Isis, an Egyptian goddess. The deities of ancient Egypt might be male or female, but in neither case could the Egyptian worshipper conceive a deity as existing in isolation: to every deity of either sex there must be a counterpart of the other sex. It was to this notion that the goddess Isis owed her origin; she was the counterpart of Osiris, and this fact is expressed in the statement that she was at once wife and sister of Osiris. But in all such cases the counterpart remained a much less important personage than the original deity, whether male or female. The mythological functions of Isis accordingly will be found to be subordinated, at any rate in their oldest forms, to the myth of Osiris. In the next place, as the child is the reproduction of its parents, for the father lives again in his children, the son was to the Egyptian in a way identical with the father, and when, as in the case of the gods, the mother was but the counterpart of the father, the identity of the child with the parents was yet more complete. In other words, as a child is impossible without parents, so it is impossible for a father to exist without a child of which he is the father. Hence we find that the deities of ancient Egypt are grouped in triads or trinities. Father, mother, and child cannot be conceived except in relation to each other (the terms are correlative); yet, though identical and inseparable, they are nevertheless distinct. The deity who completed the triad in the case of Osiris and Isis was their son Horus. In order to understand the position occupied by this triad in the circle of ancient Egyptian deities it is necessary to premise that Egypt was no exception to the laws which govern the growth of all political communities. All states which are larger than mere city states have become larger by the amalgamation or synoikismos of smaller units. The smaller states out of which Egypt as a political whole was formed still continued after the political unification of the country by Menes to exist as administrative districts, even when Egypt became part of the Roman empire, just as the boundaries of a modern English county in many cases represent the frontiers of ancient states.
In Egypt these divisions are generally known under their Greek name as ‘nomes.’ Each nome, while yet an independent state, possessed its own local deities. When, however, they were brought under one government a pantheon was necessarily formed, and the order of precedence amongst the various local deities arranged. Practically, however, each nome continued to regard its own deity or trinity as really the supreme god, unless it could succeed in identifying its own deity with some other member of the national hierarchy. This explains on the one hand the statement of Herodotus (ii. 42) that no gods were worshipped universally in Egypt except Osiris and Isis, and on the other hand it enables us to understand how it comes about that Isis was worshipped as Mut at Thebes, as Sekhet at Bubastis, and as Hathor or Athor at Dendera, as Sothis, the dog-star, and as the planet Venus. It also explains why Osiris, originally the local deity of Abydos, came to be universally worshipped throughout Egypt. Osiris undoubtedly owed his elevation in the Egyptian pantheon to the fact that he was identified with Ra, the sun or sun-god. In chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead this identification is expressed in the explicit terms, ‘Ra, the soul of Osiris, and Osiris, the soul of Ra.’
We may now proceed to the mythological functions of Isis. As being the counterpart, the sister of Osiris, she was the child of the same parents as her brother and husband—of Seb (or, as some transliterate it, Qeb), the earth, and Nut, the sky. The beneficent course of the sun across the sky is terminated by his murder at the hands of his brother Set. But though the sun dies to-night, to-morrow there lives another sun, who is different and yet the same, as the child is different from and yet the same as his father. This is Horus, who avenges the death of his father Osiris. Within the limits of this myth place was found for Isis as the faithful wife of Osiris, who recovered the body of her murdered husband, after it had been flung into the Nile by Set. Having concealed the body, Isis fled to her son Horus, and during his absence Set found the body and cut it into fourteen pieces, which he scattered. These Isis collected and buried in a stately tomb. The question at once presents itself, what was the original meaning of the mythological functions ascribed to Isis in the myth of Osiris? And we may conjecture that the answer is to be sought in the original local character of Egyptian deities, in the process of identification, or ‘syncretism,’ and in the ritual which grew out of it. Horus was originally the local god of Edfu; he may have been a solar deity, at any rate he came to be regarded as the same, yet not the same, as the local solar deity of Abydos, Osiris. He was interpreted as the son of Osiris. But Horus was in conflict with Set; obviously, therefore, it must have been as the avenger of his father, Osiris, that Horus engaged in conflict with Set, though before Horus was brought into connection with Osiris no such story existed. Again, Horus, before he was identified as the son of Osiris, had a mother of his own, Hathor, the local deity of Dendera. By what process Horus, the god of Edfu, had come to be regarded as connected with the goddess of Dendera we do not know. But the connection was expressed in ritual by a religious procession from Dendera to Edfu. Accordingly, when Horus became the son of Osiris, and Athor in consequence was identified with Isis, the procession in which the image of Athor—i.e. Isis—visited Horus at Edfu required a mythological explanation. It was provided by the invention of the myth of Isis’ flight to Horus after the death of Osiris. The dismemberment of Osiris and the collection of the members by Isis is apparently an invention to account for the phallic ceremonies, which survive to the present day in
Egypt. From this analysis of the myth of Isis and Osiris, it becomes apparent that the deities of ancient Egypt were not originally conceived in triads; but that, on the contrary, the trinity of the god was a later doctrine designed to explain the syncretism which resulted from the amalgamation of the various names and their deities. There is yet another mythological function ascribed to Isis which requires mention and explanation: she rocks the cradle of the infant Nile. To the Egyptian the conflict between the sun and the powers of darkness, in the heaven above, may have had its parallel on the earth beneath in the perennial conflict between the beneficent Nile with the sands of the desert. At any rate, Osiris had the Nile as well as the sun for his emblem; and by a not unnatural confusion between Osiris and Horus, for Horus is Osiris in his youth, Isis was regarded as tending the infant Nile. Finally, we may dismiss Isis in Egypt by adding that she as Neith was regarded as the patron goddess of women, and presided over child-birth.
But we have yet to trace the fortunes of Isis in Greece and in Rome. As early as Herodotus (ii. 156) she was taken to be the same as the Greek Demeter—for no other reason apparently than that Demeter, like Isis, suffered a great loss. Only, it was her daughter, not her husband, that Demeter lost. This was, however, a trifle to stand in the way of a Greek resolved to identify his mythology with that of the oldest, the wisest, and most religious of mankind. After the time of Herodotus—probably, indeed, not until post-classical Greek times—on the ground that the wife of the sun must be the moon, Isis became a moon-goddess, and was identified by the Greeks with their moon-goddess Io. Again, as Athor, Isis was imagined to be the same as the Semitic Astarte and the Greek Aphrodite. When the attributes and powers of all these goddesses were ascribed by the (post-classical) Greeks to Isis it is easy to understand that in the Orphic mysteries Isis was the chief and most mysterious of all goddesses. Nor have we any difficulty in recognising that the Pans and Satyrs and the nursing of Astarte's children, &c. which appear in Greek accounts of Isis are borrowed from myths that really belong to Demeter, and are not Egyptian at all. Our two chief Greek authorities, Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch (De Isid. et Osir.), draw mainly upon one Hecateus, of the time of Alexander; and we may say generally that it is impossible to trace Isis as a figure in Greek mythology farther back than the age of Alexander.
It is in the Roman empire that Isis becomes a mythological figure of importance outside Egypt. The process of syncretism was carried further in her case than in that of any other deity. Every function ever attributed to any deity whatever was transferred to her, and the result is best stated in the words of the mysterious goddess herself to the Golden Ass of Apuleius (Met. xi. 241): 'I am the universal mother nature, mistress of all elements, first-born of the ages, supreme of goddesses, queen of names, ruler of the gods, sole manifestation of all gods and goddesses, whose glance makes awful silence in the shining heights of heaven, in the depths of the sea, and of the world beneath, whose unchanging being is worshipped under many forms, with many rites, and under various names, as mother of the gods, as the Cecropian Minerva, Paphian Venus, Dictynnian Diana, Stygian Proserpina, the ancient goddess Ceres, as Juno, Bellona, Hecate, Rhamnusia—but my true name is Queen Isis.' To this we may add the inscription mentioned by Proclus: 'I am that which is, has been, and shall be. My veil no one has lifted. The fruit I bore was the Sun.'
See Maspero, Histoire Ancienne; Le Page Renouf's Hibbert Lectures (1879); Sayce's Herodotus; Chantepie de la Saussaye, Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte (i. 1887); Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Ägypter (i. 1884); R. Lepsius, Ueber den ersten Ägyptischen Götterkreis (1851); E. Lefebvre, L'Étude de la Religion Égyptienne (1886).