Isis: The Egyptian Goddess of Magic, Healing, and Divine Feminine Power Explained
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Isis — known in ancient Egyptian as Aset, “the throne” — is the most complete and most enduring expression of divine feminine power in the entire history of Western religion. She is simultaneously the devoted wife and mother, the powerful magician whose knowledge surpasses that of all other gods, the healer whose skill can restore life to the dead, the protector whose wings shelter all who shelter themselves under her authority, and the great queen whose sovereignty is absolute. She is not these things in sequence or by turns; she is all of them simultaneously, the integration of every dimension of feminine power into a single divine presence that the ancient world found so compelling that her worship spread from Egypt throughout the Mediterranean basin — to Greece, Rome, the Near East, and as far as the British Isles — becoming the most widespread mystery religion of the ancient world and the direct forerunner of the Marian veneration of the Christian tradition.
Isis’s name — Aset, “the throne” — places her at the very foundation of legitimate royal power: the throne is not the seat on which the king sits but the goddess who gives the king his power. The pharaoh who sits on the throne of Egypt sits in Isis’s lap; she is what makes him king. This is the first and most fundamental teaching of Isis about feminine power: it is not derivative of masculine power but its source. The king is king because the goddess makes him so. The throne is the goddess, and the goddess is the source of sovereignty.
The Myth of Isis and Osiris: Love, Death, and Resurrection
The central myth of Isis — her relationship with her brother-husband Osiris, his murder by their brother Set, her search for his dismembered body, and her magical restoration of his life — is one of the great myths of world literature: a story of love, grief, determination, magical power, and the ultimate triumph of life over death that has resonated across cultures and centuries because it describes something universal about the nature of genuine love and the power that genuine love generates.
Set — the god of chaos, desert, and storm — murders Osiris and dismembers his body, scattering the pieces across Egypt. Isis, grief-stricken but undefeated, searches the land for every piece of her husband’s body, collecting them one by one through her tireless, love-fueled determination. When she has gathered all but one piece (the phallus, swallowed by a fish of the Nile — the one piece she must recreate through magical means), she reassembles and mummifies the body, then uses her wings to breathe life back into it — long enough to conceive their son Horus, who will avenge his father and restore Ma’at to the land of Egypt.
The myth is the foundation of Egyptian funerary practice — the mummification that Isis performed on Osiris is the template for every mummification that followed — and it is simultaneously the deepest teaching about the nature of feminine magical power: that it operates through the combination of love (the fierce, undefeatable love that refuses to accept the finality of loss) and will (the determined, focused application of magical knowledge to the problem that love presents). Magic is love combined with will. This is Isis’s power, and it is the power that those who genuinely embody the Isis archetype access.
The Wings of Isis: Protection and Transformation
Isis is depicted in Egyptian art with the wings of a great bird — either a kite or a vulture — spread wide in the gesture of protection and enlivenment that she brings to everything she shelters. The wing-spread posture appears in the famous image from Tutankhamun’s inner shrine: Isis standing with wings extended, embracing the corners of the sacred space, embodying the protection that she offers to the dead king within. The same gesture appears at the foot and head of sarcophagi throughout the New Kingdom: Isis and her sister Nephthys, wings spread, guarding the body of the deceased from the dangers of the underworld.
The wings of Isis are not decorative; they are functional in the myth. It is with her wings that she fans the breath of life back into Osiris’s reconstructed body. The wing-beat is the act of magical enlivening — the application of the goddess’s power to the problem of death, which is not insurmountable when approached with sufficient love, sufficient will, and sufficient magical knowledge.
Isis in the Mystery Traditions: The Great Mother of All
As Isis’s worship spread through the Mediterranean world, she absorbed the attributes of every goddess she encountered — Demeter, Aphrodite, Artemis, Hecate, Cybele — until she became, in the late antique period, the universal goddess: the single divine feminine principle behind all the specific goddesses of all the specific traditions. The famous aretalogy of Isis — the litany of her self-declarations found in several Greek papyri — opens with her declaration: “I am Isis, mistress of every land. I was taught by Hermes and with Hermes I devised all the writings of humanity in their various languages.” Isis claims everything, because she is the source of everything.
Egyptian Magic & Feminine Power: Isis Energy Audio — a 20-minute guided meditation activating Isis’s magical feminine power, connecting with the resurrection magic of love combined with will, and spreading the wings of divine feminine protection over your own life and work. Includes PDF guide and meditation diagram. Digital download, instant access.
