Isis

The marsh gave up no light, only the hiss of papyrus and the small careful sounds of a woman who did not want to be heard. She moved through black water with an infant lifted clear of it, pausing whenever the reeds went still, listening for the men her brother had sent to find her. Behind her lay the scattered pieces of her husband. Ahead lay a throne she meant to take back for the child on her hip. Isis had already cheated death once. She was willing to do it as many times as it took.

She was the great magician of Egypt, goddess of healing and motherhood and the quiet arts that bend the world, and the oldest texts already knew her. Daughter of the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut, sister and wife of Osiris, sister of Set and of Nephthys, she stood among the first family of the gods and outlasted most of them in the affection of ordinary people. Her magic was reckoned greater than that of any other deity, and the reason for that reputation is a story in itself.

In the temples she is a tall woman in a sheath of white linen, and the sign on her head is a throne, because her name was written with a throne and she carried the seat of kingship on her brow. Later she borrowed the crown of Hathor, a pair of cow horns cradling the red disk of the sun, and sometimes wore the vulture cap and the rearing cobra of queens. Her other shape had feathers. She could become a kite, a small fierce falcon of the marshes, and painters loved her best with her wings thrown wide across the foot of a coffin or folded around the shoulders of the dead. Gold, linen, the cool weight of a child against her body, the tyet knot at her waist that echoed the ankh: this was how Egypt pictured its mother of magic.

She was born, in the Heliopolitan telling, on one of the five stolen days that Thoth won from the moon so that Nut could bear her children after the ordinary year had run out. Geb and Nut brought four into the world across those days, and two of the four married: Osiris took Isis, Set took Nephthys, and the balance of Egypt was fixed in that pairing and in the enmity that grew between the brothers. Osiris ruled as a good king. Set wanted the crown.

What Set did to get it is the spine of her whole story. He built a beautiful chest measured in secret to his brother’s exact body, threw a feast, and offered the box to whoever could lie down and fit it. When Osiris lay inside, Set and his men slammed the lid, sealed it with molten lead, and flung it into the Nile. The river carried it to the Levantine coast, to Byblos, where a tree grew up around it and was later cut down to make a pillar in a king’s hall. Isis went looking. She found the pillar, freed the chest, and brought her husband home, and for a moment the worst seemed over.

It was not. Set found the body, and this time he cut it into fourteen pieces and scattered them the length of Egypt. Isis set out again, and Nephthys came with her, and between them they gathered thirteen. The fourteenth, the phallus, had fallen into the river and been eaten by fish, so Isis shaped a replacement and bound the body whole. Then she became a kite and beat her wings above him until the air she stirred pushed breath back into his lungs, and in that brief return to life she conceived. The wings cracked like sailcloth in a gale. Osiris woke long enough to father a son and no longer, and afterward he went down to rule the dead, king of a country from which no one is exiled and no one comes back. She had not saved him, exactly. She had refused to let him simply end.

The son was Horus, and Isis raised him in hiding among the papyrus thickets of the Delta, one step ahead of an uncle who would have killed the boy in his cradle. Those years made her the goddess the poor prayed to. In one story she walks the roads disguised as a beggar with seven scorpions for a guard, and a rich woman slams her door on so ragged a group. When a scorpion slips inside anyway and stings the wealthy woman’s own child, it is Isis who kneels over the boy she was refused, names the venom, and calls it out of him, because that is simply what she does. She was the spell muttered over a feverish infant, the charm knotted against snakebite, the last hope after a healer had run out of others.

Her supreme power she took by cunning from Ra himself. The sun god had grown old, and he drooled as the old do, and Isis gathered the spittle where it fell, worked it with earth into a serpent, and left the thing coiled on the path he walked each day. It bit him. No god could cure the fire in his veins, because no god had made the creature and the poison was partly his own. Isis offered to heal him, but only if he told her his true and secret name, the word that held his power. He tried to buy her off with his lesser titles, maker of the fields, the one who opens his eyes and there is light. She waited. The venom climbed. In the end he let the name pass from his heart into hers, and she drew the poison out, and from that day her magic answered to no one, equal to the oldest god in the sky.

After that there was little she could not do. She healed the sick and steadied women in childbirth. She raised the dead, or held them at the threshold long enough for it to matter. She governed the powers of fate and could measure out how long a life would run. She changed her shape, read the hidden names of things, and threw her protection over the living and the mummified alike, which is why her wings spread across coffins and her knot was tucked into the wrappings of the dead.

For all of it, she was never a goddess of force. She could not lift Set’s crime off her husband or recover the one piece the river had taken. She won by patience and trickery and by simply outlasting grief, hunted through the marshes with a child, wearing a beggar’s rags, working in the dark. In one hard version of the long contest for the throne she pitied Set at the wrong moment, and her own furious son struck the head from her shoulders for it, and even that she survived, her head restored, the work continued. Her strength was that she did not stop. It was also the measure of how much the world could take from her before she got her way.

Egypt kept her for three thousand years, and then the rest of the Mediterranean took her up. Sailors and merchants carried her out of the Nile Delta to Greece and to Rome, where temples rose to her far from any desert and her worshippers wrote hymns in her own voice: I am Isis, mistress of every land, I divided the earth from the heaven, I set the stars in their courses, I am she who is called goddess by women. The throne on her head had become a claim on the whole world, and for a few centuries the world agreed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Isis in Egyptian mythology?

Isis is the ancient Egyptian goddess of magic, motherhood, healing, and kingship, revered as the greatest magician among the gods. She is the daughter of Geb and Nut, the sister and wife of Osiris, and the mother of Horus, and she was worshipped from the Old Kingdom onward before her cult spread across the Greco-Roman world.

How did Isis bring Osiris back to life?

After Set murdered Osiris and cut his body into fourteen pieces scattered across Egypt, Isis and her sister Nephthys searched out and reassembled thirteen of them, fashioning a replacement for the missing part. Isis then transformed into a kite and beat her wings over the body to breathe life back into it long enough to conceive their son Horus, after which Osiris passed on to rule the underworld.

How did Isis become so powerful in magic?

Isis gained her supreme magic by tricking the aging sun god Ra into revealing his secret name. She made a venomous serpent from earth mixed with Ra’s own drool and set it to bite him, then offered to cure the incurable poison only if he told her his hidden true name, the word that held his power. Once he surrendered it, her magic became equal to that of the oldest god in the sky.

Who were the parents and family of Isis?

Isis was the daughter of the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut, born alongside her siblings Osiris, Set, and Nephthys. She married her brother Osiris and became the mother of Horus, and the rivalry between Osiris and Set drives much of her mythology, including the murder of her husband and the long struggle to win the throne for her son.

What are the symbols of Isis?

Isis is most often identified by the hieroglyphic throne sign worn on her head, the source of her name, and by outstretched feathered wings that mark her as a protector of the dead. She is also shown with the cow-horn-and-sun-disk crown borrowed from Hathor, the tyet or “knot of Isis” amulet, and frequently seated nursing the infant Horus.

Related Entries

Osiris, Horus, Set, Nephthys, Ra, Geb, Nut, Thoth, Anubis, Hathor, Neith, Inanna, Demeter, Aphrodite