object:1.41 - Isis
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
XLI. 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.
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."
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