Paula R, Nelson 



Cover by John Bayalis and Homer Holdren 



Isis 



Wife and Mother of the Sun 



For almost two millenia, the religion 

 of ancient Egypt has claimed the in- 

 terest of the nations of the West. When 

 the once-powerful gods of Greece and 

 Rome became shadowy philosophical 

 abstractions with little hold on the peo- 

 ple, a large part of the classical world 

 turned to the ancient wisdom of Egypt. 

 The obscure temple hieroglyphs, the ob- 

 elisks and sphinxes before the shrines, 

 the strange linen vestments of the priests 

 with their shaven heads and faces, the 

 endless, archaic ritual, and the animal 

 forms of some of the idols, everywhere 

 filled the classical world with peculiar 

 awe. Wonderful mysteries seemed surely 

 to be hidden beneath these incompre- 

 hensible externals. In particular, wor- 

 ship of the deities of the Osirian cycle 

 of myths, which included the cult of Isis 

 as the archetypal wife and mother, spread 

 throughout the Roman Empire. 



Osiris was one of the oldest of the great 

 solar gods of Egypt. As king of the 

 earth, he was aided in his government 

 by his faithful sister-wife, Isis. A bene- 

 factor of men, and beloved as a right- 

 eous ruler, he nevertheless provoked the 

 jealousy of his brother, Seth, and was 

 craftily misled and slain by him. After 

 great tribulation, Isis gained possession 

 of her lord's body and reanimated it by 

 means of her magic. Although unable 

 to resume his earthly kingdom, Osiris 

 passed down in triumph to the nether 

 world, to become ruler of the dead. 



On earth, Isis escaped the continuing 

 persecution of Seth by taking refuge in 

 the marshy fastnesses of the Nile Delta. 

 Here her son, Horus, was born and se- 

 cretly reared. Grown to manhood, the 

 youth determined to become the avenger 

 of his father. He pursued Seth, and in 

 the ensuing awful battle, during which 

 both were fearfully mutilated, Seth was 

 finally conquered. Horus triumphantly 

 assumed the earthly throne of his father. 

 Unwilling to accept defeat, Seth then 

 raised before the tribunal of the gods the 

 question of the validity of Horus's claim 



Page 2 DECEMBER 



to his father's throne. Defended by 

 Thoth, the god of letters, Horus was vin- 

 dicated and his position as ruler of the 

 earth upheld. Thus Horus became for 

 the people the embodiment of the qual- 

 ities of a good son, and one who sym- 

 bolized their hope in the ultimate tri- 

 umph of the just cause. 



But Horus not only inspired the liv- 

 ing; he had also an important function 

 to perform for the dead. In the nether 

 world was the great hall of judgment, 

 with its tribunal of strange daemonic 

 forms before whom each dead person 

 must appear to confess his sins. If the de- 

 ceased could declare that he had neither 

 stolen, nor committed adultery, nor re- 

 viled the king, nor committed any other 

 sin; and if the great balance, on which 

 his heart was weighed against the feather 

 of truth, showed that he was an innocent 

 person, he was acquitted of punishment. 

 Horus then presented the worthy soul to 

 his father, Osiris, and the deceased joined 

 the nation of the blessed dead. 



The bronze statue of Isis and Horus 

 on this month's Bulletin cover dates 

 from about 600 B.C., a period when the 

 religion of the Old Kingdom (2700- 

 2200 B.C.) was being consciously revived 

 under the Saite kings. Although earlier 

 tomb-chapel reliefs portraying mytho- 

 logical subjects were frequently copied, 

 the new portrayals of the gods had a 

 more human and realistic quality. Por- 

 trait statues, for example, display a mas- 

 tery of anatomical structure and a sure 

 grasp of individual character. Similarly, 

 in the cover photograph, the child, 

 Horus, does not appear in the tradi- 

 tional upright posture of a miniature 

 god, but as a real child, who will be 

 nursed by his mother for the first three 

 years of his life, and who has fallen 

 asleep at her breast. Thus the sculp- 

 ture, which is on exhibit in the Mu- 

 seum's Hall J, Peoples of Ancient 

 Egypt, appears to foreshadow the later 

 Coptic Christian treatment of the Ma- 

 donna and Child theme. 



Certain conventional symbols of the 

 two deities, however, still remain. Horus 

 wears the traditional short, plaited lock 

 on one side of the head, a style that was 

 copied in his honor by the children of 

 royalty and sometimes by the family heir. 

 The horns on the headdress of the god- 

 dess identify Isis with the sky, which is 

 often personified in Egyptian mythology 

 by a cow. The horns, together with the 

 sun disk, symbolize her role as the heav- 

 enly wife and mother of the sun-god, 

 with whom both Horus and Osiris are 

 identified. 



It was this cult of the great mother 

 Isis which persisted as a powerful rival 

 to rising Christianity during the first 

 three centuries of the Christian era. 

 Thereafter, Christianity spread more rap- 

 idly, and in the fourth century the clos- 

 ing of all pagan shrines was accomplished 

 by Theodosius with the secure support 

 of the masses. The sole exception was 

 in Nubia, where certain nomadic tribes 

 still refused to accept the Christian 

 faith. The Roman government, which 

 feared the raids of these barbarians and 

 even paid tribute to keep them quiet, 

 was forced to tolerate a few priests of 

 Isis in the temple at Philae, at the south- 

 ern frontier of the Roman province. Not 

 until the beginning of the sixth century 

 was the powerful Emperor Justinian 

 able to suppress these remnants of pa- 

 ganism by closing the temple and im- 

 prisoning the priests. 



With the death of the last priest who 

 could read and interpret the "writings 

 of the words of the gods," as the hiero- 

 glyphs were called, the old faith sank 

 into oblivion. "It was only in popular 

 magic that some superstitious practices 

 lingered on as feeble and sporadic traces 

 of what had been, a couple of centuries 

 before, a faith which bade fair to become 

 the universal religion. . . ." 1 



1 W. Max Muller, "Egyptian Mythology," 

 The Mythology of All Races (Boston, 1918), XII, 

 244. The above account is adapted largely 

 from this source. 



