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Isis Biography

Isis Image

ISIS (Egyptian, ‘Ise-t a name of obscure etymology). An Egyptian goddess, the daughter of Seb (Earth) and Nut (Heaven) and the sister and wife of Osiris (q.v.). Herodotus identified her with Demeter and described her as the greatest of the Egyptian goddesses. After the treacherous murder of her husband by his brother Set (q.v.), Isis fled to the swamps of the Delta, accompanied by seven scorpions. On one occasion the mistress of a house in which she sought shelter, fearing the scorpions, turned the goddess from her door, and the scorpion Tefen crept into the house and stung the son of the woman so that he died. But Isis, moved by the woman's grief, laid her hand upon the child and restored him to life. Shortly after this Isis gave birth to her son Horus, whom she placed in the charge of Buto, the goddess of the north. Buto guarded him carefully, but in spite of all her care he was stung by a scorpion, and his mother found him lying lifeless on the ground. At her prayer the sun god Rê stopped his ship in midheaven and sent down Thoth, the god of wisdom, who soon brought Horus back to life. Leaving her young son in the Delta, carefully hidden by Buto from the malevolence of his uncle Set, Isis next went through the world seeking the body of her husband. Osiris, which, inclosed in a chest, had been borne out to sea by the Nile. In her wanderings she was accompanied and protected by Anubis (q.v.), the son of Osiris by his sister Nephthys (q.v.). After a long search she found the body of Osiris. The chest inclosing it had drifted ashore near Byblos, on the Phoenician coast, and had become embedded in the trunk of a great tree which had grown around it. The King of the country, ignorant of the presence of the chest, had caused the tree to be cut down and made of it a pillar for his house. Isis entered the King's service as nurse to his child and endeavored to confer immortality on the infant. Every night she burned away his mortal part with celestial fire, while she herself, in the form of a swallow, flew round the pillar lamenting her husband. One night the Queen, Astarte, came upon her while thus engaged, and crying out in terror at the sight of the child surrounded with flames, destroyed his chance of immortality. Isis now revealed herself, drew the chest from the pillar, and conveyed the body of her husband by ship to Egypt, where she hid it and went to visit her son. Set, however, found the body of Osiris and tore it to pieces, which he scattered in every direction. Learning of this misfortune, Isis took a boat, and seeking her husband's scattered members throughout the land, found all the pieces except the phallus, which had been eaten by fishes. Wherever she found a portion of the body she buried it, and in aftertimes each of these spots was revered as the burial place of Osiris. His head, e.g., was buried at Abydos, and his backbone at Busiris, in the Delta. Isis reared her son Horus in concealment, and when he reached mature age he defeated Set and ascended his father's throne. In the legends of the sun god Rê, Isis is represented as possessing special skill in magic and in the healing art; in this character, as the "great mistress of enchantments," her aid is frequently invoked in the Egyptian magical texts. Her sacred animal was the cow, and she is sometimes represented with the head of a cow, though more frequently she wears only the horns. She is also very commonly depicted as a woman wearing upon her head a throne--the ideogram used in writing her name. In later times she is often represented as seated and holding the infant Horus to her breast.

Isis was very generally worshiped throughout Egypt, but special honor was paid to her at Abydos and Busiris. In later times the centre of her cult was in Philæ (q.v.), where magnificent temples were built to her. Here she was still revered as late as 453 A.D., long after paganism had been suppressed in other parts of the land by edict of Theodosius, her special worshipers being the savage Blemmyan tribes who constantly menaced the safety of Egypt. From Alexandria, where the worship of the triad Serapis (q.v.), Isis, and Harpocrates (q.v.) overshadowed that of all other Egyptian deities, the cult of the goddess spread throughout the whole Hellenic world, and temples were erected to her in many places. It was introduced into Rome in the time of Sulla (86 B.C.) and soon became fashionable, but was brought into ill repute by the licentiousness of its priests, and the government made occasional attempts to suppress it. Under the Empire the cult of Isis became very popular, and Domitian, Commodus, and Caracalla were among the priests of the Egyptian goddess. At the opening of spring (March 5) both Greeks and Romans held a festival in which a ship was carried in solemn procession in honor of Isis. In the Roman Calendar the day of this festival was designated as Navigium Isidis.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 420.