Isis Egyptian Goddess Quotes

Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And who of Huitzilopochtli? In one year - and it is no more than five hundred years ago - 50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest. Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried out with the sun. When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted he was watered with 10,000 gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the peer of Richmond P. Hobson, Alton B. Parker, Adelina Patti, General Weyler and Tom Sharkey. Speaking of Huitzilopochtli recalls his brother Tezcatlipoca. Tezcatlipoca was almost as powerful; he consumed 25,000 virgins a year. Lead me to his tomb: I would weep, and hang a couronne des perles. But who knows where it is? Or where the grave of Quetzalcoatl is? Or Xiuhtecuhtli? Or Centeotl, that sweet one? Or Tlazolteotl, the goddess of love? Of Mictlan? Or Xipe? Or all the host of Tzitzimitl? Where are their bones? Where is the willow on which they hung their harps? In what forlorn and unheard-of Hell do they await their resurrection morn? Who enjoys their residuary estates? Or that of Dis, whom Caesar found to be the chief god of the Celts? Of that of Tarves, the bull? Or that of Moccos, the pig? Or that of Epona, the mare? Or that of Mullo, the celestial jackass? There was a time when the Irish revered all these gods, but today even the drunkest Irishman laughs at them. But they have company in oblivion: the Hell of dead gods is as crowded as the Presbyterian Hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsullata, and Deva, and Bellisima, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose - all gods of the first class. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them - temples with stones as large as hay-wagons. The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests, bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake. Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels; villages were burned, women and children butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence. What has become of Sutekh, once the high god of the whole Nile Valley? What has become of: Resheph Anath Ashtoreth El Nergal Nebo Ninib Melek Ahijah Isis Ptah Anubis Baal Astarte Hadad Addu Shalem Dagon Sharaab Yau Amon-Re Osiris Sebek Molech? All there were gods of the highest eminence. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Yahweh Himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute, and with them the following: Bilé Ler Arianrhod Morrigu Govannon Gunfled Sokk-mimi Nemetona Dagda Robigus Pluto Ops Meditrina Vesta You may think I spoof. That I invent the names. I do not. Ask the rector to lend you any good treatise on comparative religion: You will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest standing and dignity-gods of civilized peoples-worshiped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.

The Egyptians of 4000 B.C. believed that the goddess Isis, wife of Osiris, taught them how to grow olives. The Greeks have a similar legend. But the Hebrew word for olive, zait, is probably older than the Greek word, elaia, and is thought to refer to Said in the Nile Delta.

ISIS stands for Islamic State In Syria. It's an acronym. ISIS is also the name of a bad ass Egyptian goddess. So for a group that is so anti woman I find it interesting and ironic that they named themselves after one

Diodorus wrote at great length of the worship of the Goddess Isis (the Greek translation for Au Set), who had incorporated the aspects of both Ua Zit and Hathor. Isis was also closely associated with the Goddess as Nut, who was mythologically recorded as Her mother; in paintings Isis wore the wings of Nekhebt. Diodorus explained that, according to Egyptian religion, Isis was revered as the inventor of agriculture, as a great healer and physician and as the one who first established the laws of justice in the land. He then recorded what we today may find a most startling description of the laws of Egypt, explaining that they were the result of the reverence paid to this mighty Goddess. He wrote, “It is for these reasons, in fact, that it was ordained that the queen should have greater power and honour than the king and that among private persons the wife should enjoy authority over the husband, husbands agreeing in the marriage contract that they will be obedient in all things to their wives.

The problem is that we who are badly wounded in our relation to the feminine usually have a fairly successful persona, a good public image. We have grown up as docile, often intellectual, daughters of the patriarchy, with what I call ‘animus-egos.’ We strive to keep up the virtues and aesthetic ideals which the patriarchal superego has presented to us. But we are filled with self-loathing and a deep sense of personal ugliness and failure when we can neither meet nor mitigate the superego’s standards of perfection. But we also feel unseen because there are no images alive to reflect our wholeness and variety. But where shall we look for symbols to suggest the full mystery and potency of the feminine and to provide images as models for personal life. The later Greek goddesses and Mary, Virgin Mother, and Mediator, have not struck me to the core as have Innana-Ereshkigal, Kali, and Isis. An image for the goddess as Self needs to have a full-bodied coherence. So I have had to see the female Greek deities as partial aspects of one wholeness pattern and to look always for the darker powers hidden i their stories—the gorgon aspect of Athena, the underworld Aphrodite-Urania, the Black Demeter, etc. Even in the tales of Inanna and other early Sumerian, Semitic, and Egyptian writings there is evidence that the original potencies of the feminine have been ‘demoted.' As Kramer tells us, the goddesses ‘that held top rank in the Sumerian pantheon were gradually forced down the ladder by male theologians’ and ‘their powers turned over to male deities. This permitted cerebral-intellectual-Apollonian, left brain consciousness, with its ethical and conceptual discriminations, to be born and to grow.

Isis is the Egyptian mother goddess of magick, whose worship prevailed in the Greco-Roman world.  Her name means “Throne”, reflected in her headdress which is shaped like a throne.  Her spouse was originally Osiris, but became Serapis in the Greco-Roman myths, and her son became transformed from Horus to Harpocrates. Evidence of her worship in Britain has been found in an inscription on a jug  found in Southwark (London).[369]  The inscription on the jug indicates an Iseum (Isis temple) in London, but the location of this temple has yet to be determined.  An altar found in Blackfriars records the restoration of a temple to Isis in the third century CE, further reinforcing evidence of her worship.[370]  It has been suggested by some modern writers that the river Isis in Oxfordshire was named after this goddess, though this may in fact be a coincidence. The name of the river Isis is most probably a contraction of the name Thamesis. It is likely that "Thamesis" is a Latinisation of the Celtic river names "Taom"(Thames) and"Uis"(is), giving "Taom-Uis"meaning "The pouring out of water". An engraved onyx intaglio found at Wroxeter (Shropshire) dating to the third century CE shows Isis bearing a sistrum in her right hand.[371]  Another gem from Lockleys (Hertfordshire) dating to the fourth century CE shows Isis standing between Bes and a lioness, all surrounded by a serpent ouroboros.[372]

The Chapter of the divine god, the self-created being, who made the heavens and the earth, and the winds [which give] life, and the fire, and the gods, and men, and beasts, and cattle, and reptiles, and the fowl of the air and the fish of the sea; he is the king of men and of gods, he hath one period of life (?) and with him periods of one hundred and twenty years each are but as years; his names are manifold and unknown, the gods even know them not. “Now Isis was a woman who possessed words of power; her heart was wearied with the millions of men, therefore she chose the millions of the gods, but she esteemed more highly the millions of the spirits "(khu). And she meditated in her heart, saying, ‘ Cannot I by means of the sacred name of God make myself mistress of the earth and become a goddess like unto R in heaven and upon earth ? ’ Now behold, each day R entered at the head of his holy mariners and established himself upon the throne of the two horizons. Now the divine one (i.e., R) had grown old, he dribbled at the mouth, his spittle fell upon the earth, and his slobbering dropped upon the ground. And Isis kneaded it with

Even Margaret’s beloved Wordsworth fell short on the issue; for him, she quoted ruefully, the ideal woman should not be “Too bright and good / For Human nature’s daily food.” Margaret drew on examples from ancient myth, wherein “the idea of female perfection is as fully presented as that of male,” to show that women had been accorded greater respect in earlier times. In Egyptian mythology, “Isis is even more powerful than Osiris,” and “the Hindoo goddesses reign on the highest peaks of sanctification.” In Greek myth, “not only Beauty, Health and the Soul are represented under feminine attributes, but the Muses, the inspirers of all genius,” and “Wisdom itself . . . are feminine.” Margaret’s dream was to bring the dispirited “individual man” together with the disempowered woman—unite the two sides of the Great Hall’s classroom—and create, by merging the best attributes of each, “fully” perfected souls. Then, a nation of men and women will for the first time exist, she might have said, amending Waldo Emerson’s visionary claim.

The letter M is the 13th letter of English, Greek and Hebrew alphabets. M is also the astrological symbol for Virgo. In Ptolemaic Egyptian Hieroglyphs, the letter M was represented by an owl—a creature that can see in darkness. The owl was also the companion of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, an incarnation of Isis. In Egyptian hieroglyphs of the Owl, the letter M is clearly depicted on the top of its head.

Faith in an afterlife was important to Egyptians: they deliberately made their tombs the most permanent part of their built environment, and we find them in their literature very much concerned with what they could know about life after death, judgement and individual survival. Certainly they preserved their religion for most of the lifespan of their language, and they no more actively preached it abroad than they attempted to spread their language when they enlarged the boundaries of their power. But aspects of their faith did spread without the language none the less: their mother-goddess Isis became one of the most widely revered deities in the Roman empire, and has been seen as a root of the Christian cult of Mary as Mother of God.

And where the devil did you find this one?' Louis asked. 'Was the Valley of the Kings having a rummage sale?' Stead regarded him. 'You've heard of Daressy?' 'The French Egyptologist?' 'Yes, that's the one. He uncovered the ruins of an enormous palace complex back in eighteen eighty-eight--a site he called Malkata. One of his workers . . . ' Stead made a vague gesture. ' . . . liberated the artifact from what he thought was a temple devoted to Isis, one of the chief goddesses of the ancient Egyptian pantheon. When a friend of mine traveled to Egypt some time later, he became awar eof this find and brought it back home with him to England, where he offered it to me as a gift.' 'Ah,' Louis said. 'So it was a rummage sale.

And where the devil did you find this one?' Louis asked. 'Was the Valley of the Kings having a rummage sale?' Stead regarded him. 'You've heard of Daressy?' 'The French Egyptologist?' 'Yes, that's the one. He uncovered the ruins of an enormous palace complex back in eighteen eighty-eight--a site he called Malkata. One of his workers . . . ' Stead made a vague gesture. ' . . . liberated the artifact from what he thought was a temple devoted to Isis, one of the chief goddesses of the ancient Egyptian pantheon. When a friend of mine traveled to Egypt some time later, he became aware of this find and brought it back home with him to England, where he offered it to me as a gift.' 'Ah,' Louis said. 'So it was a rummage sale.

charm or magical formula against snake bites, and it was thought that the written letters, which represented the words of Isis, would save the life of any one who was snake-bitten, just as they saved the life of R. If the full directions as to the use of the figures of Temu, Isis, and the two Horus gods, were known unto us we should probably find that they were to be made to act in dumb show the scenes which took place between R and Isis when the goddess succeeded in taking from him his name. Thus we have ample evidence that Isis possessed marvellous magical powers, and this being so, the issues of life and death, as far as the deceased was concerned, we know from the texts to have been in her hands. Her words of power, too, were a priceless possession, for she obtained them from Thoth, who was the personification of the mind and intelligence of the Creator, and thus their origin was divine, and from this point of view were inspired.

In the Aeneid, Vergil depicts Cleopatra as a frenzied queen (regina) holding a rattle (sistrum).62 The rattle is a trademark attribute of the goddess Isis, and so, without saying it, Vergil linked the Egyptian queen with the goddess. Since the expulsion of the last king (rex) from Rome and the formation of the Republic in 509 BCE, rex, the sources tell us, was a loathed term as monarchy was a reviled form of government. The feminine form of rex is regina. Using regina in this passage, Vergil, without any need for elaboration, suggests deep aversion. This new Isis opposed the Roman gods, especially Apollo, whom Augustus chose as his guardian deity. In Vergil’s passage, Dionysian fury opposes Apollonian rationality; or Marc Antony’s excesses and un-Roman behavior stood in opposition to Augustus’ temperance and behavior grounded in the mos maiorum.

The most profound religious symbols rely for their power in large part on this underlying fundamentally bipartisan conceptual subdivision. The Star of David is, for example, the downward pointing triangle of femininity and the upward pointing triangle of the male.*1 It’s the same for the yoni and lingam of Hinduism (which come covered with snakes, our ancient adversaries and provocateurs: the Shiva Linga is depicted with snake deities called the Nagas). The ancient Egyptians represented Osiris, god of the state, and Isis, goddess of the underworld, as twin cobras with their tails knotted together. The same symbol was used in China to portray Fuxi and Nuwa, creators of humanity and of writing. The representations in Christianity are less abstract, more like personalities, but the familiar Western images of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child and the Pietà both express the female/male dual unity, as does the traditional insistence on the androgyny of Christ.43

Two people may look at an image of a beautiful woman dressed in blue and disagree: one sees the Christian Mary, while the other recognizes the same image as the Vodou lwa Ezili Freda Dahomey. If they bring over a third person to look at the same image and decide between them, that person may see the Yoruba orisha Yemaya. Similarly, someone viewing a statue of a mother with babe in arms carved from black wood will recognize the Egyptian goddess Isis and her son, baby Horus. Someone else sees that same statue and recognizes Mary and baby Jesus. Yet another person will recognize the Vodou matriarch, Ezili Dantor, with her daughter, Anaïs.

Greek was her first language, and in Greek literature and culture she was educated. Although representing on Egyptian temples and some statuary in the traditional headgear and robes of the pharaohs’ wives, it was unlikely she actually dressed this way save perhaps occasionally to perform certain rites. Instead she wore the headband and robes of a Greek monarch. Cleopatra proclaimed herself the ‘New Isis’, and yet her worship of the goddess betrayed a strongly Hellenised version of the cult. She was no more Egyptian culturally or ethnically than most residents of modern day Airzona are Apaches.

The general creation story contains within it two aspects that are crucial to understanding all of the myths of ancient Egypt: maat and isfet. Isfet represents chaos or disorder, generally speaking, and it was seen as a fundamental element of everything in existence. There was no notion of trying to eradicate isfet from their general lives in ancient Egypt; after all, it was said to be one of the elements that was present in the limitless ocean at the dawn of creation. The only desire for ancient Egyptians was that isfet never became more prevalent than maat, its opposite: justice. Maat was often depicted as a goddess wearing a feather on her head, which was also the hieroglyph that represented her.[8] She, or simply the concept of justice, was believed to be present in all aspects of life and if it was broken by anyone, there would be a punishment. According to the Middle Kingdom “Coffin Text” it was believed that Atum, the “Great Finisher” of creation,[9] inhaled maat in order to gain his consciousness: “Inhale your daughter Maat [said Nun to Atum] and raise her to your nostril so that your consciousness may live. May they not be far from you, your daughter Maat and your son Shu, whose name is “life” … it is your son Shu who will lift you up.

After that, Atum was capable of making the waters of Nun recede away from him, making him rise above them and become “what remained” or the “mound of creation.” It’s important to take note of the fact that there was no creation until Atum inhaled life and justice. Therefore without maat and her dualistic counterpart, there would have been no world, and that is the reason for maat and isfet’s ubiquity, as well as the acceptance of chaos in the world as seen by the ancient Egyptians. After Atum had separated himself from Nun, the children he kept inside, notably Shu and maat/isfet, often represented as a form of the goddess Tefnut, were now separated from their father, and Tefnut would go on to become the mother of all the gods.

The Gods as Concepts Like in many polytheistic religious beliefs, the gods of ancient Egypt were neither omnipotent nor omnipresent, despite appearing in many locations simultaneously in some of the myths.[16] In fact, the ancient Egyptians used to worship the deity of the location they found themselves in, since each deity was more or less “present” in each part of the country. They were decidedly human in their relationships with each other. Just like the ancient Greek gods, they fought and argued, made love and married, and were ultimately capable of death, even if this meant that they would simply be reborn later on. Each god and goddess was “responsible” for an aspect of reality the ancient Egyptians encountered every day but, when they needed to, they could share their powers with another deity, which resulted in a kind of merging of the two. This was the case for the “dying sun god” who merged with Osiris so as to borrow his regenerative power and be “reborn” the following day.[17]

In ancient Egyptian culture the duality of deities – most often manifested in their male/female relationships – was an integral aspect of the belief system. This duality appeared in Nun, the limitless ocean of potentiality out of which the universe was born. Within those waters, the male and female aspects appeared as frogs (males) and snakes (females). There were four couples, according to the beliefs at Hermopolis, making up the eight most important gods of “pre-creation” referred to at this cult center as the “Ogdoad”. Each of these gods and goddesses acquired names and, as a unit, they represented the earliest aspects of reality.

Isis was worshipped throughout the Greco-Roman world. During the fourth century, when Christianity was gaining a foothold in the Roman Empire, her worshippers founded the first Madonna cults so as to keep her influence alive. Some early Christians even called themselves pastophori, meaning the shepherds or servants of Isis, which may be where the word pastor originated. Author Ean Begg found in his research that the city of Paris was indeed built as a center for Isis, explaining that it is the original meaning of its name, Par-Is. Paris is also another place with great devotion to the Black Madonna. The original name was “Lutetia of the Parisii.” It was named after a tribe of Celts known as the Parisii during the Roman era of the first to the fourth century. The Pariasians were the followers of Isis, who was known as the chief goddess of the Greco-Egyptian empire.

The word for vulture, mwt, sounds the same as that for mother and so it was associated with goddesses and maternity. Mut and Nekhbet were particularly associated with the vulture.  Although it appears as a scavenger to us the Egyptians liked its iconography.

The Egyptians believe that the Vulture is sacred to Hera, and deck the head of Isis with Vulture’s feathers.

she wears a red tie, or ribbon, in her hair. These ties were commonly worn to keep the hair in place and also for decoration. Red had both positive and negative symbolism for the Egyptians, as it does for all cultures. In this context it symbolised the life-giving and regenerative powers of Isis. This is alluded to in one of the funerary texts. “Isis and Nephthys will rouse themselves with their head-covering, their bright red band and dark red cloth.

Many Greek and Roman depictions show Isis with a crown of stars, a crescent moon, and a diadem of leaves and flowers or the more Egyptian uraeus. This is the protective fire-spitting Eye Goddess who sat on the forehead of royals and deities,

There are even spells against recurring nightmares which the sufferer would recite ending with the optimistic “Hail to you, good dream”. Horus was troubled by nightmares and would call yet again to his mother. She comforts him and advises him to talk about it “so that your dream apparitions draw back”.[381] Egyptian healing magic continued into the Christian Period and the Horus stories continued to be a source of inspiration and guidance. An 8th-century Coptic manuscript refers to the story of Horus who eats raw the birds he’s just caught rather than be patient and wait for them to cook. Isis recites an incantation to cure him. To keep it Christian, and the healer out of trouble with the church authorities, it then adds that it is really Jesus who is doing the healing.

I am she that is called goddess by women.”[535] The cult of Isis was popular with women as Isis was a Goddess who befriended women. They could identify with her struggles to raise her son and understand her grief over the murder of her husband. In the myths Isis appears very much as everywoman. She was also a mother figure, which was important at a time when many would have lost their mothers at an early age often through childbirth. The hymns emphasis the female divine and Isis’ love of women. This does not mean that the cult was similar to the Goddess worship of today. It was very much a masculine world and all religions and cults reflected that. Women in Egypt had higher status than women in the other surrounding cultures, even though this had declined since the Old Kingdom. Egyptian cults tended to accord women higher status as a result and this enabled them to play an active part in the cult.

Firstly she offered something which the standard Greek and Roman religions couldn’t. The cult of Isis offered life after death, as did the Egyptian religion in general. This was very appealing to the Greeks and Romans whose religion was vague about this and what was offered wasn’t very appealing.

There was no disconnection between science and religion for the Egyptians. All knowledge was deemed important as it was learning about creation and this knowledge could bring you closer to the deities. It was also prized for its own sake. Knowledge is power and learning and wisdom was considered part of magic.

There is power and symbolism in many numbers but three and seven were particularly potent for the Egyptians. Three is an expression of plurality; from the earliest hieroglyphic writing three strokes indicated many. Unlike European cultures who have four seasons, the Egyptians had three with each month divided into three ten-day periods. The significance of three was carried on further. Rituals were carried out in the temples three times a day, at morning, noon and evening and the Sun God had three forms. He was Khepri in the morning, Ra at noon and Atum

Seven is one of the most symbolic numbers and of major significance in magic. The actual meaning this number had for the Egyptians is hard to define but it is associated with perfection and effectiveness. Important spells are repeated seven times and there are seven scorpions who escort Isis. Multiples of seven are also important. The body of Osiris is cut into 14 pieces by Seth and it is thought that this may represent the 14 days of the waning moon.

As Isis has control over the course of the stars she has control over fate. “I showed the paths of the stars…the stars do not move on their own course unless they receive commands from me.”[415] It was this ability to control fate which made Isis so popular outside Egypt, especially with the Greeks and Romans. Fortune was powerful and frightening and she acted either maliciously or at random, ruling deities as well as people, but Isis was Isis Victrix “whose orders destiny and fortune obey”.[416] The Egyptians aimed for constantly renewed regeneration but the Greeks wanted a release from the forces of fate and morality, from the imprisonment of this world. The words “I set free those in bonds

In the beginning there was only the Great Mother Goddess but as her power was eroded by increasingly patriarchal religions she became fragmented into an array of deities. Is the strong feminine duality present in Egyptian philosophy and religion an echo of this? The duality of the Great Mother first split into the Double Goddess then into Goddesses who work together, such as Isis and Nephthys.

In the beginning there was only the Great Mother Goddess but as her power was eroded by increasingly patriarchal religions she became fragmented into an array of deities. Is the strong feminine duality present in Egyptian philosophy and religion an echo of this? The duality of the Great Mother first split into the Double Goddess then into Goddesses who work together, such as Isis and Nephthys. These will always create a complementary pair as they are really part of the same whole. The Double Goddess is collaborative female power integrating all components of female energy and this collaboration is seen perfectly in the work of Isis and Nephthys.

The duality of the feminine was a common theme in Egyptian symbolism and concept which may well be an echo of the Double Goddess or the splitting of the Great Mother. The duplication or pairing of goddesses is common as it is for inanimate symbolic objects whose names are feminine nouns and so are related to pairs of goddesses.

Duality was deeply ingrained in the Egyptian world-view. Virtually everything consisted of paired opposites. People have their ka, their spiritual double. There is a dual mode in creation with the concept of “as above so below”.

Egyptians were totally accepting of this approach as they perceived the deities to be fluid and above definition. They saw value in multiple approaches rather than the restricting dogma of one cult’s point of view. Contradictions were to be expected, so competing cults were often embraced and assimilated.

Egyptian kings were polygamous and Nephthys may just have been viewed as the second wife of Osiris. There are many references to them both as widows.