Isis

Isis is the Egyptian goddess of magic and motherhood, sister and wife of Osiris and mother of Horus. The great mother and the cleverest of the gods, she revived her murdered husband, protected the heir to the throne and became the most widely worshipped Egyptian deity of the Greco-Roman world.

Daughter of Geb and Nut, Isis belongs to the Ennead of Heliopolis with her brothers Osiris and Seth and her sister Nephthys; her name is written with the throne sign she wears on her head. When Seth murdered Osiris, she and Nephthys searched for him and mourned him: the Pyramid Texts, around 2350 BC, already show her as a grieving kite. In Plutarch's later account, Seth cut the body into fourteen pieces and scattered them across Egypt, and Isis found all but the phallus. She bound him back together and, as a New Kingdom hymn says, beat breath into him with her wings long enough to conceive their son Horus.

She hid the child in the marshes of Chemmis, in the Delta, until he was grown to claim his throne. Healing spells on the Metternich Stela tell how her cries stopped the boat of Ra when Horus was stung by a scorpion, until Thoth came down to cure him, so she was invoked against snakes, scorpions and childhood illness. A papyrus in the Egyptian Museum of Turin records her boldest trick: she shaped a serpent from the spittle of the aging Ra, let it bite him and cured him only when he revealed his secret name, which gave her power over him.

From the New Kingdom she took on the cow horns and sun disk of Hathor, and under the Ptolemies she grew into a universal goddess. Herodotus identified her with Demeter, and Pausanias heard that her tears for Osiris made the Nile rise. Healer, mourner and queen, she had temples on Delos, in Rome and at Pompeii; Apuleius made her the savior of his hero in The Golden Ass, and her sanctuary at Philae, on Egypt's southern border, was one of the last strongholds of the old religion.