(M98) 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.”(282) The late eminent Dutch scholar C. P. Tiele confessed
candidly that “it is now impossible to tell precisely to what natural
phenomena the character of Isis at first referred.” Yet he adds,
“Originally she was a goddess of fecundity.”(283) Similarly Dr. Budge
writes that “Isis was the great and beneficent goddess and mother, whose
influence and love pervaded all heaven and earth and the abode of the
dead, and she was the personification of the great feminine, creative
power which conceived, and brought forth every living creature and thing,
from the gods in heaven to man on the earth, and to the insect on the
ground; what she brought forth she protected, and cared for, and fed, and
nourished, and she employed her life in using her power graciously and
successfully, not only in creating new beings but in restoring those that
were dead. She was, besides these things, the highest type of a faithful
and loving wife and mother, and it was in this capacity that the Egyptians
honoured and worshipped her most.”(284)
(M99) Thus in her character of a goddess of fecundity Isis answered to the
great mother goddesses of Asia, though she differed from them in the
chastity and fidelity of her conjugal life; for while they were unmarried
and dissolute, she had a husband and was a true wife to him as well as an
affectionate mother to their son. Hence her beautiful Madonna-like figure
reflects a more refined state of society and of morals than the coarse,
sensual, cruel figures of Astarte, Anaitis, Cybele, and the rest of that
crew. A clear trace, indeed, of an ethical standard very different from
our own lingers in her double relation of sister and wife to Osiris; but
in most other respects she is rather late than primitive, the full-blown
flower rather than the seed of a long religious development. The
attributes ascribed to her were too various to be all her own. They were
graces borrowed from many lesser deities, sweets rifled from a thousand
humbler plants to feed the honey of her superb efflorescence. 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.(285) 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.(286) 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.(287)
The custom has been already explained as a lament for the corn-spirit
slain under the sickle.(288) 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.”(289) 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.”(290) This is confirmed by her epithet
_Sochit_ or _Sochet_, meaning “a corn-field,” a sense which the word still
retains in Coptic.(291) The Greeks conceived of Isis as a corn-goddess,
for they identified her with Demeter.(292) 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”;(293) 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.”(294) Accordingly, Greek or Roman artists often represented her with
ears of corn on her head or in her hand.(295)
(M100) 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, spiritualized 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.(296) 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.(297) 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.(298)
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.(299) 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.(300) 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.(301) 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.”