Isis is probably the most well known and the greatest goddess of the ancient Egyptian pantheon. She is the Great Mother and the guide into the sacred feminine aspect of the Divine.
Isis is a healer and comforter. She is in fact a master healer and master magician, who resuscitated her beloved Osiris, gathering the pieces of him throughout the land and bringing him back from the dead.
Her priestesses participated in the highly emotional annual rites of grief and mourning for Osiris. Their processions were a sacred archetypal theater, with much weeping, sobbing, uncovered hair and torn garments. But these sacred rites of grief opened the possibility of healing and resurrection, and by extension, also the return of fertility and abundance into nature.
A personification of deep yin, Isis was a Moon goddess (some legends have her uniting the polarities, having both eyes, the eye of the Sun and the eye of Moon).
Isis was also the goddess of water, wind, and navigation. Marian epithet Stella Maris (star of the seas) was originally one of the titles of Isis, who was invoked to assist sailors and travelers.
Often depicted as a mother sitting on a throne nursing her child, Isis was also the goddess of fertility and marital fidelity. She is at the same time the Virgin Mother, “virgin” here closer in meaning to ever-young and sovereign unto herself.
Isis is called the Great Virgin in one of the inscriptions from the Isis Chapel in Seti I’s mortuary temple at Abydos. In Egyptian, this is Hunet Weret (the great maiden). “Hunet” is also the Egyptian name for the pupil of the eye and is connected to the Hermetic treatise known as the Kore Kosmou, the “Virgin of the World,” a dialogue of Isis and Horus.
Isis works with feminine beauty, tenderness, fidelity and maternal love — and equally well with magic, healing and strength.
As a transmitter of the yin channel, Isis is also closely connected to the underworld and the mysteries of death and resurrection. The yin channel of the tree of life in Hermetic Kabbalah is also a channel into the underworld and the world of qlipoth. Paradoxically, it can also be a channel into the Absolute and the Unmanifest…
If Isis and the Egyptian magic stirred something within your soul, you may also be interested in the first post of the series:
Weekly Meditations
We gather this Sunday (and every first Sunday of the month) at 20:30 Central European time for a half-hour healing meditation. Here is the link to connect on Zoom:
Have a blessed week, and hoping to connect with you soon!
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