“Isis am I, and from my life are fed all showers and suns, all moons that wax and wane, all stars and streams, the living and the dead, the mystery of pleasure and of pain. I am the Mother. I the speaking sea. I am the Earth in its fertility. Life, death, love, hatred, light, darkness, return to me. To me.”
- Invocation of Isis
Isis - Goddess of Life and Magic
Talon Abraxas
Isis, Egyptian Aset or Eset, was one of the most important goddesses of ancient Egypt. Her name is the Greek form of an ancient Egyptian word for “throne.” Isis was the daughter of the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut and the sister of the deities Osiris, Seth, and Nephthys. Married to Osiris, king of Egypt, Isis was a good queen who supported her husband and taught the women of Egypt how to weave, bake, and brew beer.
Isis was initially an obscure goddess who lacked her own dedicated temples, but she grew in importance as the dynastic age progressed until she became one of the most important deities of ancient Egypt. Her cult subsequently spread throughout the Roman Empire, and Isis was worshipped from England to Afghanistan. She is still revered by pagans today. As a mourner, she was a principal deity in rites connected with the dead; as a magical healer, she cured the sick and brought the deceased to life; and as a mother, she was a role model for all women.
Isis had strong links with Egyptian kingship, and she was most often represented as a beautiful woman wearing a sheath dress and either the hieroglyphic sign of the throne or a solar disk and cow’s horns on her head. Occasionally she was represented as a scorpion, a bird, a sow, or a cow.
“O Isis, Beautiful in All Thy Names,
I call Thee with the breath of my body,
I call Thee with the beat of my heart,
I call Thee with the pulse of my life,
I call Thee with the words of my mouth,
I call Thee with the thoughts of my mind.
I call Thee Power and Life and Creation.
I call Thee, Isis, Isis, Isis!”
Invocation is a way to focus our intention and attention upon Isis. It offers a method for awakening and re-awakening in ourselves the knowledge of Her eternal presence. It opens a channel of communication and communion between us and Her. If we have done it well, invocation of Isis will evoke a corresponding emotion from us. When our defenses are down, our emotions are up, and we fully open our hearts and selves to Her, that’s when our invocations are effective and we find that She is fully present with us. And that is how the magic happens.
Invocation is a wonderful way to explore the many aspects of Isis. By invoking Her by Her various epithets (epithets are names or descriptive phrases that express various aspects or powers of the Goddess), we can experience and better understand the many facets of Isis’ nature.
To this end, I thought I’d share some of Isis’ many epithets, both well and lesser known, which you may wish to try out in your own invocations.
Nutjeret Weret (Egy.); Thea Megiste (Gk.); Iset Weret (Egy.; “Isis the Great”). This is Isis in Her all-encompassing form as Goddess of All Things, and indeed, She is specifically called Lady of All. Other related epithets are Isis in All Her Names, Isis of Many Names and Many Forms, both of which refer to the ability of Her devotees to see Isis in all other Goddesses and all other Goddesses in Isis. At Denderah, She is called Lady of the Sky, the Earth, the Underworld, the Water, the Mountains, and the Nun (the Primordial Watery Abyss) for She is the Goddess of all manifest as well as all un-manifest things.
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