; God—Nudjer. As in English, where we might add -ess to feminize a word, they added “t” to the end of the word to indicate the feminine. Most Goddess’ names, in Egyptian, end in “t.” (We usually add an “e” before the “t” to make it pronounceable as in Amun/Amunet.) The Egyptian titles that we translate as priest or priestess are hem (masc.) or hemet (fem.) Nudjer/Nudjeret. More literally, these are translated in English as “servant of the God/dess.” Since “servant” has no gender in English, servant of Isis is a perfectly good, gender-neutral term for this special relationship.
Sarcophagus lid of a priestess of Isis from Carthage
Whatever title we may prefer, the relationship itself comes with responsibilities. However, unless we are part of a formal organization that specifies what those responsibilities are, each of us will have to decide for ourselves exactly what serving Isis means to us. For me, there are five main keys, which I’ve written about on this blog—from worship and gaining knowledge about Her to ritual competency and spiritual growth.
When trying to sort out decisions like these, I often look to the past. Is there anything we can learn from the experiences of ancient servants of the Goddess? Of course, we have some information about what was required of them within the temples. But what was going on in their heads and hearts?
Unfortunately, we have little left that tells us what it meant to them inwardly and spiritually. No doubt, some servants were more devout than others. Nonetheless, there is every reason to think that indeed there were inner experiences. The Egyptian reputation for religious and philosophical knowledge was immense. It would only make sense that those who were sincerely following their path would have important personal, spiritual experiences—just as people have always done.
Though records of these inner experiences are few, we do have hints. For instance, from the the reign of Thutmose III we have an inscription that indicates that priestly initiations meant something spiritually as well as professionally. A new royal vizier, who was made Prophet of Ma’et*, says of his experience:
My abilities were not as they had been: my yesterday’s nature had altered itself, since I had come forth in the accouterments of a vizier, having been promoted to be Prophet of Ma’et.
A servant of the God
This man felt truly changed by “coming forth” as a vizier and servant of Ma’et. We can assume that at least some of the servants of Isis had no less an experience than this man. Thoth also seemed to inspire warm feelings in His devotees—and as many of them were scribes, they had the ability to express it. They called Him the Lord of Friendliness and the God of Incomparable Goodness.
As late as the Greek Magical Papyri, this friendliness with Thoth remains. In PGM VIII, 1-63, Thoth is called Hermes, but we can known He is Thoth because the spell says that His images include an ibis and a baboon, that His name is great in Hermopolis (Khmunu; “City of the Eight”) and that even Isis, “the greatest of all the Gods,” calls on Him in every crisis. Part of the spell states, “For You are I, and I am You; Your name is mine, and mine is Yours. For I am Your image.” While the magic here is powerful, the sentiment is gentle and intimate.
In what is today known as the Archive of Hor, we have some records of intimate feelings for the Goddess. Hor was a priest of Isis and Thoth who came from the town of Sebennytos, the town that grew up around the Temple of Isis there, and which the Greeks called Isiopolis. He writes beautifully of Her, has prophetic dreams from Her, and calls Her by what I think is a pet name, “my Tana.” You can read his story here.
Priest of Isis holding Osiris Hydreios
Yet the closest thing we have to a personal account of spiritual experiences related to Isis is in a novel by a North African named Apuleius. They are in his book, The Golden Ass, and he writes about his initiation into the Mysteries of Isis.
It dates to the late second century CE, when Isis’ popularity was most widespread. Because it is novelized, it gives us a glimpse of the protagonist Lucius’ interior state. And while Lucius is an initiate of Isis and not a priest, one could make an argument that he would probably qualify as what we would call a priest of Isis today. He is an initiate, he remains involved with the religion—serving in its special ranks or grades—and he outwardly marks himself as an Isiac by shaving his head.
In the novel, Lucius has had a spiritual crisis. After being magically turned into an ass, he has gone through trials and tribulations and finally throws himself upon the mercy of the Moon Goddess. She reveals Herself as Isis. She says that though She is called by many names, Her true name is Queen Isis.
She tells Lucius not to fear:
But above all things beware thou doubt not nor fear of any of those things as hard or difficult to be brought to pass…
…and know this of certainty, that the residue of thy life until the hour of death shall be bound and subject to Me; and think it not an injury to be always serviceable towards Me whilst thou shalt live, since as by My means and benefit thou shalt return again to be a man. Thou shalt live blessed in this world, thou shalt live glorious by My guide and protection, and when after thy allotted space of life thou decendest to the Underworld, there thou shalt see Me in the subterranean firmament shining (as thou seest Me now) in the darkness of Acheron, and reigning in the deep profundity of Styx and thou shalt worship Me as one that hath been favorable to thee. And if I perceive that thou art obedient to My commandment and hold to my religion, meriting by thy constant chastity My divine grace, know that I alone may prolong thy days above the time that the Fates have appointed and ordained.”
As an initiate of Isis, Lucius’ life is to change. He is to be Hers forever; and in return, She will not only save him from his present difficulty, but prolong his lifespan.
Roman priestess of Isis
The priest who is overseeing his initiation tells Lucius that to take Isis’ holy orders was like a “voluntary death and slow recovery.” Yet, even if someone were on the edge of death, and had but the strength to receive Her Mysteries, that person could be made new-born and healthy once more. He advises Lucius to “accept of your own free will the yoke of service.”
The mental and emotional state of Lucius after his initiation is one of pure love and wonder. He is passionately in love with the Goddess—and he remains so throughout all the days of his life.
I’ve had an experience like that. And I have always remembered it. It is one of the many experiences with Her that has made me passionate in my love of Her and dedication to Her.
Have you had such an experience?
* I’m only looking at a translation here and don’t have the Egyptian. When Egyptologists translate “prophet,” they usually mean a high priest, thus this title may have been Hem Ma’et Tepi or chief servant of Ma’et.
Not Thanksgiving. Not Yule. Not any of the beautiful winter holidays of Light. I am just not feeling festive. I am too deeply concerned about my own country and much of the world. I am too deeply concerned about my community and many of the individual friends and loved ones who are a part of it.
Yet today, out of nowhere—while on a simple errand—I finally felt something. I felt the epagomenal days. I sensed myself existing in a time-out-of-time, in a strange unreality. Sound seemed dampened as a soft quietness fell over everything.
And I realized that my own feeling of unfestive unease may mirror the feelings that many ancient Egyptians would have had during their own epagomenal days.
The Great Mother Nuet; artwork from the Damanhur Community, Italy
For them, the epagomenal days were the five days before the summer rising of the Star of Isis, Sopdet (Sothis in Greek, Sirius in Latin). With the rising of Her Star, the New Year began.
(The Egyptian year had 360 days, but the solar year has 365.25. So the Egyptians made up the difference by adding five epagomenal—intercalary or “inserted into the calendar”—days at the end of the year.)
These days were also considered the birthdays of Osiris, Haroeris (Horus the Elder), Set, Isis, and Nephthys. So, you would think these would have been positive days for the Egyptians. But without the protection of the confines of the calendar, the Egyptian epagomenal days were thought to be a quite dangerous time. People wore special amulets and priests might perform the ritual of Sehotep Sakhmet, or “Pacifying/Satisfying Sakhmet,” because the demonic, disease-bringing hoards of the fierce Goddess were particularly rampant at the end of the year. (See more about epagomenal amulets here.)
The beautiful Star of Isis, Sirius (Sopdet in Egyptian, Sothis in Greek) is directly overhead at the New Year
Our December is most definitely not the time of the ancient Egyptian end-of-the-year epagomenal days. However, from winter solstice to the New Year is the time I consider to be my epagomenal days, for they are the end-of-year days in our modern calendar. And they, too, are the lead-in to a little miracle that involves the Star of Isis. More on that below.
So let’s talk a bit about the epagomenal days, including some ways to celebrate our own end of the year with Isis.
Epagomenal days as birthdays of the Deities
As early as the Middle Kingdom (2050-1650 BCE), these five extra days were associated with the Divine birthdays. Birthday festivals for each of these Deities were duly celebrated during each epagomenal day. The time between the winter solstice and our New Year is longer than the Egyptian period, but if you’d like to celebrate the birthdays of the Deities, one every other day rather than one per day would work out fairly well.
An ancient Egyptian calendar from the temple of Karnak
On the other hand, if you wish to be more Isis-centric in your worship, you could consider the entire period as holy days of the Goddess as the miracle of Her star approaches.
We can look to some ancient calendrical inscriptions for the day of Isis’ birthday to give us clues about options for honoring Her at this time. In a papyrus known as Leyden I, She is called “The Great One, Daughter of Nuet.” She is said to be “in Khemmis,” that is, in a particular city in the delta, and She is invoked particularly for protection.
In another papyrus, Leyden II, the fourth day is said to be named “the Pure One Who is in His Field.” The masculine pronoun would seem to exclude Isis. It could allude to Osiris—or it could be a scribal error. If it should have been the Pure One Who is in Her Field, it would make a good deal of sense in connection with Isis since She was closely associated with the pure new plants that would soon be coming forth from the Egyptian fields in the New Year.
In 1943, a papyrus was purchased by the Cairo museum from an antiquities dealer. It turned out to be three ‘books’ about the Egyptian calendar. Two were extremely damaged and hard to read. The third has become known as the Cairo Calendar and includes information on which days of the year were considered auspicious and which were not. Of course, it includes the epagomenal days. In it, the fourth epagomenal day, Isis’ birthday, is said to be named “He Who Makes Terror.” It includes a formula to be recited on that day:
“O, this Isis, Daughter of Nuet, the Eldest, Mistress of Magic, Provider of the Book, Mistress Who Appeases the Two Lords, Her Face is Glorious. I am the brother and the sister. The name of this day is He Who Makes Terror.”
Another calendar notes that the fourth day is called, “the Child Who is in His Nest; the Birth of Isis.” And you’ll remember from several weeks ago that at Denderah, the child in His nest is Re, Whose rising, after the rising of Isis’ star, marks the first day of the New Year. In fact, the Denderah temples include numerous references to Isis’ connection with the New Year and the important renewal it brings. There is some evidence that Isis’ temple at Philae may have been dedicated to Her on the 4th epagomenal day as a birthday present. We also have evidence of a lamp festival for Isis on Her birthday, which you can read about here.
Thoth purifying the pharaoh from Isis’ temple at Philae
Despite its preceding dangers, the ancient Egyptian New Year itself was a time of joy, rebirth, and renewal. Our own New Year can be the same for us. The ancient Egyptian themes are, after all, entirely in harmony with our modern New Year celebrations.
Like they did, we begin again.
We start over. We rededicate ourselves. We make resolutions to do things better. Purification is often associated with such reboots and so the epagomenal days would be a perfect time for purification prior to entering into the New Year. People participating in “Dry January” are undertaking a purification from alcohol. Lots of people start New Year’s diets then, too. We might also purify ourselves by bathing, fasting, purchasing new clothing, or purifying our sacred spaces by cleaning and straightening up our shrines—all the while invoking Isis to surround us with Her mighty wings, encircling us with Her protection.
Epagomenal days as the time of the Star of Isis
During our winter epagomenal days, we don’t witness the heliacal rising of the Star of Isis as the ancient Egyptians did. However, there is something very special that happens at this time of year for those of us in the northern hemisphere: Sirius reaches its zenith, its highest point in the night sky.
The beautiful, glittering star of Isis ascends high into the starry belly of Her mother Nuet at the stroke of midnight on January 1st—and She can be seen shimmering in that position for about the first week of January. And this year, there’s a bonus: we’ll also see Jupiter and Mars nearby and shining extra brilliantly as well.
So, just as the heliacal rising of Sirius heralded the ancient Egyptian New Year, the beautiful Star of Isis reaching its highest point in the sky can serve as a marker for our own modern New Year’s celebrations. You’ll find a small rite for celebrating here.
For me, here in Portland, it is likely that our cloudy skies will obscure the brilliance of the celestial show above, as they so often do. Nevertheless, I will be purifying myself, asking Isis for protection and growth, and using the small ritual at the link above to welcome in the renewal of the New Year.
Parsifal by Jean Delville, but it definitely gives ‘mysteries’
Most of you reading this blog are well aware of the many epithets of Isis, Our Lady of 10,000 Names. In general, epithets are descriptions attached to the Goddess’ name that help us know more about Her. Very often, you’ll see people note that epithets are especially important in Deity invocations because they help us tune into the specific aspect of Their natures that we wish to connect with.
And that’s true.
Yet, I like to think of epithets as little Mysteries.
Each epithet of the Goddess has the possibility of revealing to us a Mystery—something about Isis we might not have known, or might not have known as deeply. In a post a couple weeks ago, one of the things we learned from the ancient Greek novel Aitheopika was that initiates of Her Mysteries called Isis the Earth and Osiris the Nile. I would not be at all surprised to learn that the revealing of additional epithets of the Goddess was a regular part of Her—and other Deities’—Mysteries. A Mystery initiation gave you insider knowledge about the Mystery Deity. Discovering new aspects of the Goddess through additional names and epithets would be some pretty solid insider information.
You’ll find epithets of Isis scattered throughout this blog. For instance, here are names and epithets honoring Isis from all over the Mediterranean world. Here are some of Her secret names from the magical papyri. There are about two hundred of Isis’ epithets listed in the appendix in Isis Magic. And Offering to Isis includes several epithets appropriate to each of the offerings—sacred symbols of the Goddess—as part of the invocation offerings.
Today, I’d like to share a few more epithets of Isis, some of which may be new to you. If you’d like to delve into the little Mysteries of these epithets for yourself, try this: Pick out a few that call to you. Open your shrine or temple in whatever manner you usually do. Invoke Isis using the epithet you chose. You can sing or chant the epithet as you call out to Her. When you sense Her presence, ask Her to reveal to you some of the Mysteries of that epithet. Then open your heart, open yourself, as you experience/intuit what She communicates to you. (Even better, jot down the things that come to your mind about that epithet for later reference. Visionary work sometimes fades rather quickly.)
In no particular order, here are some epithets of our Goddess from various parts of Egypt:
Isis in red, leading Nefertari
Isis, She Who Loves the Red Cloth; IsetMeret Ines—this epithet of Isis is found at Dendara. Interestingly enough, in representations of Isis, red is the most common color of Her clothing. The famous Knot of Isis is also usually made of red stone or painted red—and it may be meant to represent a knot tied in cloth. The ancient Egyptians associated red with fire, blood, and the sun. It could be a color of destructive power and associated with anger as well. We are used to Sakhmet being associated with red, but it turns out Isis is a Red Goddess, too.
Isis the Great Golden One; Iset Nebut Weret—while we are familiar with Isis being called, like Hathor, the Golden One, here She is the Great Golden One, an epithet She shares only with the Creator Goddess Neith. Gold is associated with the sun and Divinity. What does it mean that She is not only the Golden One, but the Great Golden One?
Isis, She of the Beautiful/Good/Perfect Face in the Barque of Eternity; IsetNoferet Hor em Wia Heh—the Barque of Eternity if the boat that travels into the Otherworld, both the underworld and the heavens. What does it mean that Isis is the beautiful-good-perfect face in that holy boat?
Isis with golden yellow skin
Isis the Lady of Awfulness; Iset Nebet Neru—this is the literal meaning of awful, as in “full of awe,” but also a designation of Her great, and sometimes scary, power. See more about this one here.
Isis the Great One in the Beginning; Iset Weret em Hat—this epithet is from Her temple at Philae and is another epithet Isis shares only with the Creator Goddess Neith. This is Isis as a Primeval Goddess, the First Goddess. Similarly, She is called the Great Goddess “of the coming into being” and is the Great Goddess “in the First Time,” the Zep Tepi. We also have inscriptions calling Isis Sha’et, “She Who Was First,” from a number of places, including Philae, Dendara, and Edfu.
The Perfect Musician
Isis the Great in the Place of Her Heart; Iset Weret em Set Ib-Es—this one is from the Horus temple at Edfu. What do you think ‘the place of Her heart’ is?
Isis, Her Years are Eternity and Everlastingness; Iset, Renput-s Neheh Djet—learn more about Neheh and Djet here and here.
Isis the Perfect Musician; Iset Khunet Noferet—from Dendara. Isis is also called “the Musician of the Spoken Words” and the Shemayet, the “Chantress.” The Chantress was a high-ranking priestess in ancient Egypt. Read more about AE priestesses and the Chantress here.
Isis and the pharaoh raising the djed pillar
Isis, She Who Makes Shadow with Her Feathers; Iset Iret Shut em Shuut-Es—from a stele now in the Louvre. We know about Her wing symbolism, but what about the shadow of Her wings?
Isis the Djed Pillar; Iset Djedet—now isn’t this interesting? Osiris is usually associated with the djed pillar. But here we have Isis as the female djed pillar. The djed represents stability, so that is likely the meaning here: Isis is strong, stable, dependable.
On the other hand, She also personifies Her own symbol, and is called Isis the Excellent Isis Knot (Iset Tiet Menkhet)…for Isis is All Things and All Things are Isis.
There are so many more, but that’s enough for now.
If, in your connections with Isis, you discover any of the Mysteries of these epithets, I hope you’ll share them here, on Facebook, or on BlueSky.
It’s that time of year when we (once again) see all those articles comparing the Divine Mother Mary with the Divine Mother Isis, followed by either outrage or approbation, depending on who’s doing the writing.
Not long ago, in relation to this, a friend of this blog asked a very excellent question. It had to do with Isis’ status as a Virgin Goddess. Basically, is She or isn’t She? She is often compared with the famously Virgin Mary, and the images of the two Goddesses, nursing Their holy babes, are strikingly similar. And then there’s all of this.
Well, as is often the way with Goddesses, the answer is both no and yes.
We’re all pretty familiar with the sexual relations between Isis and Osiris. All the way back to the Pyramid Texts we hear about it, rather explicitly we might add. Pyramid Text 366 says, “Your [Osiris] sister Isis comes to You rejoicing for love of You. You have placed Her on your phallus and Your seed issues into Her…” Plutarch, in the version of the story he recorded, tells us that Isis and Osiris were so in love with each other that They even made love while still within the womb of Their Great Mother Nuet. And, of course, we have the sacred story of how Isis collected the pieces of the body of murdered-and-dismembered Osiris, all except the phallus. Crafting a replacement of gold, the flesh of the Gods, She was able to arouse Her Beloved sufficient for the conception of Horus. The mourning songs of Isis and Nephthys have Her longing for His love. The priestess, in the Goddessform of Isis, sings that “fire is in Me for love of Thee” and She calls Him Lord of Love and Lord of Passion. She pleads, “Lie Thou with Thy sister Isis, remove Thou the pain that is in Her body.” (For more on the Songs or Lamentations, go here.)
So, is that all there is to it? Isis is not a virgin?
Well, not quite. Because Isis is a Goddess.
Isis is the Goddess of 10,000 Names and 10,000 Forms. Among those forms are the sexual Lover of Osiris and the Mother of Horus. Also among Her many Names are syncretisms with famously virginal Goddesses such as Artemis, Hekate, and Athena, as well as heroines such as Io, a virgin priestess of Hera (a Goddess Who Herself renews Her virginity on the regular). Isis is identified with both Demeter the Mother and Persephone the Kore, the Young Girl, Who were sometimes seen as a single unit, Mother-Daughter, containing All in Themselves. Goddesses can be many things, all at once, without any contradiction—or perhaps with every contradiction, which is one of the ways of Goddesses.
No text shows us these Divine Feminine contradictions/not-contradictions as clearly as “The Thunder, Perfect Mind,” a text found among the Nag Hammadi papyri. It is a long poem in the voice of a Feminine Divine Power that some scholars have linked to Isis; or at least they think that Her worship influenced the content of the text. Could be, but in my opinion, the Divine Speaker may be better understood as Sophia—with Whom Isis is also identified. The Coptic (late Egyptian) manuscript from which the text comes is dated to roughly 350 CE. Here’s a brief excerpt from this amazing work:
For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the mother and the daughter. I am the members of my mother. I am the barren one and many are her sons. I am she whose wedding is great, and I have not taken a husband.
The Thunder, Perfect Mind
Clearly, Isis is syncretized with Virgin Goddesses throughout the Mediterranean world. And it is not at all unusual for such Goddesses to be both virginal and associated with fertility. What about Egyptian sources?
The ancient Egyptians were not quite so concerned with virgins—by which I mean, in this case, a young person who has not yet had sex—as were the Greeks and some other Mediterranean peoples. For instance, there was no requirement that young women or young men be sexually inexperienced when they married. Many young women probably were—particularly those who were married very young to older husbands. But prior to marriage, young people might engage relatively freely with each other. After marriage, sexual exclusivity was demanded—especially for women. The penalties for non-compliance could be very harsh—especially for women.
The Two Sisters
This is not to say that Egyptian virginity was not valued or even required under certain circumstances. The text that included the lamentation songs of Isis and Nephthys noted above specifies that the priestesses taking the roles of Isis and Nephthys be “pure of body and virgin” and also that they are to have their body hair removed, wigs on their heads, tambourines in their hands, and the names of Isis and Nephthys inscribed on their arms.
This text, one of very few we have, is from the Ptolemaic period, when Egypt had been influenced by Greek rule. I wonder whether virginity would have been considered necessary earlier. Perhaps the priestesses would have only had to abstain from sex for a period of time before their ritual service. We know that people serving in Egyptian temples had to abstain from sex for a time (at least a day, often a number of days) as part of their purification. But they weren’t virgins.
Ankhnesneferibre, God’s Wife of Amun
The God’s Wife of Amun, the highest of high priestesses, usually a female relation of the king, was virgin for life. Beginning in the 2nd Intermediate Period, the lifetime position of the God’s Wife gained a great deal of power, eventually becoming second only to the king. Interestingly, it was an “Isis”—Iset, the virgin daughter of Rameses VI—who began the tradition of the God’s Wife being celibate. Later, in the Roman period, some Roman priestesses of Isis maintained lifelong virginity. And we know that the Roman Isiacs might maintain a 10-day period of pre-ritual chastity known as the Castimonium Isidis or Chastity of Isis.
Isis Herself is called the Great Virgin in one of the inscriptions from the Isis Chapel in Seti I’s mortuary temple at Abydos. In Egyptian, this is Hunet Weret. Hunet is the word for girl or maiden, weret is the feminine form of great. Hunet is also the Egyptian name for the pupil of the eye and is connected to the Hermetic treatise known as the Kore Kosmou, the “Virgin of the World.” You can read about those maidenly connections here. (And read about the Kore Kosmouhere, here, and here. )Just like Greek parthenos, hunet could mean a virgin, a girl, a maiden, or just youthful. (A young boy or youth is hunu.) And all Egyptian Goddesses are forever young.
Parthenogenesis was not unknown in Egypt, either. The First Creators in many Egyptian myths, such as the God Atum and the Goddess Neith, created everything from Themselves alone. Some Egyptian queens, such as Ahmose, Hatshepsut’s mother, were said to have given birth to pharaohs after sexual union with a God. Just like Mary and the Holy Spirit of the Christian God.
So, is Isis a Virgin Goddess? Yes. Does She have sex with Her Divine Husband? Yes. She is, as so many Goddesses are, Both And. She is a patroness of marital sexual desire and bliss and She is an ever-renewing, ever-youthful Virgin Goddess. In this holy season and every day, may She bless you with the gifts you most desire.
The Aethiopika is an ancient Greek novel and the only known work by a writer named Heliodorus. It was written in the second or third centuries CE. It is a tale of love and adventure, and yes of course, Isis is involved. So I thought I’d summarize this tale today, focusing on the part Isis and Her cult play in the story.
The eternal lovers
The reason this came up was that I was looking at a book about the interactions between the Greek and Egyptian cultures and their influence on each other. It seems that the more researchers look into it, the more they come to the conclusion that, while the influence went both ways, the Egyptian culture seemed to have more weight behind it—if for no other reason than it was the older, more established, and richer culture.
Roman-period Isis
Scholars have long suggested that the Greek “romances” owed at least some debt to Egyptian sources. And yes, these books are romance novels in the classic sense: lovers fall in love, are parted by circumstances, adventure ensues, lovers are finally reunited.
Scholars such as the Classics professor Reinhold Merkelbach suggested that all ancient Greek novels (there are only five complete ones extant, with references to about 20 more) were informed by myth—but most especially by the Isis-Osiris complex of myths. Interesting, no? At the time of the Aethiopika, the myths of Isis and Osiris certainly would have been the ones most well known to Hellenes. Merkelbach further suggested that such tales were meant for the initiates of the Greco-Roman Mysteries, who would have understood the deeper meaning behind all the hidden clues. This theory has not generally been accepted, however.
Yet, at the very least, we can easily see the overall structure of the classic romance novel in the story of Isis and Osiris: lovers are in love, are parted by murder, the adventure of picking up the pieces ensues, and lovers are finally reunited, though one of Them is transformed.
The story of the Aethiopika reached far beyond the borders and time of the ancient Hellenistic and Roman worlds. The tale was influential all the way into the 17th and 18th centuries. That’s why all the illustrations I found for this article do not look remotely ancient Greek, Egyptian, or Ethiopian.
The Aethiopika is the love story of Theagenes and Chariklea. We meet Chariklea at the very beginning of the tale as a gang of Egyptian thieves approaches the scene of a beached pirate ship, with its crew slain, while they were in the midst of a celebratory banquet. As the robbers approach to scavenge, they see the beautiful Chariklea among the living. In sorrow, she is looking at a handsome young man who is wounded and perhaps dying. They exchange words and she tells him that, should he die, she will kill herself with the knife she bears.
Chariklea looks upon the wounded Theogenes
She rises to go to him—and the brigands step back, afraid. They think she is a Goddess, either “Artemis or Isis, the divine patroness of Egypt.” Others think she may have caused the slaughter as a frenzied priestess. Finally, they gain the courage to approach. Chariklea sees them, but continues to tend to Theagenes. Then, more thieves arrive, chase off the first group, and capture Chariklea and Theagenes. The prisoners are taken to the house of Thyamis, the chief thief, and given another prisoner as Greek interpreter. The interpreter, Cnemon, begins to treat Theagenes’ wounds with a healing herb.
We learn that Chariklea believes that Apollo is punishing the two of them because she and Theagenes fell in love with each other during the Pythian Games at Delphi and ran away together (she had been promised to another man). Chariklea had been abandoned by her Ethiopian parents, but was raised by a priest of Apollo at Delphi, becoming a priestess of Artemis. The pair of lovers fled Delphi, assisted by Kalasiris, an Egyptian priest of Isis.
It’s complicated.
Chariklea captured by brigands
Anyway, during the night, Thyamis has a dream. He dreams he is in Egyptian Memphis, his home town, and there visits a temple of Isis. The Goddess entrusts the care of Chariklea to him, but Her commands come as a riddle, which he decides to interpret as telling him that he should take her as a wife.
But now a group of warriors come to attack the thieves. Chariklea is taken to a cave, while Theagenes must fight with the thieves. During battle, Thyamis realizes the true meaning of Isis’ dream message: that he will lose the battle and lose Chariklea. Pissed off at Isis, he goes to Chariklea’s cave to kill her—since he can’t have her; you know how it is—but in the dark mistakenly kills another woman.
Theagenes and Cnemon escape the battle, but believe that Chariklea is dead. Thyamis is captured alive, for it turns out this group of warriors was sent by Thyamis’ younger brother, who had earlier stolen his rightful priesthood from him. But Theagenes and Cnemon find Chariklea alive. The group decides to go south, further into Egypt, to find Thyamis and seek revenge for his killing of the other woman, who Cnemon knew.
Rhodopis
When they get to Khemmis, they are reunited with Kalisiris, the priest of Isis who helped them escape Delphi. He had believed Theagenes and Chariklea were dead and is thrilled to find them alive. We learn that, as a pious priest, Kalisiris drinks only water and never neglects to pour libations to the Deities. He is also a vegetarian, eating only nuts and fruits. In the course of events, Kalisiris tells how he came to be in Delphi.
A Thracian woman named Rhodopis came to Egypt, settled in Memphis, and set up shop as a courtesan. She would visit the temple of Isis where Kalisiris was high priest, where she made abundant offerings to the Goddess, for her business was thriving. Though Kalisiris practiced all types of priestly austerities, he could not resist Rhodopis’ charms and he fell hard for her (apparently after merely seeing her). His answer to escaping Rhodopis’ fatal allure was to leave his priesthood and his native Egypt to wander.
We further learn that Kalisiris is skilled in divination and had divined that his two sons were destined to battle each other. (Can you guess yet who Kalisiris’ sons might be?) Having heard of Delphi as a refuge for wise men, Kalisiris traveled there, arriving just at the time that the Pythia was prophesying. He received an oracle from the God telling him to take heart for he will be able to return to Egypt, but in the meantime to be the friend of Apollo.
Chariklea awarding the prize to Theagenes at the Delphic Games
The status of “friend of Apollo” greatly enhanced Kalisiris’ reputation and he joined a group of philosophers who peppered him with questions about Egypt and its Deities. Through Chariklea’s foster-father, Kalisiris meets her and witnesses as she and Theagenes fall in love instantly. And so, he is determined to help them.
So now our lovers, their companion, and Kalisiris are back in Egypt. There, they are involved in a number of adventures in which one or the other of the lovers gets entangled with other characters. A Persian governor’s wife falls for Theagenes, so she makes showy offerings at the temple of Isis, all the while lusting for Theagenes. At the same time, Kalisiris is devoutly praying before Isis about his sons and his own future. Previously, he had been reunited with his elder son Thyamis, the former chief thief, and even better, the two warring brothers were reconciled. Kalisiris declares that the eldest son, Thyamis, should inherit his Isiac priesthood for Kalisiris’ senses his own death approaching. The governor’s wife tries to frame Chariklea for poisoning, so she can have Theagenes. This, of course, fails. More adventures eventually find both Chariklea and Theagenes captured by the Ethiopian king—who is Chariklea’s real father, but who does not yet know her.
As sexual virgins, Chariklea and Theagenes are perfect sacrifices and are about to be sacrificed to the Sun and Moon, Deities of the Ethiopians. But wait! Due to a necklace that Chariklea’s mother had placed about her neck when she abandoned Chariklea, the Ethiopian king finally recognizes his true daughter. All is well. Chariklea and Theagenes are married and live happily ever after.
To be honest, the Aethiopika is a bit of a tedious tale. Yet, the reason I was reading this story was for the Isis lore.
Hellenistic Isis
For example, we’ve learned about the pure-water-and-vegetarian diet of Kalisiris, a high priest of the Goddess. We know he is always pouring libations for the Goddess and any other Deities he encounters. We find that he is subject to visions and is a good diviner. We know that he must keep himself chaste—and so removes himself from Rhodopis’ disturbing presence.
From Thyamis’ dream, we see that Isis can send dreams, even in Loxian riddles, that can be misinterpreted by the dreamer. From the story of the Persian governor’s wife, we learn that not all rich offerings are sincere. In another part of the tale, we discover that offerings might be made to Isis if one has a bad dream. In yet another, the text tells us that initiates of the Mysteries call Isis the Earth and Osiris the Nile (but our speaker would reveal nothing more of those Mysteries). Oh, and we also learned that the love story of Isis and Osiris may well be the prototype for ancient Greek romances, and thus the roots of our modern romance novels, too.
Our Goddess can for found everywhere—for Isis is all things, and all things are Isis.
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).
Roman Isis in Her black robes
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.
Sirius, the star of Isis
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.
For some of us, poetry is one of the ways in which we can express our feelings or experiences with the Divine. Whether we compose it ourselves or discover a poem that has the perfect words to touch our hearts and say what we’d want to say.
Hesiod Listening to the Inspiration of the Muse; Edmond-François Aman-Jean, French, 1890
It isn’t easy to be a poet. You can wrestle with words for days and still come up empty-handed. I find that if I just sit down with the intention of writing a poem about Isis, I get—well—pretty much nothing.
The way it works best for me, is to poise my fingers over the keyboard, clear my mind, close my eyes, invoke the Goddess…and start typing. (The trick is keeping your fingers over the right keys. Otherwise you get rhwewosqeonger.)
What comes out is by no means finished. It’s more like notes for a poem. Then I work with it and shape it, making it into something, and in that process discover its meaning—for me, for now.
The value of this for me is that I often get images that I would not have come up with in my normal state of consciousness. Sometimes, they don’t even make logical sense, but they do make a kind of poetic sense. They can be odd and beautiful. Sometimes I edit out the strangenesses. Sometimes I just leave them in, hoping that they’ll communicate what the Goddess intended.
To show you what I mean, I’m going to do a little experiment right now. [NOTE: This is a repost. But when I first wrote it, it was done “live” and in real time.]
So here we go. Fingers poised over keyboard…opening…invoking…and typing this:
long black wings against a blue white sky clouds bending into circles interpenetrating the blackness of feather of feature of faith clean sharp shriek of light coming into my mind clearing feathered fog leaving its own breath I am hearing you now
That’s what it looks like first out of my brain, and inspired in whispered hints from some Muse-form of Isis. It sort of reminds me of Symbolist poetry from the late 19th/early 20th century.
Now, I’ll break it up into phrases and add punctuation as remembered from my mental “hearing” of it:
Long black wings against a blue-white sky. Clouds bend into circles, interpenetrating the blackness of feather, of feature, of faith. A clean, sharp shriek of light comes into my mind, clearing feathered fog and leaving its own breath. I am hearing you now.
I’m starting to understand what this is about. It’s about the subject of this post—receiving poetic inspiration from the Goddess. So it is an image of what that inspiration can be like.
Now, working with it a bit more, I get this:
Long, dark wings flash against a purified sky. Blue-white ghost clouds move and spiral, interpenetrated by the blackness of feather, of feature, of faith. In my mind, a clean, sharp shriek of light clears feathered fog, leaves its own breath. I am hearing you now.
Diego y yo, Frida Kahlo; Frida and Diego served as muses for each other
I’ll leave this as it is for now. If I had intended to keep this, I would probably work with it a bit more. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s just a quick example of what the Goddess might inspire.
Now, art of any kind isn’t quick and easy. In fact, it takes time and practice. But if you are at all inclined, I’d urge you to try it. In your own way, of course. And in your own medium. Maybe you’ll paint instead. Maybe you’ll sing. But however it comes to you, don’t be concerned with the perfection of your results. She doesn’t care about that. Isis will always gladly take your work as an offering of devotion and love.
(I have a question about this little bit of Isis poetry: That final phrase, “I am hearing you now.” Is that the poet hearing the Goddess, or the Goddess hearing the poet? What do you think?)
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.
Anubis in Roman garb
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.
Demeter immortalizing Demophon
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.
Isis-Aphrodite
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:
Isis-Hermouthis
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.
Isis-Demeter-Selene
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.
Last night, we held our All-Hallows Eve rite (a bit early, I know). As we welcomed our Honored Dead in the presence of the Dark Ones, many of us were very aware of the bright moon shining above, just two days past a full Hunters’ Moon.
The moon, the moon, the moon. And I am thinking now of the moon and Our Lady Isis.
When we first encounter Isis, we often first discover Her as a lunar Goddess, a Goddess of the Moon. But is She?
Well, that really kind of depends on when you ask.
If we’re asking for today, for now, then yes, She is. And She has been for more than a millennium. But She took a rather circuitous route to get there. So let’s follow that trail a bit and see how it happened.
Early in Egyptian history, Isis was firmly associated with the heavens—with the star Sirius in particular, and with the sun, too—but She was not considered a Moon Goddess.
Moon Gods were the norm for Egypt—Iah, Thoth, Khonsu, and Osiris are among the most prominent and the moon’s phases were quite important to the ancient Egyptians. Scholars generally agree that the first Egyptian calendars, like those of so many ancient people, were lunar based. The temples marked the moon’s changes and especially celebrated its waxing and full phases. But the face the Egyptians saw in the moon was masculine rather than feminine.
The horns of the Moon Goddess rising
For example, the waning and waxing of the moon could be associated with the wounding and healing of the Eye of Horus. So, perhaps we can think of Isis as the Mother of the Moon. Indeed, She was called “Isis, Who Creates the Moon Eye of Horus by Her Heart.” In some myths, Isis is the one Who heals Horus’ Eye, in others, it is Thoth or Hathor and we see this reflected in Isis’ epithet as She “Who Heals the Left Eye.”
By the time of the New Kingdom, the beloved of Isis, Osiris, becomes prominent as a lunar God. We have a number of examples of statuettes of Osiris-Iah—Osiris assimilated with Iah, a Moon God—or simply as Osiris the Moon. So in this case, Isis is married to the Moon. But She’s not really a Moon Goddess Herself.
On the other hand, the Greeks and the Romans were all about the Moon Goddess. In fact, the moon itself was simply called “the Goddess.” People spoke of doing something “when the Goddess rises.” They would kiss their hands, extending them toward the rising moon, “to greet the Goddess.” Magical texts give instructions for performing a certain ritual “on the first of the Goddess,” meaning at the new moon. When they saw Isis with Her horns-and-disk crown, they saw a Moon Goddess.
The lunar Eye of Horus
And because we have so much information about Isis from these Moon Goddess-loving people, today when many people think of Isis, the moon is one of the first things they associate with Her. Yet, interestingly, it seems to have been a third century BCE Egyptian priest named Manetho who first connected Isis with the moon. By the following century, when Plutarch recorded the most complete version of the Isis-Osiris myth we have, the tradition of Isis as a Goddess of the Moon was firmly established—even in Egypt.
Of course, it was easy to associate the fertility-bringing moon with the fertile Mother Isis. The ancient world also associated love affairs with the moon (the romance of moonlight, you know) and, in Her passion for Osiris, Isis was a famous lover.
A Roman Isis with lunar crescent
Of course, the moon and the obscuring darkness of night were connected with magic, too—and Isis was one of Egypt’s Mightiest Magicians from the beginning. She was called Lady of the Night. One Egyptian story told how a particular magical scroll—which the tale calls a “mystery of the Goddess Isis”—was discovered when a moonbeam fell upon its hiding place, enabling a lector priest in Isis’ temple to find it.
Today, we also connect the moon with emotions, the deep, the waters, the feminine (taking our cue from the ancient Greeks and Romans), the home, Mystery, and change (to name but a few). And Isis can definitely be associated with all of these things—from the emotional passion of Her myths to Her ancient Mysteries and Her enduring role as the Goddess of Regeneration and Transformation.
So is Isis a Moon Goddess? She certainly has been for a very, very long time. Whether we choose to honor Her in this form has more to do with us than with Her. Many contemporary Pagans will probably be quite comfortable working with Isis as a Moon Goddess; a strict Kemetic Reconstructionist, not so much. But Isis is a Great Goddess; She is All, and so, for me, She is unquestionably to be found in the deep and holy Mysteries of the Moon.
And yet, and just for myself, while I do find Her in the moon, I resonate most strongly with Isis of the Stars and Isis of the Eternities of Space and Isis the Radiant Sun Goddess. Nevertheless, I still feel the call to explore Her important lunar aspects. What about you?
We gazed at the waning light of the moon last night.
Its cool, pale light was beautiful, and yet sad. That’s often how this time of year feels. Beautiful. And sad. For at this time of year, many of us remember our Beloved and Honored Dead.
My favorite Osiris rising
Some of us might celebrate the solemn rites of Samhain—from a quite different culture than that of ancient Egypt. (In my community, we’ll celebrate our rites next weekend.)
Now, of course you’re quite right that the ancient Egyptians did not celebrate Samhain. Yet we know they honored their dead. Indeed, their dead could be very, very present for them, as transfigured spirits, akhu, who could help them in their day-to-day lives—or cause them trouble.
But for Isis devotees seeking a more Egyptian way to mark this time of year, I’d like to introduce you to the Isia.
A festival called the Isia is found in a calendar from 354 CE that was commissioned by a wealthy Roman Christian named Valentinus from a prominent, also-Christian scribe named Philocalus. The Calendar of Philocalus is famous because it contains the first known reference to the Christian holiday of Christmas as an annual festival of the birth of the Christ on December 25th. (There are earlier references to that date, but not as an annual festival.)
An illustration of November from Philocalus’ 354 CE calendar; note the sistrum and Anubis head
But for Isiacs, the calendar is important for its inclusion of a different festival: the Isia. Philocalus records the dates of the Isia as October 28th-November 1st. Some scholars also include the days until November 3rd as part of the Isia. That’s because Philocalus’ calendar has what was known as an “Egyptian Day” on November 2nd and a Hilaria on November 3rd, both of which may have been included in the Isia.
Let me explain: to the Romans, an “Egyptian Day” was a bad luck day. There were three in January and two in every other month. The first Egyptian Day in November fell right after the Isia, on November 2nd. These days were inappropriate for public festivals, sacrifices, and were generally stay-in-your-house-and-do-nothing days. The bad luck of the Egyptian Days continued on into medieval Christian calendars.
Why were they called “Egyptian” days? No one knows for certain. However, Egyptian calendars (for example, the famous New Kingdom Cairo Calendar) often list festivals along with auspicious and inauspicious days. So it may well be that Romans simply picked up these genuinely Egyptian bad luck days and put them into their own calendar. (This tells you how influential the worship of The Egyptian Gods—mostly Isis and Sarapis—were.) Later on, the name was taken to refer to the ten biblical plagues of Egypt to better harmonize these pagan-y days with scripture.
From Pompeii: Making offering before the sarcophagus of Osiris
As for the Hilaria, there are two shown on Philocalus’ calendar, one on March 25th, at the end of a lengthy festival of Magna Mater/Kybele in which the death of Attis is mourned. The preceding day (the 24th) was the Day of Blood, on which flagellation and self-castration might take place, and it was also an Egyptian Day. The Hilaria was what it sounds like: a day of joy. People played games and feasted. Some scholars think that the spring Hilaria could be the origin of our April Fool’s Day.
So clearly, it was not absolutely unheard of to have a festival on an Egyptian Day…of course in the case of the Kybele festival, it was the (yikes!) Day of Blood. There is nothing else listed in Philocalus’ calendar for the Egyptian Day following the Isia. The November Hilaria is shown as the day after that, on the 3rd.
Yet in both cases, we have a Great Goddess with a partner to be mourned, followed by a Day of Joy. This makes very good sense from a psychological standpoint; we need relief after mourning. So it may be that we should include the Egyptian Day and the Hilaria following the Isia as part of the Isia festival after all. Which would mean that (here in the northern hemisphere) we’re approaching the festival right now. So there’s time to prepare should you choose to celebrate your own Isia.
Artist’s depiction of ceremonies at the Temple of Isis, Pompeii. Click to see it larger.
We know little else about the Roman Isia. On one hand, this frees us to create our own Isia. Given the time of year, we might choose to connect the Isia with the modern festival of Halloween. Isis is, after all, a Goddess of the Dead par excellence. There is much we could do with an Isia in which we remembered our own Honored Dead, for example by speaking their names and making offering in the ancient Egyptian tradition.
On the other hand, there is an appropriate Egyptian option for the celebration of the Isia and—and given the timing and the resonant subject matter—it is a likely candidate for the basis of the Roman Isia.
Mourning for Osiris
Though perhaps it should more rightly be called the Osiria. For at about this same time of year, in the Egyptian month of Khoiak, the ancients held a festival for Osiris that remembered His conflict with His brother Set, His death, and His resurrection through the holy magic of Isis. We know of this festival from the period of the Middle Kingdom and have a decent record of it from the great Osirian sanctuary of Abydos. We also know of it from the Osiris chapel in Hathor’s Ptolemaic sanctuary at Denderah.
The festival re-enacted the central Isis-Osiris myth (I won’t recount it here; you all know the story.) The Egyptians molded images of Osiris from Nile mud, special spices, talismanic stones, and seeds. The images were watered so that the grain sprouted, a fitting symbol of new life. (We should also know that this was about the time of year when the Nile flood was receding so that the fields could be planted with new crops.) The festival ended with the raising of the Djed pillar, symbol of the resurrection of the God Himself as Lord of the Otherworld.
If you are so inclined, now is a perfect time to re-enact that core Isiac myth—if on a smaller and more personal scale. And should you do so from Isis’ point of view, it would be a true Isia, indeed.
Watering the grain in the sacred image of Osiris
I have done my own private Isia like this: I shuffle and deal out 14 Tarot cards, representing the 14 parts of the body of Osiris. I place or “hide” the cards in a circle around my temple. Then, during the several days of the festival, I ritually circle the temple, “finding” some of the cards until I have “found” them all. Then I assemble them into a roughly human-shaped, stick-figure Osiris. (This is a fairly large spread, so I place it in the middle of the floor of my temple.) On the last day of the festival, I turn over the cards, revealing them, and read them as an omen for the coming season and coming year. Naturally—to expand the rite and get myself in the proper magical frame of time, I use temple openings and closings of my choice from Isis Magic. (The Opening of the Ways works quite well; if you haven’t got your own copy of Isis Magic, you’ll find the ritual here.)
Should you decide to honor the Isia this year—in this way or some other—I would love to know about your experience. Whether you choose to connect your Isia with the ancient Khoiak festivals of Isis and Osiris, create a Day-of-the-Dead-type Isia, or celebrate some other way entirely, I wish you much depth and beauty in this darkening season of sad, sweet remembrance. May She embrace you always.
Isis and the pharaoh raise the Djed pillar, the symbol of the resurrection of Osiris
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.
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.)
Turquoise and carnelian—perfect Egyptian colors for fall.
Here at the 45th parallel on the west coast of the US, we are perfectly situated to experience the turning of the seasons in a nearly archetypal form. Very often, the first day of autumn or winter or spring or summer turns out to be a ideal expression of the forthcoming season. Today, the first day of fall, is sunny, warmish but not hot, and the air shines with the gold that only autumn can bring. And it’s harvest time.
The crops are a bit late this year due to our weather; nonetheless, winter squash are in the farmer’s market and we’re just a few weeks away from our annual Dionysian Grape Stomp and Bacchanal, when we harvest the grapes in our own vineyard, dance them to juice, then feast and trance the night away.
Yet here, halfway from the equator to the top of the world, the seasons bear no relation to the seasons in ancient Egypt. For them, this would have been the second month of Inundation, when the Nile rose to cover the land, bringing its rich silt to Egyptian fields. Harvest time wasn’t until early Spring.
What’s an Isiac to do?
The Two Sisters, here with symbols of the Two Lands
For me, the answer is simple: when it comes to seasonal things, I celebrate locally. I am not trying to recreate the worship of Isis as it was in ancient Egypt; instead, I am inspired by those ancient roots of Her worship and yet feel perfectly free to grow from those beautiful, deep, and ancient roots new living plants. The seasons of the ancient Egyptians are not my seasons. And though this Egyptian Goddess is my Goddess, I cannot help but experience Her through my own modern cultural—and seasonal—lenses.
Thus, while the rite I will be participating in tonight, on this equinoctial evening, is not an ancient Egyptian rite, it honors one of the most important themes in ancient Egyptian life and spirit: duality. For tonight I shall make offering to the Two Sisters. Bright Isis and Dark Nephthys Who, when joined hand in hand, are an expression of the sacred magic of the equinox—the harmonious balance of light and dark, day and night.
Isis & Nephthys as sisters. See more illustrations of this artist’s work here.
The two Goddesses compliment each other in the light and dark children They bear 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.”
The Twins
And yet, Isis and Nephthys are also and importantly twins. They are the Two Ladies, the Two Women, the Two Goddesses of the Hall of Truth, the Two Long-Haired Ones, the Two Uraeus Serpents, the Two Spirits, the Two Nurses, the Two Weavers, the Two Feathers, the Two Birds, the Two Cows, the Two Kites, the Two Divine Mothers, the Two Eyes of God, the Two Women, the Two Wise Ones, the Two Weepers, the Two Great, Great Ones, and ultimately, the Two Uniters. The essential balance and unity of Isis and Nephthys is expressed in the Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri by the name Isenephthys or Isis-Nephthys.
And so, in this time of perfect balance, I dance between the equal poles of night and day, teetering on the scales of Libra, and I honor the Two Ladies.
I think I mentioned that Isis took, as an offering from me, a silver Knot of Isis when I visited Her Philae temple earlier this year. I had it on a chain around my neck when we took the boat over to the temple…and it was simply gone when we came back. It made me smile.
The Knot of Isis is often of red material, but here’s a green one, the color of all good things in ancient Egypt
Knots are important symbols for Isis and of Her. Most of us are very familiar with the Knot of Isis, the knot amulet that resembles an ankh, but with the “arms” folded down. Learn more about it here. But there’s another reason Isis is connected with knots. And that’s because She is the Goddess of Magic—heka, in Egyptian—and very often, heka was and still is worked by the tying of knots.
Ancient Egyptian texts often describe working heka as weaving or knitting, which is just another form of knotting. The deceased person is said to be “knit together in the egg” prior to rebirth. Some texts say that the head of the deceased is “knit on.” The concept of weaving, knitting, or knotting magic—bringing the strands of magic together to create or preserve or repel—makes complete and utter sense to me. There is a delicacy and precision that the many types of knotting require that speaks to me as a very viable way to work magic.
Note the knots in the straps of the Goddess’ garment as well as the little loop between Her breasts.
The basic idea is simple enough: tied knots bind and untied knots release. Beyond that, knots can unite opposites and—since a knot secures things—protect.
Knot magic was well known in Egypt from an early period; an inscription in one of the pyramids says that Isis and Nephthys work magic for Osiris “with knotted cords.”
The Book of Coming Forth by Day (aka Book of the Dead) also gives several examples of the magical power of the knot. In one, knots are tied around the deceased to help them come into the presence of the Deities: “The four knots are tied about me by the guardian of the sky [. . .] the knot was tied about me by Nuet, when I first saw Ma’et, when the gods and the sacred images had not yet been born. I am heaven born, I am in the presence of the Great Gods.”
A tjes knot as part of a necklace and the Goddess Bat or Hathor; surely this beautiful piece of jewelry was also protective
In addition to these four knots, another text talks about seven knots, or tesut, that were tied about the deceased to protect them.
The power of the magical knot is in its ability to both unite and “surround” things. The tied knot is a symbol of the coming together of two things in perfect wholeness, a condition that promotes a positive outcome.
A passage in the Coffin Texts says that when the hair of Isis is knotted to the hair of Nephthys, the Two River Banks (that is, the land of the living and the land of the dead) are united. Tying a knot could also refer to sexuality; the perfect coming together of two people in an act of creation. We still “tie the knot” when we get married.
Hapi “tying the knot” to unite the Two Lands
Furthermore, because the two ends of the cord used in tying a magical knot symbolically go all the way around something, they “surround” that thing. Thus knot magic could be used to surround” or bind an enemy—or even tie a curse to them.
In Spell 42 in Budge’s translation of the Book of the Dead, the knot appears as a kind of seed. The deceased is said to be “the knot within the tamarisk tree, beautiful of splendor more than yesterday.” This surely refers to Osiris within the tree prior to His resurrection.
And, of course, as you already know, the famous Knot of Isis is a very magical knot. In most cases, it is protective and associated with renewal and resurrection. As time passed, it became a must-have amulet for all mummies and was usually placed on the upper torso.
A tjes knot used to secure a belt
If you’d like to work some protective knot magic for yourself, here’s a ritual, slightly adapted, from my Isis Magic (new edition coming in spring of 2026 from REDFeather Publishing!! Yay!) that you can use to do so.
In this rite, we are using the knots to surround with protection. We call upon Isis primarily, but also Nephthys, Neith, and Selket as the four Goddesses often found guarding the four corners of a shrine as well as the four Sons of Horus, Who in turn protect the canopic jars.
The Rite of the Tiet (the Knot of Isis)
Isis protects!
About the Rite: In this ritual, you will magically tie a protective knot around yourself, or around anything or anyone you wish to protect. The ritual draws upon sources in the Book of Coming Forth by Day and is, in part, adapted from an ancient rite for consecrating the Tiet amulet.
Temple Arrangement: Altar at center; all tools on altar.
Ritual Tools: Nile water in Lotus Cup; flower petals from lotus, lily, or rose; Isis incense in censer; six pieces of fairly substantial red cord, each approximately one foot long (if you can’t find red cord that is thick enough, use white rope).
Opening
Purify and consecrate the temple and yourself according to the formulae of the House of Isis or any method you prefer. Return to the altar, take up the lotus (lily or rose) petals and elevate them.
Ritualist: O, you Souls of Life, Lotus Dwellers, Breathers, you of the Pure Air from the Wings of Isis, I have come for you. By the Blood, by the Power, by the Magic of Isis, establish yourselves within these petals. (Vibrating onto petals) ISET NEF!
Place some of the petals in the chalice.
Ritualist: (Addressing petals) I know you, you shining flowers. Your name is “Life Is In It”. Your name is “Protection”. Your name is “Peace Bringer”.
A beautiful Egyptian lotus cup
Place the pieces of cord upon the altar and anoint each of them with the Nile water with flower petals in it.
Ritualist: (Touching each piece of cord) Isis protects!
Invocation of the Powers of Isis
Next, invoke the Goddess, raising your arms in Adoration.
Ritualist: I call the power of my Mighty Mother Isis. I call Her strength to me. I call upon the Power and the Peace of Isis, for I shall knot the cord, the Knot of Isis.
O Isis, my Mother, I call You!
I call You with the breath of my body (breathing out).
I call You with the beat of my heart (touching your chest).
I call You with the pulse of my life (touching your wrists).
I call You with the words of my mouth (touching your mouth).
I call You with the thoughts of my mind (touching your forehead).
I call You Power. I call You Life. I call You Protection.
I call You, Isis!
Tying the Knots
Take up one of the pieces of red cord and move to the southeast corner of your ritual space. Holding the two ends of the cord in your hands, say:
Ritualist: You have Your Blood, O Isis. You have Your Power, O Isis. You have Your Magic, O Isis. The Blood of Isis and the Strength of Isis and the Words of Power of Isis shall be mighty to (state what you wish to protect) against all that would cause harm.
With strength and intention, tie a knot in the cord and set it in the southeast corner of the ritual space.
Ritualist: By the Power of Isis, I have knotted the cord.
Repeat this same procedure in the southwest, northwest, and northeast of the temple, above your head (leaving the cord on top of the altar), and upon the ground (leave the cord at the foot of the altar).
Stand west of the altar, facing east. Make the Sign of the Wings of Isis (raise and open your arms like wings).
Ritualist: O Isis and all You mighty Goddesses of Protection, I call upon You to guard (state what you wish to protect) as You did guard Osiris Himself, as You did guard Horus the Child.
An exceptionally beautiful gold and amethyst necklace, secured by a clasp in the form of a knot
Isis, Mighty Magician; Nephthys, Lady of Life; Neith, Primal Mother; Selket, Powerful One—tie the Knot of Isis against all harm. Keep it away! Restrain it! Let it not come near! O, Isis and all You Goddesses of Protection, grant Your peace and protection.
If you wish to meditate or do other work, this is an excellent time to do so.
Closing
If this is a ritual for protection from some outside threat, leave the tied knots in your ritual space for as long as desired or needed and conclude the rite by making the Sign of the Wings of Isis at the altar and speaking the last line.
If this rite is worked simply to create peace for meditation, you may untie the knots when you are finished by simply going to each knot in the order you tied it and untying it, then returning each one to the altar.
Use a simple, overhand knot in this ritual
Ritualist: I have untied the knot. Be in peace, O You Blood and Power and Magic of Isis. Be in peace.
At the altar, make Sign of the Wings of Isis.
Ritualist: I thank You, Isis, in all Thy names of Protection. Hold me ever near You, bound by Your protective knots.
Come, Hathoru, You Seven Hathors, You Egyptian Muses—come and help me to sing in praise of working rituals with groups of actual living humans.
These days, many of us are doing our rituals, spells, and meditations solitary. I’m reading an academic study of this particular phenomenon right now. (Yes, there are scholars who actually study us—though not that many.) Solitary ritual was a trend before the pandemic. But afterwards, it’s something of a landslide.
Why?
Sometimes, where we live doesn’t give us easy access to a like-minded community. Sometimes people have had a bad (sometimes very bad) experience with a group and are, as a result, “group-shy.” Sometimes, it’s just a lot of trouble to coordinate a get-together. If it’s formal ritual, then there’s rehearsal, too. But, even if it’s very informal ritual, you still need to have a certain level of comfort with each other—that is, you have to know each other at least a little to do ritual effectively. And that never comes automatically.
When Egypt re-opened the Avenue of the Sphinxes at Luxor, they did group ritual—a boat procession. (Okay, Egyptian media were very careful to say the participants were “actors.”)
These are all reasonable reasons.
And yet.
Music, often a part of group ritual
If you’ve ever been in a group ritual that really worked, you will know that there is nothing like it. When the stars align and the group is focused; when the Ways are open and all hearts are open; when the Goddess ARRIVES and the entire group ignites with Her energy—then, then, then the result is unlike what we can achieve in a solitary rite. There are times, during and after ritual, when I look at everyone in the circle with me and I deeply know how incredibly beautiful each and every one of them is. I see them through Her eyes for we have been together with Her, enfolded in Her wings, nourished by Her magic. Together.
Having been connected and in communication with Isis, we become connected and in communication with each other as well. (And this is one of the keys for when conflicts arise in groups, as they do. We have developed paths of communication and connection with each other, which we can then use to resolve issues. I’m not saying it’s easy; it’s not. But I am saying it’s possible. And I am saying it’s worth it. I’ve been in groups in which members went though a divorce and still managed to have the group remain stable, offering support to both members.)
In solitary ritual, our ritual actions tend to be more informal. Perhaps we light a candle, chant Isis’ name, and meditate or offer a prayer to Her. Often, this works beautifully and profoundly. It is the greater part of my own spiritual work.
Getting ready for festival
When we are doing group ritual, however, we are usually doing a rite with a more formal structure: cast-the-circle, call-the-quarters, invoke-the-Goddess, for instance. And that’s good because group ritual is about communication, human to Divine, Divine to human—and when it is group ritual—human to human and individual to group. By being a form with which everyone is familiar, the understanding and communication between all group members helps us easily build a sacred container for the group experience. In turn, that lets everyone relax into the form, enabling them to become more open, in both body and spirit. And this lets the magic flow, helping us more easily open to our perceptions of Her and connection with Her.
Carriers of the sacred boat at Luxor
What’s more, the energy in group ritual is often more than the sum of its parts. Each individual brings their own innate magic to the rite. But combined, something happens. There is an alchemical blossoming of power and magic that makes it easier to connect with Deity—and/or accomplish the purpose of the rite. More than once, I’ve entered into a group ritual feeling low energy and maybe even grumpy for having to be there. But never once have I left feeling anything other than spiritually uplifted and grateful for having participated. Group energy can not only help carry a member through the rite, but can also replenish someone—who, like me—may be feeling depleted.
More celebration of the opening of the Avenue of the Sphinxes
Ritual like this helps us gain other benefits, too. Researchers have studied the effects of the basic components of ritual, such as chanting, drumming, and invocation, and found them to be beneficial to us both physically and mentally. I would add spiritually as well. Read more about why I think ritual itself is important here.
I have been fortunate throughout my entire magical life to have been able to find people with whom to work magic, with whom to do group ritual. Some of us have been friends for a very long time and I love them all dearly. But some of us are new friends and I’m just getting to know them. For instance, some of my friends, new and old, are working together on a festival—the Return of the Wandering Goddess (Hathor! Sakhmet!)—for next summer solstice. And I can’t wait to do more group ritual with them all.
Modern Egyptians put wheels on their sacred boats!
Sunrise at the “castle” at the summit of Rocky Butte, our Sirius Rising viewpoint
Well, once again, Portland weather foiled my plans for watching the Star of Isis rise last Thursday.
But I have some amazing folks coming today to talk about our summer solstice festival for next year: The Return of the Wandering Goddess—so I need to get ready for them.
For today then, instead of a new post, I’m reposting a report from a time when Portland did not foil my Sirius rising plans.
There’s always next year!
Wonderful, wonderful.
That’s not what I was thinking when the alarm went off at 3:20 this morning, but it is exactly what I’m thinking now.
I have just come back from witnessing the rising of Sirius, the Star of Isis, in the morning skies over the city of Portland, Oregon. And it was glorious. A fellow priestess of Isis and I traveled to one of the high places in the city to watch Her be born from between the thighs of Her mother Nuet.
Our vantage point is known as Rocky Butte. It is an extinct volcanic cinder cone that rises to an elevation of 612 ft. within the city limits and is a less-than-ten-minute drive from my house. At its summit, there’s a city park surrounded by castle-like walls, which is a popular viewpoint for visitors and natives alike. From Rocky Butte, you can see the slow serpent of the Columbia river that forms the border between Oregon and Washington and the layered silhouettes of the ranges of the eastern mountains, including the archetypal, snow-capped presence of Mt. Hood (though I prefer its Native American name, Wy’east).
When we arrived shortly after 4 am, we could see Orion-Osiris clearly, so we seated ourselves before Him to await Her Rising. We brought stargazer lilies, bread, and milk to offer to Her at Her Appearance, and we each also had that wonder-working wand of modern priestesses, a phone equipped with Google Sky so we could check Her progress toward the horizon. Even though the morning was clear enough, with the haze of the city lights on the horizon, we weren’t certain we’d be able to see Her, but we settled in to wait.
This is what we saw in the pre-dawn sky
Then, to the far left of where the Goddess’ star would rise, we noticed something strange and beautiful. It turns out that this was the one and only morning to see another pre-dawn cosmic wonder: a perfect triangle in the indigo sky of Jupiter, Venus, and the slimmest crescent of the waning Moon. As the triad rose higher in the sky, the crescent turned from ruddy orange to milk white and, from our viewpoint, framed a small stand of fir trees before us on the Butte. It was spectacular. I’ll take that as a portent for the New Year anytime.
At just about 5 am, Google Sky told us Iset-Sopdet should be above the horizon, but we still couldn’t see Her for the city lights, haze, and mountains.
Then—wait, what’s that? Yes, we could see something flashing through the haze, shooting off sparks of red and white and blue-green: Iset-Sopdet appeared. She scintillated. She glittered. She sparkled.
Iset-Sopdet
We watched Her Rising in silence, but for the sounds of the night and the coming dawn.
We meditated, each in our own way. Then, after a time, we poured the milk, offered the bread, and placed the vase of stargazers on the surrounding wall so that they were in alignment with Her star. I really hope someone finds them later today and takes them home to enjoy the incredible fragrance of those lilies. She, I am sure, has already enjoyed them.
The heliacal rising of Sirius, August 23, 2014, was for me, quite simply, a perfect experience.
I’ve been working on some new material for the new edition of Isis Magic (yay!). But that means I didn’t get to the post I was planning for today—some juicy tidbits about Isis in Rome (She’s still there, of course).
Instead I’m reposting the story of when I knew Isis had accepted me. I’d love to hear you story, too. Please do share in the comments, if you’d like.
Wings and lotuses, always
I am terrible with memories. I don’t mean my memory is bad. I mean I don’t honor ‘things past’ enough. I don’t take many pictures (and certainly not of myself). I tend not to care for traditional souvenirs. And I definitely have the “get rid of it” gene (which my beloved does not). In my defense, I don’t generally dwell on past wrongs either.
Earlier this week, this post was going to be on an entirely different topic. But then I came across an old magical journal. And there were memories in it.
Not my magical journal, but I like…
I do keep magical journals. I don’t record everything all the time (good Goddess, the paper trail would never end!). Usually, I keep them during periods when I’m doing a lot of magical work. This particular journal, as I have said, is old. I mean really old. Like “before the fire” old. Yes, of course, you don’t know what I mean.
Before we moved to the Pacific Northwest, we lived in an apartment in Tennessee. One night the complex caught on fire. Neighbors knocked on neighbors’ doors, telling them to get up and get out. We grabbed the cat and the insurance papers and got out. The next day, with the fire quenched, we were able to go back to survey the damage. It had been a weird fire. Things like our stereo system were completely and utterly incinerated. Things like our irreplaceable magical papers (papers!) were saved. This journal was among them. I can tell from the singed edges.
So I thought I’d sit down and read it. There was lots of visionary work pertaining to a magical system I was training in. But every now and then, there were entries about Isis. This was before I knew very much about Her, before I became Her priestess, and way before Isis Magic. Yet I clearly had been working with Her (or She was working with me).
A magical, glowing blue lotus
One entry reads, “I have had a very strong Isis connection since my dream the other night.” That dream was not recorded, but a vision was. I was working on love and acceptance. For the vision, I called on Isis to touch me and help me let Her love of humanity come through me. I sensed Her great, but gentle hand descend from above. She placed it on top of my head. Waves of Her not-quite-orgasmic love passed though me and out into the world. I describe that flow of energy, then write, “I again saw the bright, bright, blue glowing lotus.” It had been so bright that I couldn’t tell one petal from another; eventually, the lotus-light enveloped me. I conclude, “I am feeling very worshipful of Great Isis.”
I see myself falling in love with Her through this journal.
Another entry says, “A most wondrous dream! A prayer answered!” Apparently, my beloved was snoring, so I took my bedding and went into our temple room to sleep. I was overcome with a desire to know, truly know, that Isis was with me. I write that it was “a demanding, revealing need” for Her presence. I prayed to Her “more emotionally than ever before” to send a dream to let me know She was with me. I chanted Her name for a while, then slept.
This art was inspired by a dream the artist had of the Temple of Isis in Pompeii. See what her dream was and more of her work here.
“A few hours later,” I write, “I came from a full, deep sleep to awake with loud sobbing from happiness and amazement.” (My sobbing.) Due to the abrupt awakening, I lost part of the dream. But the actual content of the dream wasn’t the point. The point was that, in the dream, the resolution to a dream-problem happened by a miracle. By Her miracle. And it made me so happy that I woke up crying with joy. And I again saw the blue lotus flower.
Woman picking blue lotus
I remember this event. The details are a bit fuzzy now, but I vividly remember the visionary blue lotus. I could see it anytime I closed my eyes with crystal clarity instead of the vague dreaminess that vision often has. “I must look up lotus symbolism and I must make a blue lotus talisman,” I wrote. See how much I didn’t know then? Another entry says simply, “I love Her.” And now you know why the Isis temple in my backyard is called the Lotus Temple.
Next, I found an entry that I had marked IMPORTANT with a drawing of a star, a lotus, and a sickle on top. I wrote, “In the dark month of February, on the 15th of the month, with the moon waning in Capricorn, I have taken and been taken by Isis in Her Black Aspect as my Lady, my personal Goddess.” But this wasn’t when I became Her priestess; that was long in the future then. This was my forming a true bond with Her, a bond that will last my entire life. She became “my” Goddess, I became Her devotee. This is when I really began learning about Her.
There is, of course, more in this journal. I see my own inner struggles, doubts, fears, angers, and depression. But this particular record is incomplete. These are loose-leaf pages without a binder…and it seems that some are missing. After we moved to Portland, I began buying blank-but-bound books for my journals. The next one—which I am still writing in—starts with the time when I actually did become Isis’ priestess. In this journal, I can see that I am working out the magic part for what will eventually become Isis Magic.
But I think I have regaled you with quite enough of my journal entries for now. And I have learned my lesson that I should better value memories and keepsakes. Perhaps you will do some magical work with Isis yourself today? After all, your story will be a much better tale—because it will be yours. Just don’t forget to write in your journal.
As I look to the night sky, I cannot see the star of Isis, Sirius, for She remains hidden now. Yet I anticipate Her rising late next month. But in the meantime, I contemplate the vastnesses of Her mother, Nuet, the Sky Goddess, Who is filled with the Indestructible Stars that Are in Her, and within Whom Her daughter now rests.
A most beautiful Nuet
I am not Nuet’s priestess, but O, the Secret One draws me. I am awed by Her Eternity, Her Depth, Her Beauty, and I want to lose myself in Her. And right now, in the northern hemisphere at least, Our Lady Isis is Herself lost within the beautiful body of Her mother Nuet.
Right now, the star of Isis, Sirius, is hidden. Here in Portland, Oregon, She will not be seen again until pre-dawn in late August. Astronomically, that’s because the star is in conjunction with the sun. As the sun rises, its greater light makes the light of Sirius invisible to us. By late August, Sirius and the sun will move further away from each other so that, just before dawn, we can once more see the brilliance of the star in the twilight sky.
But that’s just astronomically. Mythically, Isis sojourns within the body of Her powerful mother Nuet. She Who is called the Mistress of All and the One Who bears the Gods and Goddesses. She is the Splendid and Mighty One in the House of Her Creation. She is the Great One in Heaven and the Indestructible Stars, that is, the circumpolar stars that are always visible, are within Her, just as Her mighty daughter Isis is within Her.
Nuet embraces the deceased king and each of us “in Her name of Sarcophagus” and “in Her name of Tomb.” She is the Mistress of the Secret Duat (the Otherworld). She is the Glowing One (perhaps as the Milky Way) and in Her we are joined to our stars, Becoming Divine. She is the one Who gives birth to us and Who welcomes us back into Her starry body at our deaths. She is Heaven and She is the Otherworld. She gives birth to the Sun God Re each day and receives him back into Her body, by swallowing, each night. She is the one Who is “Amid the Iset Temple in Dendera” for She is over Her daughter and Her daughter is in Her.
But now, while Isis is in Her mother’s body, She is also in the Underworld—for Nuet is the Lady of the Duat and Her body is both the Heavens and the Underworld. So now in the heat of the year, our Goddess is in the cool depths of Eternity. Perhaps this is the time for us, as Her devotees, to enter the Otherworld as well.
Nuet, the Circle of Eternity, encompassing All
Sopdet (Sirius), the Star of Isis
We usually think of symbolically going into the Underworld during the dark part of the year rather than the light part. Yet now, in the light of summer, it may be a particularly safe time to take that Underworld journey, for now we have the support of Isis Who awaits us there.
If we have scary things to face in our own personal Underworlds, now is a more supportive time to do so. The light of dawn comes more quickly now and the sunlight of Isis the Radiant One is more readily available to us after we have faced those inner darknesses that we must face in order to grow.
This may also be a good time to explore our relationships with our mothers. A strong priestess of my acquaintance, who was serving as a Priestess of Nuet at a festival a while ago, told me an interesting thing about how she perceived the relationship between Nuet and Isis. It was her distinct impression that Nuet did not get along with Her daughter. Of course, in the human realm, this is far from an uncommon thing. Mothers and daughters (and mothers and all their children, for that matter) can have issues. Now—in the light of summer and with the help of the Goddesses available to us—now might be a time to shed some light on those issues.
Sarcophagus lid with Nuet opening Her protective wings over the deceased
But even if we don’t have mom stresses, this can be a time to honor and remember our mothers, both human and Divine—perhaps under a star-filled sky. Since my own mother has already been enfolded in the wings of Isis, I shall plan to honor my Divine Mother Nuet and Her Starry Daughter Isis as I look up into the next clear and star-filled night.
Several posts ago, I mentioned a particular type of graffiti found at Isis temples in Egypt and in other locations throughout the Mediterranean. These are the images of a foot or feet or footprints that were sometimes scratched on or near Her temple or shrine. Similar feet have also been found carved on separate stone slabs and placed within temples. In Egypt, we find these feet images associated with Isis in Abydos and Philae. Outside of Egypt, we find them in Delos, Chaeronea, Thessaloniki, Maroneia, Rome, and more.
A knot of Isis like the one She took as offering
If you’ve ever traveled to a sacred place, you may have been tempted to leave behind an offering or token of some kind to mark your journey. On my own recent pilgrimage to Isis’ temple at Philae in Egypt, it seems I left such a token—if inadvertently. On the boat ride to Her temple island, I was wearing two pieces of jewelry: a knot of Isis and a tiny sistrum. I paid no attention to them at all while we explored Her sacred temple. But on the boat ride back, I had only the tiny sistrum. The knot of Isis must have fallen off sometime during our visit.
Yet the loss made me happy. Why? Because I had had a premonition that something would happen while I was there. I believe that what happened was that Isis accepted the offering that I had unconsciously brought Her. I have since wondered if the Goddess re-gifted it to some other visiting priestess and absolutely made her day, week, and month. I hope so; that’s my fantasy, anyway.
A votive footprint from a temple in the Egyptian Faiyum
Of course, I would never have etched my footprints or left graffiti on Her temple as some ancient visitors before me had done. I mean, what were they thinking!?! And, in fact, that’s exactly what I’d like to explore today: what were they thinking, and what are those footprints about anyway?
In a general sense, footprints are tangible proof that someone was here; right here—and substantial enough to leave a print. Remember the Ice Age footprints discovered in New Mexico several years ago? They are of a woman and child and they’re the longest continual track of fossilized footprints found to date; they continue for almost a mile. Because of the pace of the footprints and the changing depth of the imprints, researchers can tell something about what may have been happening to those people at that time. Or remember how affecting seeing Buzz Aldrin’s human footprint in the dust of the moon was? Or perhaps you’ve been intrigued by the celebrity footprints (and handprints) outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood? Like a fingerprint, a footprint uniquely represents the one who made it.
Etched footprints of (probably) priests of Khonsu on the roof of His temple at Karnak
Footprints can often have a spiritual significance, too. Across the world, people have always pointed out what they say are footprints of Deities, heroes, and supernatural beings. Some are natural footprint-shaped indentations in rock, while others are human-created, like the giant God-footprints in Syria’s ‘Ain Dara temple. Such physical evidence is meant to clearly demonstrate the Deity’s Presence. These God-sized footprints may be meant to commemorate a human being’s experience of Divine epiphany. Or their permanence, especially in a temple, may be meant to say, “the Deity is always here.” However we interpret them, there is magic in them.
The “walking” footprints from Isis’ Baelo Claudia temple; you can see Her name in Latin in the upper left of the photo
Isis is, of course, one of the Deities Who left such evidence of Her Divine Presence in Her temples. We have a limestone slab from Alexandria, Egypt that shows a single, large footprint that has been conveniently labeled for us in Greek: Isidos Podas, “Foot of Isis.” Separate stone slabs like this, incised with a Divine foot or feet, seem to have been an Egyptian thing and is attested for Egypt from at least the 5th century BCE. Similar carved slabs are also found throughout the Mediterranean, and often in temples of “The Egyptian Deities.” During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, “the Egyptian Deities” meant specifically Isis, Serapis, Harpokrates, and Anubis. Sometimes, other symbols related to the Deity are carved along with the foot or feet, or the dedication informs us that it was given to fulfill a vow or “by order of” the Deity.
We sometimes also find votive footprints carved in stone that would then be set into the floor of the temple. In the Isis temple in Baelo Claudia, Spain, the footprints are offset, as if in movement, and seem to lead toward the altar. (I love this.) In this case, the footprints have been interpreted as the path walked by Isis’ priests as they served Her or as the steps of the Goddess Herself as She attends the ceremonies at Her temple. Another small Isis sanctuary near Seville shows similar treatment with the footprints approaching the sanctuary entrance.
Votive “footsteps” dedicated to Isis Dykaiosyne from the sacred island of Delos
From the sacred island of Delos in Greece, we have a pair of footprints, labeled as “footsteps” and dedicated to Isis Dikaiosyne, “Isis of Justice,” by “order of the Goddess.” Another set of Goddess-sized footprints from Delos were dedicated to Isis and Anubis by at least three women. From Chaeronea, we have sandalled feet dedicated “following the command of Isis.” We have similar dedicated footprints from the acropolis in Athens and from Thessalonike.
While oversized footprints usually represent Deities, smaller, human-sized ones represent Their human worshipers. The footprint demonstrates the worshiper’s presence before the Deity at Their temple. Some of the earliest examples come from Egypt. We find them not only in temple complexes, but also in hilltop locations, perhaps putting the human closer to the Divine in this elevated position. In Egypt, there are hundreds of examples and they date from as far back as the Old Kingdom. Some were made by visitors to the temples, but many were made in areas—such as the roof—that were inaccessible to anyone but the clergy. Thus it seems to have been a privilege of the priests to be able to put themselves in continual proximity to the Deity of the temple. In fact, the four instances of footprint graffiti found at Isis’ Philae temple come from a single family that served there as priests of Isis. (Researchers also note that some of the footprints from Egypt are found in secular contexts, often made by soldiers, and simply say, “I was here.” Because. Humans.)
Footprints of the Goddess and Her devotee from the Temple of Isis Locheia in Dion, Greece
Sometimes we find a larger footprint beside a smaller one, perhaps to represent the Deity and Their worshiper. An example of a set of footprints like these comes from the Temple of Isis Locheia in Dion, Greece. They may be meant to show that the devotee is walking beside her Goddess. Since Isis Locheia is a protector of women in childbirth and of children, we can surmise that the footprints represent a pregnant woman asking protection from her Goddess.
We also find a number of these footprint dedications given by now-free, formerly enslaved people. Both Isis and Serapis were known to help manumit slaves through a fictitious “sale” to the Goddess and God.
Later, during the Roman Imperial period, a new kind of “foot” comes into vogue. It is a gigantic 3D sculpture of a Divine foot. A famous example is the Piè di Marmo (“Marble Foot”) that now resides on Via del Piè di Marmo in Rome and which is believed to be a large foot of Isis (or possibly Serapis) from the temple of Isis Campense or the Serapium. These feet are free-standing and not part of a large, lost statue. In other words, the whole Deity is represented by the foot. Scholars believe that this trend, too, first developed in Egypt and was exported to other sanctuaries in the Mediterranean.
The Piè di Marmo in Rome
The concept of representing ourselves or our Deities by footprints—by the traces left behind by our presence or Their Presence—is found worldwide. People everywhere do it and have done so for thousands of years. The many “footprints of Buddha” are just one example from outside the Mediterranean region. They are, I believe, similar in meaning to the prehistoric handprints found in caves from Indonesia to France.
In Egypt, we have Old Kingdom evidence of the idea that “my footprint means I was here” in both secular and sacred contexts. By the New Kingdom, oversized Divine footprints begin to appear. But instead of being etched into temple walls or roofs, they are often carved on separate slabs of stone and dedicated in temples. We begin to see this trend outside of Egypt, too, especially in temples of Isis and Serapis, but also in temples of other Deities in sanctuaries throughout the Mediterranean. Remember the ones at Hekate’s temple in Karia?
For the Isis shrine in my backyard, we purchased two slabs of rock that we intend to have sandblasted with a pair of votive feet, right foot on one, left on the other. This is a project yet to be done, but after looking into this interesting little chapter in the worship of Isis, I’m gonna have to get on that. She needs some footsteps of Her votary—me—leading into Her temple.
In my own work with Isis over the years, I have come to settle on four qualities that seem to me to capture much of Her “flavor” for me. They are power, wisdom, love, and magic.
When we first come to Isis, we often immediately perceive Her love, flowing out to us, enfolding us in Her sheltering wings. We are warmed in Her love. We rest in Her wings.
Her power reveals itself later.
The “Isis of Coptos”
First, there is Her metaphysical power. This is the power that blows my hair back, makes we want to “kiss the ground before Your beautiful face,” as the ancient texts put it. This power makes me gasp, thrills my body and makes me shiver. Before this power, I can say only, “yes, Goddess.” And rejoice. Sometimes there’s a stupid grin on my face in Her powerful Presence. Sometimes Her power kicks open all my doors, both physical and spiritual and I have no idea what sort of expression might be on my face. Isis often hides this metaphysical power behind Her famous veil, for without the shielding of the veil, Her full Presence could overwhelm us.
But there is another, more earthly, kind of power that She shows us as well. And this is the power of persistence. Plutarch, in his essay On Isis and Osiris, says that Isis serves as an example to those enduring suffering in life. And so She does. As Her myths instruct, each time the Goddess suffers a tragedy, She uses Her power to pick Herself up and go on; and ultimately, to succeed.
Perhaps this seems a boring power? I don’t think so. For human beings, I believe this power of the Goddess is one of the keys to living. We will all experience pain, failure, death; indeed, some will suffer more than others. But we can all look to the stories of our Goddess passing through these things Herself to find our own power. What’s more, in our times of trouble, we can borrow some of Her strength. She will lend it to us in abundance. She is the fount of power, both mystical and persistent, and She never, ever runs dry. When we are in pain, She will take our hands and She will make us stronger, filling us with Her holy power.
What qualities does Isis manifest in your experience?
The soft melancholy and honeyed light of September has given way to chill mornings and encroaching darkness. Here in Portland, the leaves are just beginning to turn, just beginning to ignite in autumnal flames.
It is Samhain-tide. And people have died.
Just yesterday, a friend of many years died. People I know, people my friends know and love, have died. Soon, at the end of this month, we will gather together in remembrance. We will cry and laugh and sing and eat and drink in their honor. I hope those who love me will do the same when I go.
Our Lady understands these things. For She is—among All The Many Things That She Is—a Lady of Death. One of Her many names is “Mooring Post,” for She is the one Who calls us to our deaths. But only when it is our time. I hope…
With its boat-infused culture, in ancient Egypt, “to come to moor” was a euphemism for “to die.” And the Great Mooring Post is the Goddess of Death Who calls us to our final mooring and to Whom our boats ever return and are always safely docked.
She may go by many names (as is the wont of Egyptian Goddesses), but when we can be certain of Her identity, She is none other than Our Lady Isis. “The Mooring Post summons you as Isis,” say the Pyramid Texts, “the Mourning Woman calls to you as Nephthys.”
Being called by or spoken to by Menit Weret, the Great Mooring Post, was understood as an important part of the process of death and eventual rebirth. The Coffin Texts tell the deceased that the Great Mooring Post speaks to him and a stairway to Heaven is set up for him, enemies fall before him, and even the stars bow down. Magical words of power ensured that the beings in the realm of the dead would serve the deceased, that his Divine mothers would nurse and kiss him…and that the Great Mooring Post would call to him, call to him.
From Isis’ ancient origins as the death-bringing and resurrecting Bird of Prey Goddess to the “voluntary death and a life obtained by grace” experienced by the initiates of Her Mysteries, Isis—the Great Mooring Post—is at home in the land of the dead. And even though, as the Great Mooring Post, Isis is the one Who calls us to our deaths, She is not a frightening figure. Instead, She initiates our transformation as we become fully spiritual beings. Isis is a comfort and a guide to those who journey into death. She “makes a spirit” of those who die and the dead rejoice when they see Her. She is called the Lady of All in the Secret Place [the land of the dead] and the dead beg Her to “spiritualize” them and guide their souls on the paths of the Otherworld.
In the land of the dead, Isis is the one “at whom Osiris rejoiced when he saw her.” She is the guide Who is asked to “clear my vision in the paths of the Netherworld.” She also acts on behalf of the deceased, ensuring that their initiation into death proceeds as it should. In a formula for being accepted into the land of the dead, the deceased greets the West, personified as the Goddess Amentet, for having arrived safely and states, “true is Isis who acted on my behalf.”
Isis the Great Mooring Post is Mistress of the Mysteries of the Otherworld. In both the Coffin Texts and the Book of Coming Forth by Day, there is a formula in the form of a dramatic reading in which the new pharaoh, as Horus, is to go on a journey to His father Osiris, the deceased pharaoh. To do this, He first allies Himself “with the Divine Isis.” Then He sends a messenger to whom He has given His own shape. The messenger is none other than the deceased. He must pass tests and provide the proper tokens along the way until coming to “the House of Isis, to the secret mysteries.” The deceased also says that he has been conducted to the hidden secrets of Isis “for she caused me to see the birth of the Great God.” Once in possession of the hidden secrets and having witnessed the rebirth of the Great God shown to him by Isis, the deceased delivers his message to Osiris: all is well on Earth because Horus, the Son of Isis, rules His father’s kingdom.
Nile ducks by a rusted mooring post along the Great Nile.
As the Great Mooring Post, Isis calls us to our deaths, but She also ensures that, in death, we understand Her hidden secrets and that we witness the birth/rebirth of the Great God. We are all Osiris, re-membered and renewed by Isis in the Otherworld. We are all Horus, reborn into the world as Her child. Death bringer, resurrector, life giver. Isis is the Great Mooring Post, the Caller to the Dark Journey. Thus do we offer unto Isis that which is Hers.
To Isis, a Mooring Post En Iset, Menit
This is a gift the priest/ess brings before the Lady of All in the Secret Place, the Death Goddess: an invocation offering of a mooring post.
I make offering to You as Death, Isis.
While I am yet human, You are inevitable. You show me Your implacable face. Yet I cannot fear You, except with the excited fear of a traveler on her first journey. Will there be pain? Will there be suffering? Or will we dance until I slip quietly into your deepest embrace? How lyrical poets have been about You! Yet I can find no words. Only that I do not fear You. Only that the wise remember You every day. Only that I do not want to go—yet.
Isis, I offer you this mooring post that when you speak to me, it will be with Your kindly voice. May You drive in this mooring post for me that I may come to moor in the heart of my Mother. On that day, I shall speak Your name and silence my soul in Your darkness. But until then, accept this mooring post and remember me.
Listen, O Isis, to the words of the Mooring Post: “I am offered unto Isis as the vision in the darkness. I am the desired thing. The dead speak in joy: “See! There She is,” they say. I am the comforting voice, the heartbeat of the Mother, the enfolding wing. I am eternal and omnipresent. I am the soother of souls. I am the Mooring Post.”
Unto You, Isis, I offer this mooring post and all things beautiful and pure. M’den Iset. Accept it, Isis.
A meditation on beautiful Sirius, the Star of Isis
I was talking, not with Isis, but with a couple priestess friends of mine, last evening at a lovely party we were having. We were talking about our upcoming, local Fall Equinox festival, this year dedicated to Hekate. While I’m not among the main folks in charge, I do have one significant role that includes “talking with Hekate.” I wanted their take on how Hekate “feels” and/or “sounds” when my fellow priestesses connect with Her.
It’s always enlightening and interesting to hear the experiences of others with our Divine Ones. For myself, I will just briefly say that, so far, Hekate feels a bit “heavier” than Isis and has a deeper voice. During one of my first meditations with Her, Isis was there with me, handing me off for a brief time, for this Magical Work with Hekate.
All that said, today I’m cleaning up from last night’s party, so this is a repost about talking with Our Lady Isis. Feel free to add your own experiences in the comments. I’d love to hear them.
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When we connect with Isis, how do we do that? Prayer? Meditation? Invocation? Visualization? Can we talk with Her, actually have a back-and-forth conversation? Can we ask Her questions? Can we request Her help?
Yes, we can. But how it happens exactly is different for different people.
My own boundaries between prayer, meditation, and visualization tend to be rather soft. Very often, I find that meditation flows into visualization flows into prayer flows into an offering chant flows back into meditation. Sometimes I visualize the whole time, sometimes I don’t “see” anything, but just feel Her presence. Sometimes I can “hear” Her voice, sometimes I just sense in some way what She is communicating with me.
Here’s a perfect image for ‘ascending’ in your visualizations…indeed, the pillars in Egyptian temples were meant to be holding up the sky.
But why do we talk with the Goddess, why do we strive to “see” Her? There is a point and it’s not just an ego boost.
The point of this sort of talking with the Goddess is communion—sharing with Her in one way or another and asking Her to share with us. Sometimes we just need the reassurance that She is there, so we invoke and try to sense Her. Sometimes we need help, so we ask for it. Sometimes we are so full of love for Her that we simply must express it.
An excellent posture for meditation
Talking with Goddess is good for our souls and spirits, too. I think that Iamblichus, my favorite Neoplatonic theurgist, had it right: invocation of the Deities lifts up the soul of the theurgist (or Isis devotee, in this case) and brings us closer to the Divine. By repeatedly connecting with Isis—whether through prayer or ritual or devotions, meditations or visualizations, dance or chanting, or any number of other ways—we make ongoing contact with the Divine.
The more we come into the presence of Holy Isis, the more we become infused with Her holiness. In the same way that we tend to mirror the people with whom we spend the most time, spending more time with the Divine can help us better mirror that Divinity, and can help to make us better people.
This classic scribe’s posture is perfect for meditation, too
Of course there are ways we can make some serious missteps in this process. The most problematic is when we think we’re talking to Isis, but we’re actually talking to ourselves; when it’s not Isis Who we hear in our heads, but only our own subconscious echoes.
That’s what I think happens with some of the mega-church preachers who always seem to hear God asking for more money or with church-based hate groups who think they hear God condemning everyone but themselves. They’re not talking to the Divine; they’re getting feedback from their own interior bullshit. This can happen to people with even the best of intentions. I know it’s happened to me; chances are, if you’re talking with Isis, it will or already has happened to you, too.
So what do we do about it?
Sometimes, vision looks like this
Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer, no perfect solution, no quick fix. The only partial answer that I know of is to develop spiritual maturity. A spiritually mature person will be better able to recognize their own internal “stuff,” and so be better able to separate it from true Divine contact with Isis. Did Isis really say that so-and-so with whom I had a fight yesterday deserved a big, fat comeuppance? Nope; pretty sure that was me and not Her. She, on the other hand, might offer advice on how I can get over it or She might even point out that I need to make an apology.
The other tricky thing about all this is that while we live in these bodies, we will never—I repeat, never—receive pure and unadulterated contact with the Divine. It comes to us though our own perceptions of body, soul, mind, and spirit. There is no other path the Divine can use to reach us. While we are incarnate beings, the Goddess must come to us through our perceptions—and our perceptions are always, always, always tinged by our own psychological makeup. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, getting to know our own psychology is very valuable in sorting all this out. It’s just something that is and we have to be aware of it if we hope to hear—in the clearest voice possible—what Isis has to say.
Or like this…
The one clue I can offer, after many years of wrestling with my own head and heart, is that when it is truly Her—as opposed to just my echo chamber—the thought-impression-feeling-intuition I get seems to come suddenly and without precedent. I can recognize it as “not-me” (or not just me). Sometimes the words are strange or the images are not ones I would normally choose. Yes, it’s all very subjective—which is my point exactly. That’s why the more you know about yourself, the more you can move yourself out of the way so that you can better know when it is Isis Who is doing the talking.
I’m taking the holiday weekend off, so here’s a repost of what I think is an important connection.
Warning: this post refers to rape in myth.
Boy and girl Divine Children, enwrapped in the protective coils of Isis-Thermouthis and Serapis Agathos Daimon
During the excavation of Hathor’s temple at Denderah, an interesting statue, now in the Cairo Museum, came to light. It shows two children, one male, one female, standing within the protective coils of two serpents. On the boy’s head is a solar disk with an Eye of Horus on it. The girl has a lunar disk with an Eye of Horus.
The statue appears to be a votive gift, and may have originally come from the shrine of Isis-Thermouthis, believed to be not far from Denderah. According to experts, the serpents are most likely Isis-Thermouthis and Serapis Agathos Daimon.
Isis as Agathe Tyche and Osiris as Agathos Daimon in serpent form
In the Ptolemaic period, Isis and Serapis/Osiris were frequently depicted as Divine Serpents. The Isis serpent can sometimes be the combined Goddesses Isis and Renenutet as Isis-Thermouthis. Other times, She can be Isis Agathe Tyche, Good Fortune. In both forms, She is partnered with Serapis/Osiris Agathos Daimon, or Good Spirit.
Unfortunately, there is no writing on the statue to help with the identification of the Divine Children. One possibility is that They are the well-known twins, Shu and Tefnut. There are things in myth and at the site that could support this interpretation. But as you might guess, I like a different possibility.
Harpokrates with Mom Isis and Dad Serapis
The male child has the Horus lock, so He is probably Harpokrates, in Egyptian Hor-pa-khred, Horus the Child. Harpokrates was very popular during this time period. He is the child of Isis and Serapis and is frequently shown with a sun disk on His head. The fact that the Child God is protected by Isis and Osiris serpents, strengthens the identification. But if the boy is Harpokrates, Who is the little girl?
We don’t know of a twin sister of Harpokrates from either Egyptian or Greek sources. Some have wondered whether the lunar girl is supposed to be a form of Isis. Indeed Isis is called the Female Horus (Hor-et or Horit) in Egyptian sources. Several other Goddesses and a number of queens are called by the name as well. The Oxyrhynchus Hymn to Isis, written in Greek, calls Her Harpokratin, which is just Harpokrates with the Greek feminine ending. Translators have taken this to mean something like “the darling-girl of the Gods,” but it can just as easily be simply “Horet the [Girl] Child.” What’s more, by Ptolemaic times, Isis was indeed connected to the moon, even though She was not in earlier Egyptian sources.
Nevertheless, I stubbornly like the idea that the Divine Girl could be Horus’ twin sister, Horet. While this is the only statue we know of that shows the Harpokrates Twins together, during the Ptolemaic period, there are a few other baby girl statues that have been identified as Girl Harpokrates. We have no evidence of Her before this time, but we know that the Egyptians always did have a penchant for name-sharing male-female pairs of Deities, such as the Deities of the Ogdoad of Hermopolis.
Now, there is a Goddess Horit Who shows up in late Egyptian sources, specifically in what is known as the Delta Mythological Manual. Scholars aren’t sure where the manual came from, but they date it to about the 26th dynasty—though the material may be much older. It contains myths having to do with 12 of the nomes in the Egyptian delta. It could have come from a temple cache or been in the possession of a priest or maybe even a priestess. In this manual, we meet Horit. She is a daughter of Osiris, but we do not know Who Her mother is.
And…then things get bad.
You see, Horit bears sons fathered by Her father Osiris. The Delta Manual is pretty darned cryptic, but we learn that when Her father raped Her, it was Her “first time” and that when She learned She was pregnant, She “sat down and mourned.” What’s more, there was something wrong or unusual about the birth of the resulting child. The text isn’t super clear, but Horit may have either chosen abortion or miscarried. The child, being Divine, did not die, but instead left the premises immediately.
Tefnut in Her lioness form
After this, Horit functions as a wife to Osiris and bears four more children, the last one after suffering a rape by Set. The manual (again very cryptically) tells stories about each of these sons of Horit—all forms of Horus. Strangely, there is even one called The Child of Isis. Of the third of these sons, the manual tells us that after Set murders Osiris, Horit raises Their son to be His father’s avenger; very Isis-like indeed. There is even an incident of decapitation just as there is in the story where Isis grants mercy to Set, which so enrages Horus (the two Gods are battling at the time) that He decapitates Isis, a state of affairs that wise Thoth fixes right away.
In the Delta Manual, the identities of all the Goddesses are very fluid; quite confusingly so. They are associated, joined, or become each other frequently. Horit is identified with Hathor and it is said that “She is the Divine hand of Re,” which is specifically a vagina. (In this version of the story, Re replaces Atum Who uses His Goddess-Hand to masturbate, producing Shu and Tefnut.)
Tefnut is not happy
Many of the myths in the Delta Manual, and most of Horit’s, have to do with boundary-crossing sex among Deities, consensual or not. In addition to Hathor, Horit is associated with Bast, Who is said to “come forth as Horit.” At Sebennytos and Behbeit (Isiopolis!), Horit is joined with Tefnut and the myth of the Raging/Distant/Returning Goddess (which is an important myth for another day). Sebennytos and Behbeit are in the 12th delta nome. There, the myths relate that Tefnut-Horit is raped by Her son Geb and imprisoned. The rapist is eventually punished and the Goddess freed, which becomes a cause for festival in the nome. So now, in addition to the rape of Horit the daughter by Her father Osiris, we also have the rape of Horit-Tefnut the mother by Her son. Some of you may know that there is similar tale in which Horus rapes His mother Isis and Her tears fall into the water.
WTF? Is it any wonder that Horit is among the raging Goddesses? And what the heck are we to supposed to make of all this anyway? We certainly do not approve. But neither did the ancient Egyptians. After all, Geb (and Set in other tales) is punished for His rape. And yet, the Egyptians retained these stories and, no doubt, tried to make sense of them.
Goddess and Son? God and Daughter?
I have speculated, in Isis Magic, about the possible meaning of the rape of Isis by Her son. It goes like this: What if that story, and others like it, are merely the very misunderstood remnants of a different and very ancient story; indeed, perhaps the oldest story? The Goddess Comes Into Being; of Herself, by Herself. She gives birth to a Child, a son. He grows to maturity. Then, in order to start the multiplication of life on earth, Divine Mother and Divine Son mate, not in a rape, but because They are All That Is. Could the same be said of the Divine Father and Divine Daughter? Obviously, I don’t know the answer to these questions. But it’s a way I can try to make it make some sense in my own head.
As for Harpokrates and His twin sister, I doubt we can make a direct connection between Horit and the Girl Harpokrates of the votive statue. And yet, and yet, and yet. Osiris has a son, Hor, and a daughter, Horit. (Different mothers? Same mother?) Hor and Horit make a perfect Egyptian name-sharing male-female pair. Horit’s myths come from the delta, including from Behbeit, where Isis’ great delta temple once stood.
I wonder whether we will some day find stories about Horit and Her mother? And if we do, what will Her name be?
We know quite a lot about the history of the Great Goddess Isis. For instance, we know that She was already important by the time of the Pyramid Texts (Old Kingdom, 5th-6th dynasties). We know fairly clearly how Her worship spread throughout Egypt. We know how She came into Nubia and the Mediterranean. And we know how She went underground with the rise of Christianity in the Mediterranean and the West…staying alive in the magical traditions. Today there are few who do not at least know Her name.
Yet, what we don’t know for certain is where Her worship originated. So far, it is one of Her Mysteries.
Oh, there are theories. The one I am most seeing lately is that She is originally from some small city in the Egyptian delta of Lower Egypt. But strangely, no town in ancient Egypt, Upper or Lower, claimed to be Her “birthplace.” Since She became Egypt’s most famous Goddess, you would think someone would claim Her as their own.
The Egyptian delta. The arrow points to the location of Isiopolis. You can see Heliopolis above Cairo (Caire).
Others attribute Upper Egyptian origins to Her, especially given Her important Upper Egyptian temple at Philae (now on Agilkia island). However, the oldest evidence we have of Isis worship on Philae is from the 26th dynasty.
On the other hand, the consensus of researchers today is that what would become ancient Egypt was first populated by Paleolithic people moving from south to north. So if proto-Isis was already known to these people, perhaps She did come from what would eventually be Upper Egypt. And Abydos, an important Osirian cult center, is in Upper Egypt.
On the other, other hand, Isis and Osiris are incorporated into the Heliopolitan myth cycle. And Heliopolis is about 20 miles north of Cairo and in the delta. What’s more, there was another famous Isis temple right there in the middle of the delta at Isiopolis. We may eventually find that it (or its predecessor on the site) is, in fact, the oldest temple of Isis. (Yes, of course, I asked Her. She told me, “delta.” But that is decidedly UPG, “unverified personal gnosis.”)
Some very pretty skulls and bones from an Egyptian tomb
I recently came across a paper by Dr. Kelly-Anne Diamond, an Egyptologist serving as Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at Villanova University, that makes a new and interesting contribution to the possible origins of Isis. She focuses in on the title of a female funerary ritualist. The title is “demdjet” and the demdjet can appear as a human ritualist, but also sometimes as a Divine ritualist. We find her—very infrequently—from the Old Kingdom to the New. Egyptologists used to group this particular ritualist under the general category of “mourning women,” but it appears the demdjet or Demdjet may have had a more specific function.
The root of the word has to do with collecting or assembling. And since the title is a feminine active participle, the title demdjet is “she who collects or assembles.” If you’re at all familiar with the ancient Egyptian funerary texts, you may recall that there is quite a lot of emphasis on making sure the deceased have all their bones, bits, limbs, heads, etc. collected or assembled for them as well as ensuring none of those things are disassembled or lost. Since Isis is the collector of bits and pieces par excellence—at least when it comes to Osiris (and thus the deceased)—Diamond suggests that this ritual role may play a part in Isis’ origins.
The demdjet (top) and the kenut (bottom) offering nu pots
One of the Pyramid Texts (PT 2283) refers to a Demdjet Vulture. It says, “Osiris Neith, accept Horus’ Eye, which Seth hid—THE HIDDEN VULTURE, which he joined—THE JOINED [Demdjet] VULTURE…” This Demdjet Vulture is involved with stretching or spreading something. We cannot say whether the Demdjet Vulture is supposed to be Isis, but at least we may have an early attestation of a Divine Demdjet. Of course, Isis can take vulture form, but it is not Her most common bird form. Yet, as a winged Goddess, She is often shown stretching or spreading Her wings over the deceased.
We also find the Demdjet in the pyramid temple of Senwosret III where She gives life and protection. From the Middle Kingdom, there are demdjets in the papyrus Ramesseum E. Some scholars think that the contents of that papyrus may date back to the 3rd dynasty (there are archaisms in the text). If true, it would be the oldest mention of a demdjet.
In this papyrus, we learn that the demdjets are present throughout the funerary rites. At some point, the demdjets move simultaneously, perhaps in ritual motion or dance. They are there when the deceased is summoned to revivification. And they have speaking parts. In the New Kingdom, we have several more instances of demdjets. They are shown as two kneeling women with nu water pots and they are watering “the desert necropolis.” In one case, one woman is labeled menkenu and one demdjet. (Alan Gardiner suggests menkenu is a title of Isis, while demdjet is a title of Nephthys.) In another case, one is called demdjet and one is called kenut (menkenu and kenut may be different versions of the same title).
Same offering, different labels: The Great Kite and the Lesser Kite
But here’s where it gets more interesting for Isiacs. In the last New Kingdom example (tomb of Paheri, if you must know), we find the same scene—women kneeling with nu pots, dressed in the same way—but this time, They are labeled Djeret Weret (Great Kite) and Djeret Nedjeset (Lesser Kite). In this time period, we know Who the Great Kite and the Lesser Kite are; They are Isis and Nephthys. So, the women depicted may be human ritualists portraying the Goddesses, which we know was done in Egyptian ritual. In additional—but very damaged—scenes in two of these tombs, we see the demdjet no longer kneeling, but standing with her/Her right arm raised, elbow bent, and fist clenched while her/Her left clenched fist is placed at her/Her chest. It reminds me of the henu gesture, but standing.
The henu gesture
She is labeled Djeret Weret Demdjet, the Great Kite Demdjet. The gesture s/She makes is thought to be associated with transfiguration, the recitation of holy words, and glorifications for the dead.
In the Book of the Amduat, a Goddess named Demdjet appears in the 7th and 8th Hours of the Night where She helps protect Re and the Sun Barque as it journeys through the Otherworld. In the 7th Hour, She is with three other Goddesses: She Who Cuts, She Who Punishes, and She Who Annihilates. In the 8th Hour, Demdjet is with three other mummiform Goddesses: She Who Veils, She Who Decorates (?), and the Dark One. Interestingly, the 7th Hour is the same Hour in which Isis and the Elder Magician work Their powerful magic to subdue Apophis. So in this case, with Isis in Her Great of Magic form, it seems to me it would be a bit of a stretch to consider this Demdjet, a minor Hours Goddess, to be a form of Isis.
The Djeret Weret Demdjet making a gesture of transfiguration; we can see the feet of (probably) another demdjet (the Djeret Nedjeset Demdjet?) above this one, but this part of the tomb is damaged.
Nevertheless, with its core meaning of She Who Collects, Assembles, and Puts Together, we can find in the Demdjet an important harmony with one aspect of Great Isis: She Who searches, finds, reassembles, and gives new life to Osiris.
Some researchers have suggested that there may have been a very early Egyptian funerary custom in which important dead persons were disarticulated and then put back together for rejuvenation. It’s a highly controversial topic, but if so, perhaps the original Demdjet may have been the female ritualist who did this reassembly. Perhaps she was serving as a priestess of the Great Renewing Mother. And perhaps, just perhaps, this Great Mother Regeneratrix was the Demdjet Weret—(proto) Iset Demdjet—She Who collects our bones for us that we may be made whole in preparation for our rebirth.
A worshipper giving worship and receiving energy that looks like flowers from the God
Some time ago, I was corresponding with a man in England on Dionysian subjects. (You may recall that, in addition to my devotion to Isis, I also have a passion for Lord D.) During the course of our conversation, I said something about worshipping Dionysos. He wrote me back to the effect of “you wouldn’t catch me worshipping anybody or anything!”
I suspected we had a definition problem—and that turned out to be so, because when I explained that what I meant by worship was an expression of love, appreciation, and honor toward the Divine, my Dionysian pal wrote back saying he’d decided that, in that case, he guessed worship was okay with him.
Always good advice
I think a lot of people share my friend’s ideas about worship. The word is too…um… “churchy.” For many, it has come to have a hollow sound and worse yet, a hollow feeling. Some associate it with merely going through the motions—attending church, sitting in rows, singing ill-harmonized hymns, and eventually passing the collection plate. Others may associate worship with bowing before some cold and distant deity. (I am inevitably reminded, and perhaps you are, too, of Monty Python’s toadying minister: “Oh God, You are so gosh-darned BIG…”) Such prostration appears to them to have no respect for the sacred possibilities of either humankind or Nature and leaves an unpleasant taste in their mouths.
Kissing the ground before Her beautiful face
Yet worship is one of the most significant ways we can relate to the Goddess. It is certainly an appropriate way for a ministrant of Isis to relate to Her.
True worship has to do with reverence and appreciation for the Divine, as well as for that which is sacred in others, in ourselves, and in the manifested world. Worship is a meaningful way of expressing our feelings and inner selves to the Divine. It is a way of speaking about and participating in that which we find sacred. Worship requires participation not by the mere rote actions of our bodies, but by the focus of our minds, the openness of our hearts, and the willingness of our souls and spirits.
Two worshippers adore the God
When we sense Isis’ heartbeat and understand that She senses ours, we are participating in worship. When we finally, actually know, in our bones, in our guts, in our hearts that She really is there, the door to worship is flung wide. The temple of our soul is opened, and She indwells. When we taste Her truth upon our tongues, and are grateful, grateful, grateful for that taste, then we worship. When Her Mystery allures and deepens us rather than merely baffling, that is worship. When we know Her in the light in our lover’s eyes, a blade of grass, a spider’s dance, we are worshiping.
We may do this intuitively or, using the Art of Ritual, we may speak to Isis, sing to Her, listen to Her, make offerings to Her, express our gratitude to Her, commune with Her in a ritual context. When we do this consciously and with full intent to expand our souls and spirits, it is then that we truly worship. As we come to know Isis through our acts of devotion, we come to love Her and to understand that She has always loved us.
The fiery heart of true worship
And love…love is the true essence of the worship that a ministrant of Isis gives to their Goddess.
I am not a fan of comicbooky-videogamey over-sexualized depictions of the Deities. I am especially not a fan of images of Goddesses with huge, spherical boobs that would hurt like heck in real combat (oh, it’s always about combat; you know that.) Personally, I like my Deity images to be either historical or, if they are art, to capture something of the awe of the Divine. But that’s just me.
Nevertheless, I was amused, or perhaps bemused, when the popular video game Smite introduced a new fightin’ Deity back in 2013: Isis, Goddess of Magic. They even have a halfway decent version of Her myth in the game’s character information.
Then, earlier this week, the company that makes Smite announced that they will rename the character Isis as Eset, to be pronounced “Ee-set.” The idea is to be able to avoid being caught in YouTube’s “ISIS is a terrorist group” algorithms. Sigh. I wish we had been able to get people to call them ISIL or Daesh (or, really, anything else), but “ISIS” is just too easy, just too familiar, for people.
Smite’s Isis, soon to be Eset, doing Her magic-casting thing
Which is precisely why I continue to use it in my blog and books; it’s the familiar name by which She is known to more people throughout the world. Yes, I can be stubborn. Of course, as many of you know, “Eye-sis” is the Anglicized version of what the ancient Greeks called Her: Ἶσις (EES-Ees).
I represent Her Egyptian name as Iset. Here’s why:
These are the most common hieroglyphs for Isis’ name in Egyptian.
In Egyptian, Isis’ name was most often spelled with the hieroglyphs throne, semi-circle (possibly a bread loaf), Goddess, although during the thousands of years of Her worship there were a number of variant spellings. Egyptian artists commonly designated Isis by painting the throne hieroglyph on Her crown. Thus it is possible to identify the shortest version of Isis’ name with the throne itself. The Goddess Isis is the Goddess Throne.
Another “skin” for Smite’s Isis
Similar to Hebrew, the Egyptian hieroglyphs don’t represent the vowels. They had vowels, of course. You were just expected to know where to put them to pronounce the words, plus some of the glyphs function as semi-vowels. As a result, we don’t know precisely how the ancient Egyptians would have pronounced Isis’ name. (Not only that; the pronunciation of words changes over time and Egyptians had regional accents.)
The throne hieroglyph is a biliteral symbol (*it could sometimes even be a triliteral), that is, a single symbol representing several sounds. The semi-circle is a single-sound glyph and represents our letter t. In this case, it provides the feminine ending of the word just as in English we might add -ess to feminize a word. The Goddess symbol is a determinative and provides the overall concept of the word, but has no sound. (And just to complicate things, the throne glyph itself can be used as a determinative.)
The first of the two sounds comprising the biliteral throne symbol is a consonant similar to the Hebrew yod** and is represented by modern Egyptologists as ı͗ . The yod sound is similar to English y or i, but remember that it’s not really a vowel. In hieroglyphs, the yod is represented by the reed flower glyph. The initial sound may also be referred to as another Hebrew letter, aleph, the vulture glyph. It’s a glottal stop, but for convenience is sometimes given as an a. The second of the two sounds in the throne is an s. Between the yod or aleph and the s, any vowel could have been inserted. Similarly, a vowel could be inserted between the throne and the semi-circle.
So how can we know which vowels were used? We do have some clues, at least from a later period, in ancient Coptic and Greek.
A Ptolemaic Ese
Coptic is a late form of Egyptian (today, very late as it still survives in the Coptic church) that uses Greek letters plus some special letters to represent Egyptian sounds. By the time Egyptian had changed into Coptic, Isis is Ese (Aay-seh or Ee-seh) or Esi (Aay-see or Ee-see) (the final t was dropped in Coptic, and likely in pronunciation earlier).*** From their earliest encounter with Egyptian religion, the Greeks—and Egyptians who wrote Greek—spelled Her name asἾσις, which they would have pronounced as EES-ees. In Late Antiquity, they sometimes added an epsilon at the beginning so that an alternative pronunciation would have been Aay-sis. So from examples of Her name in Coptic and Greek—contemporary pronunciations that were actually being used by the people who recorded them—we can narrow the search for initial vowels down to either an ee sound or an ay sound. In earlier times, then, the first syllable of the Goddess’ name was probably Ees and in the late period may have changed to Aays. (How could that happen? In the same way that modern English no longer sounds like Chaucer’s English. Ancient Egyptian was spoken for thousands of years and naturally changed during that long time period.)
Between the throne and the semi-circle, Egyptologists usually insert a generic e before the final t to create the feminine ending in line with the Egyptological convention of representing the feminine ending as et as in Amunet, the feminine form of Amun. (It is entirely possible that this e could have been another vowel, for example, i.) Nonetheless, by combining the information we have about Her name as pronounced in Coptic and Greek with current scholarly opinion, it is most likely that Isis in Egyptian would have been pronounced Ee-seh (or Ee-set with the t) and in Late Antiquity also as Aay-seh (or Aay-set with the t). Either of these could have been Hellenized to Isis by replacing the ending with the Greek –is ending. I prefer Iset (Ee-set) to Eset (Ee-set) because it looks closer to Her most well-known name, but Eset works as does Aset (Aay-set).
Look! Giant spherical boobs on a Ptolemaic queen dressed as Isis; does this mean I have to retract my objection? Nah.
Of course, all this is just for the sticklers among us. Isis will know those who call upon Her no matter what pronunciation we use. She’s a Goddess. She knows. Yet, the various pronunciations of Her name are of interest because of the emphasis that the Egyptians themselves placed on knowing the true name of a Deity, person, or thing in order to know its essential nature.
We can use the various pronunciations of the Goddess’ name to touch different aspects of Her nature. For example, to contact a very Egyptian form of the Goddess, we might invoke Her by the name Iset or Ise. For a more Hellenized aspect, we might call upon Isis using the Greek pronunciation, Ees-ees. Many people will call upon Her using the Anglicized version of Her name, Eye-sis. In any and all of these names, we will still be contacting the energy of the Goddess Isis, She of the 10,000 Names. The difference will be not in the essence of the Goddess, but in the particular “flavor” of Her energy that we touch. Personally, right now I’m using Coptic Ese (Aay-seh) a lot lately. It chants beautifully.
In the Book of Coming Forth by Day, better known as the Book of the Dead, Isis is called Iset Nudjerit em Renus Nebu, “Isis, Goddess in All Names.” Perhaps, we can see Her not only as the Goddess of All Names, but of All Pronunciations as well.
*In some uses, the multi-literal throne hieroglyph includes the t consonant; in that case the loaf t indicates the feminine ending.
Smite Isis about to smite someone
**A century ago, in his hugely influential books (which are still so because Dover keeps them readily available), Sir E.A. Wallis Budge used a peculiar set of symbols to transliterate the hieroglyphs, and one of them in particular continues to confuse readers to this day. Instead of the ı͗ used by other Egyptologists and often called yod, Budge represents the reed flower as å (that’s not quite it; the dot should be solid, but it was all I could get WordPress to do.) Most people look at it and read it as “a” rather than a “yod.“
***There are several forms of Coptic with different spellings and pronunciations of Her name.
Boy and girl Divine Children, enwrapped in the protective coils of Isis-Thermouthis and Serapis Agathos Daimon
During the excavation of Hathor’s temple at Denderah, an interesting statue, now in the Cairo Museum, came to light. It shows two children, one male, one female, standing within the protective coils of two serpents. On the boy’s head is a solar disk with an Eye of Horus on it. The girl has a lunar disk with an Eye of Horus.
The statue appears to be a votive gift, and may have originally come from the shrine of Isis-Thermouthis, believed to be not far from Denderah. According to experts, the serpents are most likely Isis-Thermouthis and Serapis Agathos Daimon.
Isis as Agathe Tyche and Osiris as Agathos Daimon in serpent form
In the Ptolemaic period, Isis and Serapis/Osiris were frequently depicted as Divine Serpents. The Isis serpent can sometimes be the combined Goddesses Isis and Renenutet as Isis-Thermouthis. Other times, She can be Isis Agathe Tyche, Good Fortune. In both forms, She is partnered with Serapis/Osiris Agathos Daimon, or Good Spirit.
Unfortunately, there is no writing on the statue to help with the identification of the Divine Children. One possibility is that They are the well-known twins, Shu and Tefnut. There are things in myth and at the site that could support this interpretation. But as you might guess, I like a different possibility.
Harpokrates with Mom Isis and Dad Serapis
The male child has the Horus lock, so He is probably Harpokrates, in Egyptian Hor-pa-khred, Horus the Child. Harpokrates was very popular during this time period. He is the child of Isis and Serapis and is frequently shown with a sun disk on His head. The fact that the Child God is protected by Isis and Osiris serpents, strengthens the identification. But if the boy is Harpokrates, Who is the little girl?
We don’t know of a twin sister of Harpokrates from either Egyptian or Greek sources. Some have wondered whether the lunar girl is supposed to be a form of Isis. Indeed Isis is called the Female Horus (Hor-et or Horit) in Egyptian sources. Several other Goddesses and a number of queens are called by the name as well. The Oxyrhynchus Hymn to Isis, written in Greek, calls Her Harpokratin, which is just Harpokrates with the Greek feminine ending. Translators have taken this to mean something like “the darling-girl of the Gods,” but it can just as easily be simply “Horet the [Girl] Child.” What’s more, by Ptolemaic times, Isis was indeed connected to the moon, even though She was not in earlier Egyptian sources.
Nevertheless, I stubbornly like the idea that the Divine Girl could be Horus’ twin sister, Horet. While this is the only statue we know of that shows the Harpokrates Twins together, during the Ptolemaic period, there are a few other baby girl statues that have been identified as Girl Harpokrates. We have no evidence of Her before this time, but we know that the Egyptians always did have a penchant for name-sharing male-female pairs of Deities, such as the Deities of the Ogdoad of Hermopolis.
Now, there is a Goddess Horit Who shows up in late Egyptian sources, specifically in what is known as the Delta Mythological Manual. Scholars aren’t sure where the manual came from, but they date it to about the 26th dynasty—though the material may be much older. It contains myths having to do with 12 of the nomes in the Egyptian delta. It could have come from a temple cache or been in the possession of a priest or maybe even a priestess. In this manual, we meet Horit. She is a daughter of Osiris, but we do not know Who Her mother is.
And…then things get bad.
You see, Horit bears sons fathered by Her father Osiris. The Delta Manual is pretty darned cryptic, but we learn that when Her father raped Her, it was Her “first time” and that when She learned She was pregnant, She “sat down and mourned.” What’s more, there was something wrong or unusual about the birth of the resulting child. The text isn’t super clear, but Horit may have either chosen abortion or miscarried. The child, being Divine, did not die, but instead left the premises immediately.
Tefnut in Her lioness form
After this, Horit functions as a wife to Osiris and bears four more children, the last one after suffering a rape by Set. The manual (again very cryptically) tells stories about each of these sons of Horit—all forms of Horus. Strangely, there is even one called The Child of Isis. Of the third of these sons, the manual tells us that after Set murders Osiris, Horit raises Their son to be His father’s avenger; very Isis-like indeed. There is even an incident of decapitation just as there is in the story where Isis grants mercy to Set, which so enrages Horus (the two Gods are battling at the time) that He decapitates Isis, a state of affairs that wise Thoth fixes right away.
In the Delta Manual, the identities of all the Goddesses are very fluid; quite confusingly so. They are associated, joined, or become each other frequently. Horit is identified with Hathor and it is said that “She is the Divine hand of Re,” which is specifically a vagina. (In this version of the story, Re replaces Atum Who uses His Goddess-Hand to masturbate, producing Shu and Tefnut.)
Tefnut is not happy
Many of the myths in the Delta Manual, and most of Horit’s, have to do with boundary-crossing sex among Deities, consensual or not. In addition to Hathor, Horit is associated with Bast, Who is said to “come forth as Horit.” At Sebennytos and Behbeit (Isiopolis!), Horit is joined with Tefnut and the myth of the Raging/Distant/Returning Goddess (which is an important myth for another day.) Sebennytos and Behbeit are in the 12th delta nome. There, the myths relate that Tefnut-Horit is raped by Her son Geb and imprisoned. The rapist is eventually punished and the Goddess freed, which becomes a cause for festival in the nome. So now, in addition to the rape of Horit the daughter by Her father Osiris, we also have the rape of Horit-Tefnut the mother by Her son. Some of you may know that there is similar tale in which Horus rapes His mother Isis and Her tears fall into the water.
WTF? Is it any wonder that Horit is among the raging Goddesses? And what the heck are we to supposed to make of all this anyway? We certainly do not approve. But neither did the ancient Egyptians. After all, Geb (and Set in other tales) is punished for His rape. And yet, the Egyptians retained these stories and, no doubt, tried to make sense of them.
Goddess and Son? God and Daughter?
I have speculated, in Isis Magic, about the possible meaning of the rape of Isis by Her son. What if that story, and others like it, are merely the very misunderstood remnants of a different and very ancient story; indeed, perhaps the oldest story? The Goddess Comes Into Being; of Herself, by Herself. She gives birth to a Child, a son. He grows to maturity. Then, in order to start the multiplication of life on earth, Divine Mother and Divine Son mate, not in a rape, but because They are All That Is. Could the same be said of the Divine Father and Divine Daughter? Obviously, I don’t know the answer to these questions. But it’s a way I can make it make some sense in my own head.
As for Harpokrates and His twin sister, I doubt we can make a direct connection between Horit and the Girl Harpokrates of the votive statue. And yet, and yet, and yet. Osiris has a son, Hor, and a daughter, Horit. (Different mothers? Same mother?) Hor and Horit make a perfect Egyptian name-sharing male-female pair. Horit’s myths come from the delta, including from Behbeit, where Isis’ great delta temple once stood.
I wonder whether we will some day find stories about Horit and Her mother? And if we do, what will Her name be?
Boy and girl Divine Children, enwrapped in the protective coils of Isis-Thermouthis and Serapis Agathos Daimon
During the excavation of Hathor’s temple at Denderah, an interesting statue, now in the Cairo Museum, came to light. It shows two children, one male, one female, standing within the protective coils of two serpents. On the boy’s head is a solar disk with an Eye of Horus on it. The girl has a lunar disk with an Eye of Horus.
The statue appears to be a votive gift, and may have originally come from the shrine of Isis-Thermouthis, believed to be not far from Denderah. According to experts, the serpents are most likely Isis-Thermouthis and Serapis Agathos Daimon.
Isis as Agathe Tyche and Osiris as Agathos Daimon in serpent form
In the Ptolemaic period, Isis and Serapis/Osiris were frequently depicted as Divine Serpents. The Isis serpent can sometimes be the combined Goddesses Isis and Renenutet as Isis-Thermouthis. Other times, She can be Isis Agathe Tyche, Good Fortune. In both forms, She is partnered with Serapis/Osiris Agathos Daimon, or Good Spirit.
Unfortunately, there is no writing on the statue to help with the identification of the Divine Children. One possibility is that They are the well-known twins, Shu and Tefnut. There are things in myth and at the site that could support this interpretation. But as you might guess, I like a different possibility.
Harpokrates with Mom Isis and Dad Serapis
The male child has the Horus lock, so He is probably Harpokrates, in Egyptian Hor-pa-khred, Horus the Child. Harpokrates was very popular during this time period. He is the child of Isis and Serapis and is frequently shown with a sun disk on His head. The fact that the Child God is protected by Isis and Osiris serpents, strengthens the identification. But if the boy is Harpokrates, Who is the little girl?
We don’t know of a twin sister of Harpokrates from either Egyptian or Greek sources. Some have wondered whether the lunar girl is supposed to be a form of Isis. Indeed Isis is called the Female Horus (Hor-et or Horit) in Egyptian sources. Several other Goddesses and a number of queens are called by the name as well. The Oxyrhynchus Hymn to Isis, written in Greek, calls Her Harpokratin, which is just Harpokrates with the Greek feminine ending. Translators have taken this to mean something like “the darling-girl of the Gods,” but it can just as easily be simply “Horet the [Girl] Child.” What’s more, by Ptolemaic times, Isis was indeed connected to the moon, even though She was not in earlier Egyptian sources.
Nevertheless, I stubbornly like the idea that the Divine Girl could be Horus’ twin sister, Horet. While this is the only statue we know of that shows the Harpokrates Twins together, during the Ptolemaic period, there are a few other baby girl statues that have been identified as Girl Harpokrates. We have no evidence of Her before this time, but we know that the Egyptians always did have a penchant for name-sharing male-female pairs of Deities, such as the Deities of the Ogdoad of Hermopolis.
Now, there is a Goddess Horit Who shows up in late Egyptian sources, specifically in what is known as the Delta Mythological Manual. Scholars aren’t sure where the manual came from, but they date it to about the 26th dynasty—though the material may be much older. It contains myths having to do with 12 of the nomes in the Egyptian delta. It could have come from a temple cache or been in the possession of a priest or maybe even a priestess. In this manual, we meet Horit. She is a daughter of Osiris, but we do not know Who Her mother is.
And…then things get bad.
You see, Horit bears sons fathered by Her father Osiris. The Delta Manual is pretty darned cryptic, but we learn that when Her father raped Her, it was Her “first time” and that when She learned She was pregnant, She “sat down and mourned.” What’s more, there was something wrong or unusual about the birth of the resulting child. The text isn’t super clear, but Horit may have either chosen abortion or miscarried. The child, being Divine, did not die, but instead left the premises immediately.
Tefnut in Her lioness form
After this, Horit functions as a wife to Osiris and bears four more children, the last one after suffering a rape by Set. The manual (again very cryptically) tells stories about each of these sons of Horit—all forms of Horus. Strangely, there is even one called The Child of Isis. Of the third of these sons, the manual tells us that after Set murders Osiris, Horit raises Their son to be His father’s avenger; very Isis-like indeed. There is even an incident of decapitation just as there is in the story where Isis grants mercy to Set, which so enrages Horus (the two Gods are battling at the time) that He decapitates Isis, a state of affairs that wise Thoth fixes right away.
In the Delta Manual, the identities of all the Goddesses are very fluid; quite confusingly so. They are associated, joined, or become each other frequently. Horit is identified with Hathor and it is said that “She is the Divine hand of Re,” which is specifically a vagina. (In this version of the story, Re replaces Atum Who uses His Goddess-Hand to masturbate, producing Shu and Tefnut.)
Tefnut is not happy
Many of the myths in the Delta Manual, and most of Horit’s, have to do with boundary-crossing sex among Deities, consensual or not. In addition to Hathor, Horit is associated with Bast, Who is said to “come forth as Horit.” At Sebennytos and Behbeit (Isiopolis!), Horit is joined with Tefnut and the myth of the Raging/Distant/Returning Goddess (which is an important myth for another day). Sebennytos and Behbeit are in the 12th delta nome. There, the myths relate that Tefnut-Horit is raped by Her son Geb and imprisoned. The rapist is eventually punished and the Goddess freed, which becomes a cause for festival in the nome. So now, in addition to the rape of Horit the daughter by Her father Osiris, we also have the rape of Horit-Tefnut the mother by Her son. Some of you may know that there is similar tale in which Horus rapes His mother Isis and Her tears fall into the water.
WTF? Is it any wonder that Horit is among the raging Goddesses? And what the heck are we to supposed to make of all this anyway? We certainly do not approve. But neither did the ancient Egyptians. After all, Geb (and Set in other tales) is punished for His rape. And yet, the Egyptians retained these stories and, no doubt, tried to make sense of them.
Goddess and Son? God and Daughter?
I have speculated, in Isis Magic, about the possible meaning of the rape of Isis by Her son. It goes like this: What if that story, and others like it, are merely the very misunderstood remnants of a different and very ancient story; indeed, perhaps the oldest story? The Goddess Comes Into Being; of Herself, by Herself. She gives birth to a Child, a son. He grows to maturity. Then, in order to start the multiplication of life on earth, Divine Mother and Divine Son mate, not in a rape, but because They are All That Is. Could the same be said of the Divine Father and Divine Daughter? Obviously, I don’t know the answer to these questions. But it’s a way I can try to make it make some sense in my own head.
As for Harpokrates and His twin sister, I doubt we can make a direct connection between Horit and the Girl Harpokrates of the votive statue. And yet, and yet, and yet. Osiris has a son, Hor, and a daughter, Horit. (Different mothers? Same mother?) Hor and Horit make a perfect Egyptian name-sharing male-female pair. Horit’s myths come from the delta, including from Behbeit, where Isis’ great delta temple once stood.
I wonder whether we will some day find stories about Horit and Her mother? And if we do, what will Her name be?
We know quite a lot about the history of the Great Goddess Isis. For instance, we know that She was already important by the time of the Pyramid Texts (Old Kingdom, 5th-6th dynasties). We know fairly clearly how Her worship spread throughout Egypt. We know how She came into Nubia and the Mediterranean. And we know how She went underground with the rise of Christianity in the Mediterranean and the West…staying alive in the magical traditions. Today there are few who do not at least know Her name.
Yet, what we don’t know for certain is where Her worship originated. So far, it is one of Her Mysteries.
Oh, there are theories. The one I am most seeing lately is that She is originally from some small city in the Egyptian delta of Lower Egypt. But I’ve haven’t seen the arguments to back that up. And strangely, no town in ancient Egypt, Upper or Lower, claimed to be Her “birthplace.” Since She became Egypt’s most famous Goddess, you would think someone would claim Her as their own.
The Egyptian delta. The arrow points to the location of Isiopolis. You can see Heliopolis above Cairo (Caire).
Others attribute Upper Egyptian origins to Her, especially given Her important Upper Egyptian temple at Philae (now on Agilkia island). However, the oldest evidence we have of Isis worship on Philae is from the 26th dynasty.
On the other hand, the consensus of researchers today is that what would become ancient Egypt was first populated by Paleolithic people moving from south to north. So if proto-Isis was already known to these people, perhaps She did come from what would eventually be Upper Egypt. And Abydos, an important Osirian cult center, is in Upper Egypt.
On the other, other hand, Isis and Osiris are incorporated into the Heliopolitan myth cycle. And Heliopolis is about 20 miles north of Cairo and in the delta. What’s more, there was another famous Isis temple right there in the middle of the delta at Isiopolis. We may eventually find that it (or its predecessor on the site) is, in fact, the oldest temple of Isis. (Yes, of course, I asked Her. She told me, “delta.” But that is decidedly UPG, “unverified personal gnosis.”)
Some very pretty skulls and bones from an Egyptian tomb
I recently came across a paper by Dr. Kelly-Anne Diamond, an Egyptologist currently serving as Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at Villanova University, that makes a new and interesting contribution to the possible origins of Isis. She focuses in on the title of a female funerary ritualist. The title is “demdjet” and she can appear as a human ritualist, but also sometimes as a Divine ritualist. We find her—very infrequently—from the Old Kingdom to the New. Egyptologists used to group this ritualist under the general category of “mourning women,” but it appears the demdjet or Demdjet may have had a more specific function.
The root of the word has to do with collecting or assembling. And since the title is a feminine active participle, the title demdjet is “she who collects or assembles.” If you’re at all familiar with the ancient Egyptian funerary texts, you may recall that there is quite a lot of emphasis on making sure the deceased have all their bones, bits, limbs, heads, etc. collected or assembled for them as well as ensuring none of those things are disassembled or lost. Since Isis is the collector of bits and pieces par excellence, at least when it comes to Osiris (and the deceased), Diamond suggests that this ritual role may play a part in Isis’ origins.
The demdjet (top) and the kenut (bottom) offering nu pots
One of the Pyramid Texts (PT 2283) refers to a Demdjet Vulture. It says, “Osiris Neith, accept Horus’ Eye, which Seth hid—THE HIDDEN VULTURE, which he joined—THE JOINED [Demdjet] VULTURE…” This Demdjet Vulture is involved with stretching or spreading something. We cannot say whether the Demdjet Vulture is supposed to be Isis, but at least we may have an early attestation of a Divine Demdjet. Of course, Isis can take vulture form, but it is not Her most common bird form.
We also find the Demdjet in the pyramid temple of Senwosret III where She gives life and protection. From the Middle Kingdom, there are demdjets in the papyrus Ramesseum E. Some scholars think that the contents of that papyrus may date back to the 3rd dynasty (there are archaisms in the text). If true, it would be the oldest mention of a demdjet.
In this papyrus, we learn that the demdjets are present throughout the funerary rites. At some point, the demdjets move simultaneously, perhaps in ritual motion or dance. They are there when the deceased is summoned to revivification. And they have speaking parts. In the New Kingdom, we have several more instances of demdjets. They are shown as two kneeling women with nu water pots and they are watering “the desert necropolis.” In one case, one woman is labeled menkenu and one demdjet. (Alan Gardiner suggests menkenu is a title of Isis, while demdjet is a title of Nephthys.) In another case, one is called demdjet and one is called kenut (menkenu and kenut may be different versions of the same title).
Same offering, different labels: The Great Kite and the Lesser Kite
But here’s where it gets more interesting for Isiacs. In the last New Kingdom example (tomb of Paheri, if you must know), we find the same scene—women kneeling with nu pots, dressed in the same way—but this time, They are labeled Djeret Weret (Great Kite) and Djeret Nedjeset (Lesser Kite). In this time period, we know Who the Great Kite and the Lesser Kite are; They are Isis and Nephthys. So, the women depicted may be human ritualists portraying the Goddesses, which we know was done in Egyptian ritual. In additional, but very damaged, scenes in two of these tombs, we see the demdjet no longer kneeling, but standing with her/Her right arm raised, elbow bent, and fist clenched while her/Her left clenched fist is placed at her/Her chest. It reminds me of the henu gesture, but standing.
The henu gesture
She is labeled Djeret Weret Demdjet, the Great Kite Demdjet. The gesture s/She makes is thought to be associated with transfiguration, the recitation of holy words, and glorifications for the dead.
In the Book of the Amduat, a Goddess named Demdjet appears in the 7th and 8th Hours of the Night where She helps protect Re and the Sun Barque as it journeys through the Otherworld. In the 7th Hour, She is with three other Goddesses: She Who Cuts, She Who Punishes, and She Who Annihilates. In the 8th Hour, Demdjet is with three other mummiform Goddesses: She Who Veils, She Who Decorates (?), and the Dark One. Interestingly, the 7th Hour is the same Hour in which Isis and the Elder Magician work Their powerful magic to subdue Apophis. So in this case, with Isis in Her Great of Magic form, it seems to me it would be a bit of a stretch to consider this Demdjet, a minor Hours Goddess, to be a form of Isis.
The Djeret Weret Demdjet making a gesture of transfiguration; we can see the feet of (probably) another demdjet (the Djeret Nedjeset Demdjet?) above this one, but this part of the tomb is damaged
Nevertheless, with its core meaning of She Who Collects, Assembles, and Puts Together, we can find in the Demdjet an important harmony with one aspect of Great Isis: She Who searches, finds, reassembles, and gives new life to Osiris.
Some researchers have suggested that there may have been a very early Egyptian funerary custom in which important dead persons were disarticulated and then put back together for rejuvenation. It’s a highly controversial topic, but if so, perhaps the original Demdjet may have been the female ritualist who did this reassembly. Perhaps she was serving as a priestess of the Great Renewing Mother. And perhaps, just perhaps, this Great Mother Regeneratrix was the Demdjet Weret—(proto) Iset Demdjet—She Who collects our bones for us that we may be made whole in preparation for our rebirth.
