Chapter 41. Isis.
THE ORIGINAL meaning of the goddess Isis is still more difficult to
determine than that of her brother and husband Osiris. Her
attributes and epithets were so numerous that in the hieroglyphics
she is called "the many-named," "the thousand-named," and in
Greek inscriptions "the myriad-named." Yet in her complex nature
it is perhaps still possible to detect the original nucleus round
which by a slow process of accretion the other elements gathered.
For if her brother and husband Osiris was in one of his aspects
the corn-god, as we have seen reason to believe, she must
surely have been the corn-goddess. There are at least some
grounds for thinking so. For if we may trust Diodorus Siculus,
whose authority appears to have been the Egyptian historian
Manetho, the discovery of wheat and barley was attributed to Isis,
and at her festivals stalks of these grains were carried in
procession to commemorate the boon she had conferred on men.
A further detail is added by Augustine. He says that Isis made the
discovery of barley at the moment when she was sacrificing to the
common ancestors of her husband and herself, all of whom had
been kings, and that she showed the newly discovered ears of
barley to Osiris and his councillor Thoth or Mercury, as Roman
writers called him. That is why, adds Augustine, they identify Isis
with Ceres. Further, at harvest-time, when the Egyptian reapers
had cut the first stalks, they laid them down and beat their breasts,
wailing and calling upon Isis. The custom has been already
explained as a lamen for the corn-spirit slain under the sickle.
Amongst the epithets by which Isis is designated in the
inscriptions are "Creatress of green things," "Green goddess,
whose green colour is like unto the greenness of the earth," "Lady
of Bread," "Lady of Beer," "Lady of Abundance." According to
Brugsch she is "not only the creatress of the fresh verdure of
vegetation which covers the earth, but is actually the green
corn-field itself, which is personified as a goddess." This is
confirmed by her epithet Sochit or Sochet, meaning "a corn-field,"
a sense which the word still retains in Coptic. The Greeks
conceived of Isis as a corn-goddess, for they identified her with
Demeter. In a Greek epigram she is described as "she who has
given birth to the fruits of the earth," and "the mother of the ears of
corn"; and in a hymn composed in her honour she speaks of
herself as "queen of the wheat-field," and is described as
"charged with the care of the fruitful furrow's wheat-rich path."
Accordingly, Greek or Roman artists often represented her with
ears of corn on her head or in her hand. 1
Such, we may suppose, was Isis in the olden time, a rustic
Corn-Mother adored with uncouth rites by Egyptian swains. But
the homely features of the clownish goddess could hardly be
traced in the refined, the saintly form which, spiritualised by ages
of religious evolution, she presented to her worshippers of after
days as the true wife, the tender mother, the beneficent queen of
nature, encircled with the nimbus of moral purity, of immemorial
and mysterious sanctity. Thus chastened and transfigured she won
many hearts far beyond the boundaries of her native land. In that
welter of religions which accompanied the decline of national life
in antiquity her worship was one of the most popular at Rome and
throughout the empire. Some of the Roman emperors themselves
were openly addicted to it. And however the religion of Isis may,
like any other, have been often worn as a cloak by men and
women of loose life, her rites appear on the whole to have been
honourably distinguished by a dignity and composure, a solemnity
and decorum, well fitted to soothe the troubled mind, to ease the
burdened heart. They appealed therefore to gentle spirits, and
above all to women, whom the bloody and licentious rites of other
Oriental goddesses only shocked and repelled. We need not
wonder, then, that in a period of decadence, when traditional
faiths were shaken, when systems clashed, when men's minds
were disquieted, when the fabric of empire itself, once deemed
eternal, began to show ominous rents and fissures, the serene
figure of Isis with her spiritual calm, her gracious promise of
immortality, should have appeared to many like a star in a stormy
sky, and should have roused in their breasts a rapture of devotion
not unlike that which was paid in the Middle Ages to the Virgin
Mary. Indeed her stately ritual, with its shaven and tonsured
priests, its matins and vespers, its tinkling music, its baptism and
aspersions of holy water, its solemn processions, its jewelled
images of the Mother of God, presented many points of similarity to
the pomps and ceremonies of Catholicism. The resemblance need
not be purely accidental. Ancient Egypt may have contributed its
share to the gorgeous symbolism of the Catholic Church as well
as to the pale abstractions of her theology. Certainly in art the
figure of Isis suckling the infant Horus is so like that of the
Madonna and child that it has sometimes received the adoration
of ignorant Christians. And to Isis in her later character of
patroness of mariners the Virgin Mary perhaps owes her beautiful
epithet of Stella Maris, "Star of the Sea," under which she is
adored by tempest-tossed sailors. The attributes of a marine deity
may have been bestowed on Isis by the sea-faring Greeks of
Alexandria. They are quite foreign to her original character and to
the habits of the Egyptians, who had no love of the sea. On this
hypothesis Sirius, the bright star of Isis, which on July mornings
rises from the glassy waves of the eastern Mediterranean, a
harbinger of halcyon weather to mariners, was the true Stella
Maris, "the Star of the Sea." 2