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One of the most
popular incarnations of Goddess was the Egyptian Isis, Queen of the Tomb,
Mother of the gods, whose myth and mysteries, so much like those of Demeter,
persevered into Roman and early Christian times. Isis assumed primary
importance in Heliopolos during the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (ca. 2500
B.C.E.). Inheritor of the powers of Ua Zit, Nut, Maat, and Hathor, she was the
throne of Egypt in whose lap the pharaohs sat. Like Inanna, she had a dark
sister, earth-colored Nephthys. Together they created and destroyed; they were
the Nile in its annual process, the female body in its smooth cycle – of
flooding and receding, destroying and providing.
The
brother-lover of Isis was the great king Osiris, the god of maize and the
Underworld in the highly complex death and resurrection religion of which he
and his sister-consort were the major figures. (Note 1) Osiris was infinitely
more powerful than the Sumerian shephard-king Dumuzi, but like Dumuzi he became
the seed of life buried in the earth, revived by the power of Goddess and her
mysteries.
In the
remarkable myth retold by Plutarch and others, several elements come into their
own as signs of Goddess in her role as fertility figure: the snake as a
companion, the presence of the tree in which the son or brother-lover is
contained as a seed in a pod or on which he is hung as seed-bearing fruit; the
castration or dismembering that is the harvest and the planting of the body
parts so that new life can spring forth; and the ritual revival ceremonies of
the women.
The first-born
daughter of Geb and Nut, Isis soon came to know virtually everything, and
especially when her parents retired to the heavens, she was the mistress
of the cosmos, the giver of law, justice, abundance, the mother of al life,
healer, and bestower of life after death. She was the feathered throne on which
the pharaohs would one day sit, and from one of her tears, the Nile had sprung.
It is said that
the very last piece of knowledge she needed to acquire was the secret name of
Ra, the sun. To garner this knowledge, she fashioned a serpent from earth and
from the very spittle of Ra, who was, at the time, a doddering old man. She
placed the serpent in Ra’s daily path, and it lashed out, sinking its fangs in
the old man’s flesh. Paralyzed by venom in a paroxysm of pain, Ra called out
for help, for a cure, but no one heeded him.
Then Isis
appeared before him, promising a cure if he would reveal to her his secret
name. The old man rambled on about his royal lineage and his powers but finally
spoke his secret name, and Isis set about curing him. Her wisdom was now
complete; she was altogether omnipotent.
One of the
secrets she knew was the planting of seeds, and she spoke of this to her eldest
brother, dark-skinned Osiris, who was also her beloved consort on the throne of
Egypt. Osiris, delighted, ran off to tell others of this mystery, which put his
brother Seth, the god of destruction and the personification of evil, into a
jealous rage. Seth conspired to kill Osiris and placed his body in a wooden
coffer that, in turn, was put into the mighty Nile, where it floated down into
the wayward currents of the sea.
Overcome with
grief at the assassination of her lover by their brother, Isis cut off her
hair, tore her robes, and set forth to find him. Meanwhile, Osiris’s coffer
drifted with the tide and wind across the sea and came to rest among the roots
of a tamarisk tree growing on the Phoenician shore at Byblos. The tree began to
grow at an astonishing rate, enclosing the coffer completely. Noting the fine
tree, the king of Byblos ordered it cut down to serve as a column in his house.
Once cut, the tree gave off a powerful scent of such exquisiteness that word of
it eventually reached Isis, still abroad in her dolorous quest.
She went to
Byblos and met the queen, Astarte, who asked Isis to care for her baby son. So
fond did Isis grow of the infant that she adopted him as her own and bathed him
in flames to confer immortality on him. But Astarte happened to see this rite,
and her terrified outbursts broke the spell. Isis revealed her true identity
and explained her sorrowful mission, and Astarte, reassured, gave her the
tamarisk trunk. From the trunk, Isis extracted the coffer bearing her
husband-brother’s corpse and hastened with it back to Egypt, to the marshes of
Per Uto, where her lover could be given a proper burial, hidden as well from
the violent Seth.
But rather than
bury the body, Isis, with the aid of her sister Nephthys, fanned the breath of
life into it. In the brief moment that Osiris regained life in his loins, Isis
conceived a child with him. Again in mourning for her consort, Isis remained
among the reeds, consoled by the Holy Cobra Ua Zit, who served in due course as
midwife when the Goddess gave birth to a son, Horus. Then, leaving the child in
the care of Ua Zit, Isis went off on a mission. Taking advantage of her
absence, Seth stole in among the reeds and filched the body of Osiris. To
ensure that his brother – his antithesis – could not be honored by burial in a
tomb, Seth chopped Osiris’s body into fourteen pieces, scattering them here and
there in the lands near the Nile.
Upon her return
to the marsh, Isis was once again dismayed but set out determined to recover
Osiris’s dismembered remains. Far and wide she journeyed, eventually finding
all the pieces but one – the phallus, which had been greedily devoured by the
Nile crab (earning him perpetual dishonor in Egypt).
With consummate
skill, Isis rejoined the thirteen remaining body parts of Osiris and, inventing
the rite on the spot, embalmed him, a gift that gave him eternal life in the
afterworld. In this, she was assisted by her sister and Horus, her son. Making
see-like models of Osiris’s missing part, Isis went about the land planting
them in the earth, and in every spot she so blessed, the river pulsed and
flooded, brining grinch silt in which maize, wheat, and other crops came to
life and grew.
Isis then
resumed the throne, ruling Egypt and all the creation, holding the child Horus,
the reborn Osiris, the ever-renewing seed and pharaoh, in her feathered lap.
Her fame spread
wide, throughout the extent of the world, borne by sailors to Sicily and even
north to the shores of Britain. Temples were built to her, and she reigned in
heaven as the star Sirius, which peers above the horizon at the time of the
oncoming flood of the Nile. On earth, her reign continued until, in Rome, the
emperor Justinian closed her bright temple built on the Capitoline Hill and
silenced the music in her honor that had rung in the streets.
Chapter titled
“The Male and the Archetype: Fertility Goddess: Isis” from Goddess:
Myths of the Female Divine by David Leeming and Jake Page, pages 77 –
81.
Note 1 –
Students are often curious about the inclusion of maize as an ancient Egyptian
crop and whether or not this is accurate. The short answer is that
interdisciplinary investigations have taken place and exploration continues
about the ancestral origins of corn going beyond the Americas. For our
purposes, we may concede that the mythology that Leeming and Page have
transcribed is demonstration of myth as an ongoing narrative akin to
science, as we have explored in Unit 2: Understanding Myth. For those who
are interested in this topic, the internet provides the latest agricultural and
archeological research as it becomes available.
The post Online Reading: “Isis” “Isis” appeared first on essay-paper.
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