Isis

• 1. Introduction

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  Isis was one of the most consequential figures in the religious history of the ancient world. She began as a relatively minor character in the royal rituals of ancient Egypt and ended her journey as a universal goddess worshipped from Britain to Iran, her cult outlasting nearly every rival and leaving traces still visible in modern religious practice. What drove that extraordinary expansion? And how does a goddess born from the politics of an ancient royal court become a symbol of nature, femininity, and cosmic power for millions of people across thousands of years? To answer those questions, this documentary follows Isis from her first appearances in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom to the esoteric traditions of the modern world, tracing the myths, the temples, the festivals, and the debates she continues to inspire.

• 2. Origins and Name

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  Neither Isis nor her husband Osiris appears to have been mentioned by name before the Fifth Dynasty, which ran roughly from 2494 to 2345 BCE. An inscription that may refer to Isis dates to the reign of Nyuserre Ini during that period. She appears prominently in the Pyramid Texts, which began to be written down at the end of that dynasty, though their content may have developed far earlier. Several passages link her to the Nile Delta, near Behbeit el-Hagar and Sebennytos, suggesting her cult may have originated in that region.

  Her Egyptian name was written as ꜣst, and its pronunciation shifted across centuries: from Rūsat to Rūsaʾ, then to ʾŪsaʾ, then to ʾĒsə. In the Coptic form of Egyptian it became ⲎⲤⲈ, or Ēse. In the Meroitic language of Nubia she was called Wusa. The Greek form, Ἶσις, is the basis for the name used today.

  The hieroglyphic writing of her name incorporates the sign for a throne, which she also wears on her head as a mark of identity. The Egyptologist Kurt Sethe proposed that she was originally a personification of the throne itself, a view Henri Frankfort supported by arguing that the throne was considered the king's mother because of its power to transform a man into a king. Other scholars, including Jürgen Osing and Klaus P. Kuhlmann, disputed this interpretation, citing dissimilarities between her name and the Egyptian word for a throne. The question of whether Isis was born from the symbolism of kingship or arrived at that symbolism later remains open.

• 3. Wife, Mourner, Mother

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  Isis belongs to the Ennead of Heliopolis, a family of nine deities descended from the creator god Atum or Ra. She is the wife and sister of Osiris, and his queen. Set kills Osiris and, in several versions of the story, dismembers his corpse. Isis and Nephthys, joined by deities including Anubis, search for the pieces and reassemble them. Their efforts became the mythic prototype for mummification and other funerary practices.

  Funerary texts preserve speeches by Isis in which she expresses her grief, her sexual desire for Osiris, and even anger that he has left her. All these emotions serve a purpose in the myth: they are meant to stir Osiris into action. Isis ultimately restores breath and life to his body, copulates with him, and conceives Horus. After this Osiris lives only in the Duat, the underworld. By producing an heir to carry out funerary rites and avenge his death, Isis has secured her husband's endurance in the afterlife.

  As Horus's mother, Isis gives birth to him in the papyrus thickets of the Nile Delta, after a long pregnancy and a difficult labor. She must then protect him from Set, from snakes, scorpions, and illness. One story describes seven minor scorpion deities traveling with her as guards. When a wealthy woman refuses to help the goddess, the scorpions sting the woman's son. Isis heals the blameless child anyway. This episode became one of the foundations of her reputation as a compassionate deity willing to relieve human suffering.

  Her maternal authority expanded in every direction. The Coffin Texts from the Middle Kingdom name the Four Sons of Horus as her offspring. A story in the Westcar Papyrus has Isis serving as midwife to three future kings, calling out each child's name as it is born. Barbara S. Lesko reads that detail as evidence that Isis held the power to predict or influence future events. Late texts would call her outright the "mistress of life, ruler of fate and destiny", placing her above the older deities of fate such as Shai and Renenutet.

• 4. Magic, Kingship, and the Sky

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  In the New Kingdom story "The Contendings of Horus and Set", Isis outmaneuvers Set repeatedly, transforming herself into a young woman who lures him into judging himself guilty of injustice. She was said to be "more clever than a million gods", a phrase that captures how her cunning was as central to her identity as her grief.

  One of the most striking stories involves a snake she creates to bite Ra, who is older and more powerful than she is. The venom makes him ill, and she offers a cure in exchange for his secret name, a piece of knowledge carrying incomparable power. Ra eventually tells her, and she passes the name to Horus, strengthening his royal authority. The story may have been intended as an origin myth for her magical supremacy, though as the source notes, it seems to treat her as already possessing such abilities before she learns Ra's name.

  Her protective role extended to the entire kingdom. Her Ptolemaic temple at Philae, near the frontier with Nubian peoples who raided Egypt, described her as the protectress of the nation, more effective in battle than "millions of soldiers". New Kingdom funerary texts place her in Ra's barque as it passes through the underworld, where she helps subdue his archenemy Apep.

  Passages in the Pyramid Texts connect Isis closely with Sopdet, the goddess representing the star Sirius. Sirius's heliacal rising just before the start of the Nile flood gave Sopdet a close connection with the floodwaters. Partly because of this link, Isis came to be associated with the flood itself, which was sometimes equated with the tears she shed for Osiris. By Ptolemaic times she was connected with rain, with the sun, and with the moon. Hymns inscribed at Philae call her the "Lady of Heaven" whose rule of the sky parallels Osiris's rule of the Duat and Horus's kingship on earth.

• 5. Temples, Festivals, and the Last Rites

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  The earliest known major temples to Isis were the Iseion at Behbeit el-Hagar in northern Egypt and the temple at Philae in the far south. Both began construction during the Thirtieth Dynasty and were completed or enlarged by Ptolemaic kings. Philae drew pilgrims from across the Mediterranean. A series of additional temples stretched south from Philae to Maharraqa, serving Egyptians and various Nubian peoples alike. The Nubians of Kush built their own temples at sites as far south as Wad ban Naqa, including one in their capital, Meroe.

  In the fourth century BCE, Nectanebo I of the Thirtieth Dynasty claimed Isis as his patron deity. The Ptolemaic kings who ruled Egypt as pharaohs from 305 to 30 BCE wove her into their own legitimacy. Cleopatra III used Isis's name in place of her own in inscriptions. Cleopatra VII, the last ruler of Egypt before Rome annexed it, used the epithet "the new Isis".

  Festivals multiplied as her worship spread. Egyptians across the country celebrated her birthday, the Amesysia, by carrying the local cult statue through their fields. At Philae, priests held a festival every ten days when the cult statue visited the neighboring island of Bigeh, said to be Osiris's burial place, to perform funerary rites for him.

  Christianity became dominant in the Roman Empire during the fourth and fifth centuries CE. Temple cults died out gradually, losing funding and facing Christian hostility. Isis's temple at Philae, sustained by its Nubian worshippers, maintained an organized priesthood and regular festivals until at least the mid-fifth century CE, making it the last fully functioning temple in Egypt. The Isia festival was celebrated at least as late as 417 CE, and the Navigium Isidis, the March procession celebrating her influence over the sea, lasted well into the sixth century.

• 6. Isis Across the Mediterranean

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  Greeks were aware of Isis at least as early as the Archaic Period, roughly 700 to 480 BCE. Her first known temple in Greece was built during or before the fourth century BCE, by Egyptians living in Athens. The conquests of Alexander the Great created the Hellenistic kingdoms and put Greek and non-Greek religions in much closer contact. Merchants and other travelers spread the cults of Isis and Serapis into Greek port cities at the end of the fourth century BCE. They expanded throughout Greece and Asia Minor during the third and second centuries. The Greek island of Delos, a major trading center, served as a springboard for the Egyptian cults to reach Italy.

  The first Ptolemies promoted the cult of Serapis, who combined aspects of Osiris and Apis with those of Greek gods including Zeus and Dionysus. Isis, portrayed in a Hellenized form, was regarded as Serapis's consort alongside her traditional role as Osiris's wife. Ptolemy II and his wife Arsinoe II developed a ruler cult around themselves, worshipped in the same temples as Serapis and Isis.

  Isis's cult reached Italy during the second century BCE. Private persons set up shrines and altars to her on the Capitoline Hill in the early first century BCE. The independence of her cult from Roman authority made it potentially unsettling. During the political crisis of the 50s and 40s BCE, the Roman Senate destroyed those shrines, though it stopped short of banning her entirely. After Octavian's victory over Cleopatra VII in 30 BCE, he banned Isis shrines within the pomerium, the city's innermost sacred boundary, while allowing them outside it.

  Despite a temporary expulsion during the reign of Tiberius, from 14 to 37 CE, the Egyptian cults gradually became accepted. The Flavian emperors in the late first century CE treated Serapis and Isis as patrons of their rule, alongside traditional Roman deities such as Jupiter and Minerva. At their peak in the late second and early third centuries CE, Isis and Serapis were worshipped in most towns across the western empire. Their temples were found from Petra and Palmyra in the east to Italica in Spain and Londinium, the Roman name for what is now London, in Britain.

• 7. Mystery Rites and Devotees

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  Some temples of Isis performed mystery rites to initiate new members. These were claimed to be of Egyptian origin, but the source notes they were mainly based on Greek mystery cults, particularly the Eleusinian Mysteries dedicated to Demeter, given an Egyptian coloring. The only detailed account of an Isiac initiation comes from the novel by Apuleius, written around 125 to 180 CE, known as Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass. Its protagonist, Lucius, enters the innermost part of Isis's temple at night and describes what followed in deliberately cryptic terms: "I came to the boundary of death and, having trodden on the threshold of Proserpina, I travelled through all the elements and returned. In the middle of the night I saw the sun flashing with bright light, I came face to face with the gods below and the gods above and paid reverence to them from close at hand."

  The cult asked both ritual and moral purity of its devotees, requiring periodic ritual baths or days-long periods of sexual abstinence. Isiacs sometimes displayed their devotion by singing Isis's praises in the streets or, as a form of penance, declaring their misdeeds in public. They were among the very few religious groups in the Greco-Roman world to have a distinctive name for themselves: Isiacus.

  Isiacs came from every level of society, from slaves and freedmen to high officials and members of the imperial family. Women were more strongly represented in Isis's cult than in most Greco-Roman cults, and in imperial times they could serve as priestesses in many of the same ranks as their male counterparts. Several Roman writers accused the cult of encouraging promiscuity among women. Jaime Alvar suggests the cult attracted male suspicion simply because it gave women a venue to act outside their husbands' control.

  Priests of Isis were recognizable by their shaven heads and white linen clothes, both drawn from Egyptian priesthood traditions and their requirements of ritual purity. Apuleius's account of Isiac initiation went on to influence the practices of many secret societies. Jean Terrasson's 1731 novel Sethos used it as inspiration for a fanciful Egyptian initiation rite, which was then imitated by actual rituals in various Masonic and Masonic-inspired societies during the eighteenth century and, most notably, in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's 1791 opera The Magic Flute.

• 8. Afterlives in Western Culture

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  The memory of Isis survived the extinction of her worship. Giovanni Boccaccio's 1374 work De mulieribus claris treated her as a historical queen who taught skills of civilization to humankind. In the 1490s, Annio da Viterbo claimed Isis and Osiris had civilized Italy before Greece, and the Borgia Apartments painted for his patron, Pope Alexander VI, illustrated the Osiris myth with that theme.

  From the Renaissance on, a passage in the works of the fifth-century writer Macrobius, which equated Isis with nature, shaped how she was read. A veiled statue mentioned by both Plutarch and Proclus bore the inscription: "I am all that has been and is and will be; and no mortal has ever lifted my mantle." Authors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave this image a wide variety of meanings: Isis as the mother of all things, as truths waiting to be unveiled by science, as a pantheist symbol of an enigmatic deity immanent within nature. During the dechristianization of France in the French Revolution, her image appeared in government-sponsored artwork, including the Fontaine de la Régénération. Helena Blavatsky, founder of the esoteric Theosophical tradition, titled her 1877 book Isis Unveiled.

  Among modern Egyptians, Isis served as a national symbol during the Pharaonism movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Mohamed Naghi's painting in the parliament of Egypt, titled Egypt's Renaissance, and Tawfiq al-Hakim's play The Return of the Spirit both used Isis to symbolize national revival. A sculpture by Mahmoud Mokhtar, also called Egypt's Renaissance, plays upon the motif of Isis removing her veil.

  The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late nineteenth century and the writer Dion Fortune in the 1930s adopted an all-encompassing goddess into their belief systems and called her Isis. This conception influenced the Great Goddess found in many forms of Neopagan witchcraft. Today, reconstructions of ancient Egyptian religion such as Kemetic Orthodoxy include Isis among the deities they revere. The Greek name Isidoros, meaning "gift of Isis", survived into Christianity and gave rise to the English name Isidore. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Isis itself became a popular feminine given name, carrying forward, without most bearers knowing it, a thread that stretches back to the papyrus thickets of the Nile Delta.