Legends Library

Egyptian Legends

Isis: The Goddess of Magic and Motherhood

Isis was the great Egyptian goddess of magic, motherhood, and the throne — wife of Osiris, mother of Horus, who reassembled her husband after he was murdered.

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Among all the gods of ancient Egypt, none has a story more moving, and none a worship more widespread, than Isis. Wife of Osiris, mother of Horus, sister of Set and Nephthys, daughter of Geb and Nut, Isis was the great magician among the gods, the protector of women in childbirth, the patroness of the throne, and the queen of heaven whose cult would eventually spread across the entire Greco-Roman world. From the great temple of Philae on the southern border of Egypt to the Isis temples of Rome, Pompeii, and the Rhineland, her name was known, and her power was feared and loved.

Isis is the figure around whom the entire central myth of Egyptian religion revolves. The Osiris myth — the murder of the king, the search for his body, the magical resurrection, the conception of the avenging son — is, in essence, the Isis myth. Without her, the story would have no center, and the great Egyptian doctrines of the afterlife, the kingship, and the divine motherhood would have no origin.

Origins: Daughter of Geb and Nut

Isis was one of the four children of the earth-god Geb and the sky-goddess Nut, born in the dawn of the world according to the Ennead of Heliopolis. Her brothers and sisters were Osiris, Set, and Nephthys. The four gods together formed the second generation of the divine family, and they would set the pattern for the entire Egyptian conception of kingship, marriage, and the cosmic struggle.

By Egyptian reckoning, Isis was the elder of the two sisters. Her name in Egyptian, Aset (or Iset), has been translated in many ways — “throne,” “she of the throne,” “queen of the throne” — and the most common interpretation is that Isis was the personification of the royal power itself. Her hieroglyphic name, a stylization of a throne, was so identified with the goddess that it became the symbol of the throne, and every pharaoh was said to be seated upon “the throne of Isis.”

Iconography: The Throne, the Cow Horns, the Wings

Isis was typically depicted as a beautiful woman, often wearing a tight sheath dress and a long wig. Her most distinctive emblem was the throne hieroglyph placed upon her head — a square-backed chair with a low seat and a high back, the very image of royal authority. This symbol identified her so completely that the throne itself was called “Isis” in temple inscriptions.

In some periods, particularly the New Kingdom and later, Isis wore cow horns cradling a sun disk on her head. This iconography, borrowed from the goddess Hathor, identified Isis with the sky and with the cosmic motherhood. The cow-horned Isis was particularly common in the Late Period and in the Greco-Roman temples, where she was often shown nursing the infant Horus on her lap — an image that would, in the Christian centuries, be a model for the iconography of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child.

In her funerary form, Isis was sometimes depicted with outstretched wings, the protective wings of the mother bird. In the New Kingdom tomb paintings, Isis and her sister Nephthys hover over the deceased with their wings, providing protection and breath. The image of Isis as the protective mother became one of the most beloved in Egyptian art, and it would survive long after the cult itself had faded.

The Greatest Magician Among the Gods

Isis was, by the Egyptian account, the most powerful magician in the divine world. She knew the secret name of Ra, she could bring the dead back to life, and she could control the forces of nature. Her magic was not the rough magic of Set, the brute force of storm and violence, but the careful, patient, knowing magic of spells and incantations, of herbs and ritual, of the spoken word.

The myth of Isis and the secret name of Ra, preserved in a New Kingdom papyrus, is one of the most revealing of Egyptian theological texts. In it, Isis, seeking to gain enough power to raise Osiris from the dead, made a serpent from the spittle of Ra. She placed the serpent in the path of the sun god, and when Ra was bitten, he writhed in agony. Isis, playing the healer, offered to draw out the poison if Ra would tell her his secret name. Ra, in his pain, was forced to give it. From that moment, Isis had the most powerful name in the universe, and she was able to perform the magic of resurrection.

This myth established Isis as the supreme magician, and her cult was the cult of magic. Throughout Egyptian history, Isis was the goddess to whom one turned for help in childbirth, in illness, in legal disputes, and in love. Her priests and priestesses were renowned for their skill in the magical arts, and her temples served as centers of healing.

The Central Myth: The Murder of Osiris

The myth of Isis is, above all, the myth of Osiris. According to the story preserved in the Pyramid Texts and most fully told by Plutarch in De Iside et Osiride, Isis was married to Osiris, who was the king of Egypt. The couple were loved by the people, and Osiris taught them agriculture, law, and the worship of the gods.

Isis’ brother Set, consumed by jealousy, plotted to kill Osiris. He organized a great banquet and produced a beautiful chest, promising to give it to whoever could fit inside it. When Osiris lay down in the chest, Set and his followers slammed the lid shut, sealed it with lead, and threw it into the Nile. The chest floated out to sea and came to rest at Byblos, on the coast of modern Lebanon, where a tamarisk tree grew up around it and enclosed it in its trunk.

Isis, learning of the murder, set out to find the body. She searched the whole world, eventually finding the chest at Byblos. She brought it back to Egypt, but Set, discovering the body, dismembered it into fourteen pieces and scattered them across the country. The full story of this myth is preserved in Isis and Osiris: A Story of Love and Murder.

The Search and the Resurrection

Isis searched for the pieces, traveling the length of the Nile. Wherever she found a piece, she buried it, and a shrine grew up at that spot. The ancient Egyptians identified fourteen such sites, and the city of Busiris (Egyptian Djedu, “the pillar”) was said to contain the spine, while Memphis contained the head.

In the end, Isis had all the pieces except the phallus, which had been eaten by a fish (the phagrus or lepidotus, the oxyrhynchus, sacred to the cult and forbidden to be eaten). She made a golden replica of the missing part, and she reassembled the body with the help of Anubis, who performed the first mummification. With the aid of her magic — and the secret name of Ra — Isis brought Osiris back to life, just long enough for her to conceive a son.

The Birth of Horus

The son was Horus, the falcon-headed god who would avenge his father. Isis hid the infant in the marshes of the Nile delta, in a place called Chemmis (the Bitter Lakes region, near the modern town of Ismailia). There, in a papyrus thicket, she gave birth and nursed the child in secret.

The Greeks recorded a local tradition that, when Isis was giving birth to Horus, the goddess Buto (the cobra goddess of the delta) came to her assistance, and the labor was so difficult that the child was born with a finger pressed to his mouth — an image of the infant Harpocrates, the silent god of secrets. This image became one of the most popular in the Greco-Roman cult of Isis, when the goddess was identified with Demeter and her child with Plutus.

The infant Horus was raised in the marshes in hiding, and Isis was tireless in protecting him. Set sent serpents and wild beasts to kill the child, but Isis used her magic to defeat them. When Horus grew to manhood, he challenged Set for the throne of Egypt, and after many trials, he won.

The Contest of Horus and Set

The contest between Horus and Set for the throne of Egypt is the most extended battle in Egyptian myth. The two gods faced each other in a series of contests judged by the Ennead of Heliopolis. They competed in boat races (in which Horus’s boat was made of wood and Set’s of stone, but Set’s sank because of the weight of the stone), in battles of transformation (where each tried to outwit the other by turning into different animals), and in single combat (in which Horus lost an eye and Set lost his testicles, which the Egyptians understood as a castration).

Isis played an active role in the contest. In one famous scene, she helped Horus by transforming herself into a beautiful young woman who seduced Set and tricked him into declaring that Horus was the rightful king. In another, she flew over the battlefield in the form of a kite, beating her wings to keep Horus alive when he was wounded.

After eighty years of contest, the Ennead finally decided in favor of Horus. He was crowned king of Egypt, and Osiris descended to the underworld to become its eternal ruler. The myth established the pattern of the Egyptian kingship: the living pharaoh was Horus, the dead pharaoh became Osiris, and the queen of Egypt was the living image of Isis.

The Cult of Isis

The cult of Isis was one of the most ancient and most widespread in Egypt. Her original cult center was at Coptos (modern Qift) in Upper Egypt, where the god Min was worshipped in conjunction with her as the divine couple. From the Old Kingdom onward, she was worshipped throughout Egypt, and her image appeared in tombs, temples, and private shrines from the delta to the cataracts of the Nile.

In the New Kingdom, the cult of Isis expanded enormously. She was identified with the Hathor of Dendera, with the Mut of Thebes (the wife of Amun), and with the Nekhbet of the southern city of El-Kab. The great temple of Isis at Philae, on an island near the first cataract of the Nile, became the center of her cult in the Late Period and the Greco-Roman Period. The temple was one of the last functioning temples of the ancient Egyptian religion, and it was not finally closed until the sixth century CE, when the Byzantine emperor Justinian ordered it shut. (The temple was later relocated to the island of Agilkia, where it can still be seen today.)

In the Late Period (664-332 BCE), the cult of Isis spread throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and by the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, it had become one of the most widely traveled religions of the ancient world. Isis was identified with Demeter, the Greek goddess of agriculture, with Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, and with Persephone, the Greek queen of the underworld. Her cult absorbed elements of many other traditions, and the cult of Serapis — a syncretic god combining Osiris and the Greek Hades — was established at Alexandria as a new universal deity.

By the second century CE, Isis temples had been founded in Rome, Pompeii, Beneventum, Lugdunum (Lyon), and Londinium (London). The cult of Isis was one of the great competitors of early Christianity, and the two religions borrowed extensively from each other. The image of Isis nursing the infant Horus has been recognized as one of the most likely models for the early Christian iconography of the Madonna and Child.

Isis in the Roman World

The cult of Isis in the Roman world is best known through the novel The Golden Ass of Apuleius (second century CE), in which the protagonist Lucius is transformed into a donkey and, after many adventures, is initiated into the cult of Isis at Corinth. The goddess saves him by transforming him back into a man, and the closing books of the novel are one of the most vivid descriptions of an ancient religious initiation.

The cult of Isis in Rome was repeatedly banned and re-established. The emperor Tiberius suppressed it in 19 CE, and Gaius Caligula favored it. Claudius was tolerant, and the cult continued to grow. The emperor Commodus was even initiated into the cult, and by the time of the Severan dynasty (early third century CE), the cult of Isis was a major religion of the Roman Empire.

The cult of Isis and Serapis was the great Mediterranean religion before Christianity. It was open to men and women, to rich and poor, to free and slave. It promised salvation through initiation, eternal life through the grace of the goddess, and a personal relationship with the divine that was to prove an important model for Christian practice.

Isis and the Afterlife

In the Egyptian afterlife, Isis was the protector of the dead. She sat beside the deceased on the solar barque, she hovered over the mummy with her sister Nephthys, and she whispered the spells of resurrection. The deceased, in the Book of the Dead, was often identified with Osiris, and Isis was the wife who would receive them in the afterlife.

In the Greco-Roman cult, this role was expanded. Isis became the queen of the underworld, identified with Persephone and Proserpina, the wife of Hades who returned to the upper world each year. Her cult promised that the initiate, after death, would be raised up by the goddess and would dwell forever in the Field of Reeds.

Isis and the Motherhood

The most enduring image of Isis, in both ancient and modern times, has been the image of the mother. She was the mother of Horus, the avenger, the king. She was the mother of every pharaoh, who was identified with Horus. She was the mother of the deceased, who was identified with Osiris. And she was, in her most universal form, the mother of all.

The image of Isis with the infant Horus on her lap, nursing him, protecting him, has been reproduced in countless statues, paintings, and engravings. In the Roman world, it was perhaps the most popular religious image of all. In the early Christian centuries, it was adapted into the image of the Madonna and Child, with Isis becoming Mary and Horus becoming Christ. The imagery is so similar that many scholars believe the Christian image was directly inspired by the Egyptian one, especially in Egypt, where the cult of Isis and the cult of the Virgin Mary coexisted for centuries.

The Lasting Power of Isis

The cult of Isis did not die out with the fall of Rome. It continued in Egypt for centuries, side by side with Christianity, and it was not until the sixth century CE that the last temple of Isis at Philae was finally closed. Even then, the goddess did not disappear. She survived in the Coptic Christian tradition as the Mother of God, and her image can still be found in Coptic churches, in paintings of the Virgin and Child, and in the folk traditions of Egypt.

Isis is one of the great figures of world mythology. Her story — the love of a murdered husband, the long search, the magical resurrection, the protection of the child, the triumph of the son — is a story that has been told in many forms in many cultures, and it has been told most powerfully in the myth of Isis and Osiris. The goddess of magic, the queen of the throne, the mother of the god, has been an inspiration for three thousand years, and she remains one of the most powerful feminine figures in the religious history of humanity.

Last reviewed: June 2026.