Deities, Themes, and Concepts they are brother and sister. Angered by this betrayal, Horus cuts his mother’s head off. It takes more than this to kill Isis. The gods give her a new head, sometimes that of a cow. By contrast, most sources of the first millennium BCE make Isis the implacable enemy of Seth. She takes many forms to lure, hunt down, and destroy Seth and his followers. The joy of Isis when the Divine Tribunal finally made Horus king became proverbial. The myth that Horus repaid his mother by raping her seems strange, but each king had to take possession of the throne goddess and beget a repeat of himself. Magical and literary texts stress the cunning and determination of Isis. As Weret-Hekau (the Great of Magic) she could be shown as a cobra suckling and protecting kings. She was “cleverer than millions of gods” and a better guardian of Egypt’s borders “than millions of soldiers.” In the Contendings of Horus and Seth, Isis transforms herself into an old woman to fool the divine ferryman and a young girl to trick Seth into making damaging admissions. In the story known as the True Name of Ra (see “Period of Direct Rule by the Creator Sun God” under “Linear Time” in “Mythical Time Lines”), Isis is able to turn the sun god’s own power against him to get what she wants. In several dramatic spells Isis is reimagined as an ordinary woman forced to leave her child alone in the marshes while she begs for food. When Horus is poisoned, she stops the progress of the solar barque across the heavens until he is cured. By the later New Kingdom, Isis was often shown in the solar barque with Ra. This was one of the roles she took over from the goddess Hathor. The cult of Isis became more and more prominent during the first millennium BCE. She began to be honored as the goddess of the sea, responsible for bringing ships safely to harbor. The Greeks identified Isis with Demeter, the harvest goddess who perpetually searched for a lost child. In her stellar form of Sopdet/Sothis, Isis had always been linked with the coming of the inundation that made the harvest possible. She was now credited with inventing agriculture and all manner of useful crafts and institutions. According to hymns of the Greco-Roman Period, it was Isis who made the world and decreed that men should love women and children should love their parents. All other goddesses became merely “names” of Isis. In his book “Concerning Isis and Osiris,” Plutarch suggested that the all-powerful Isis allowed herself to be portrayed as a woman of sorrows to console suffering humanity. This, and her promise to believers of a happy afterlife, made the Isis cult the closest rival to Christianity in the early centuries of the first millennium CE. See also Anti; Birds; Cattle; Eyes of Horus; Horus; Horus the Child; Min; Nephthys; Osiris; Stars and Planets
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