Goddess of Magic and Divine Motherhood
The name of Isis means 'throne,' and her earliest images show a woman wearing the throne hieroglyph on her head; later she adopted the cow horns and solar disk of Hathor. Egyptians called her weret-hekau, 'Great of Magic.' A Turin papyrus tells how she fashioned a serpent from clay and the spittle of the aging Ra, let it bite him, and cured the poison only after he surrendered his secret name, thereby winning power equal to the sun god's own.
Her defining deeds are the rescue of her husband and son. After Set murdered and dismembered Osiris, Isis and her sister Nephthys searched Egypt for the scattered pieces; hovering as a kite over the rejoined body, she fanned life back into it and conceived Horus. She hid from Set in the papyrus thickets of Chemmis in the Delta and raised the child alone. The Metternich Stela records how the infant Horus died of a scorpion's sting, and how her cries halted the barque of the sun until Thoth descended with the spell that revived him — the episode that made her the most invoked deity in Egyptian healing magic, and the nursing mother-and-child figure a standard amulet.
From the Ptolemaic period her cult spread far beyond Egypt, with temples at Delos, Pompeii, and Rome. Her sanctuary on the island of Philae at the First Cataract functioned until Justinian closed it in the sixth century CE, the last active temple of the ancient Egyptian religion.
