Quest 188, December 2016, pp. 15-18.

Reclaiming Isis
Chris Wood

H ardly a day goes by without reading that “Isis” has done something
bad in Syria. Of course, the goddess Isis has not done these things
and the use of Her Name by the Western media represents, at best, a lazy
mistranslation from the Arabic.1 But the effect is to associate Her Name in
the popular mind with terrorism, bigotry and evil. So much so, that
businesses using the name have felt it necessary to change it because of
abuse and more serious attacks. (So much for Western democratic
tolerance…)
Over a year ago, a number of us, who had been at the Norfolk Pagan
Federation’s 2015 Harvest Moon conference, were discussing the abuse of
the Name of Isis. At the conference, I had given a presentation on the
influence of ancient Egypt on Western Magic, including the suggestion
that Isis (and my use of Her Graeco-Roman Name was deliberate) has
been a lifeboat for the gods of Egypt and other parts of the Classical
world. She was already ‘Isis of 10,000 Names’ in late antiquity, a result of
the globalisation that was the Hellenic and then Roman expansion, and the
spiritual dislocation of people that came with it. Isis became Mother
Nature and Queen of Heaven, riding the waves of the Renaissance and
Enlightenment to safe harbour in the modern world, where we have been
able to rediscover the gods of the ancient world, brought like refugees
through the dark times of monotheism behind the Veil of Isis.
We discussed, a year ago, the idea of joint rituals to reclaim Her
Name, and publicising them for others to take up. We didn’t follow those
ideas up at the time, partly because there seemed to be an increase in the
use of “IS”, “so-called Islamic State”, and even “Daesh”, at least on BBC
Radio Four… For me, there was also the worry that perhaps our proposed
action would be hubris and that surely She would have everything in
hand? However, over a year later, the Name of Isis is still being abused,
especially on social media. Whether or not there is a deliberate attempt to
sink the lifeboat of the gods, the insidious tarring of Her Name puts a
barrier between people and divine potency.
At the end of October 2016, I visited the British Museum’s
exhibition, Sunken Cities: Egypt’s lost worlds.2 It was an excellent
production, with no need felt to apologise for the use of the Name of Isis
(as indeed there should not be). A key element was the importance of the
cult of Osiris in the ports of Thonis-Heracleion and Canopus, which sat at
the mouth of the Nile in a constant and eventually unsuccessful battle to
stay above water (rather like Venice today perhaps). As the drowned cities
were abandoned quite quickly (probably in the first century CE, although
waterlogged ruins remained, only sinking after an earthquake in the eighth
century), many more ritual artefacts have been revealed in underwater
archaeology than would generally be left at ancient sites on land.
In the exhibition, there was a room of alcoves that felt like a temple
to Osiris, with His statue prominent in the centre. Another room celebrated
the creation of Osirian sprouted corn mummies. And a large section of the
exhibition was evocatively devoted to the annual procession of Osiris
along the canal between Heracleion and Canopus, with votive offerings
and ritual equipment.
After viewing the exhibition, I attended a special evening event, a
‘Festival of Osiris’. There were performances, themed gallery talks, food
and drink, sistrum-making, and a survey of people’s attitudes to death. The
evening culminated in a potent procession. Visitors were gathered up by
Isis, Horus and Anubis, and urged to re-member Osiris and
circumambulate the Great Court to facilitate His return. Then, Anubis
restored to Osiris His regalia and the risen Osiris gave a rousing speech,
before triumphantly ascending the stairs of the Reading Room.
With Osiris risen, and celebrated at such an international cultural axis
mundi as the British Museum, perhaps it is high time to return attention to
the key agent of His re-membering and resurrection, Isis.
In our discussions back in 2015, Marian Green suggested a rite in
which Osiris re-members Isis. Also, one person who well understood the
power of Isis, and indeed Her presence in London, was Dion Fortune. I
would not presume to know how she would have responded to the abuse
of the Name of Isis, but she does give us some ideas. Parts of her Rite of
Isis3 could be employed, along with the celebrations of Isis from Apuleius’
The Golden Ass.4
 We all have different ways of working, from formal Ceremonial
lodges to the grubby end of Natural Magic and hedge-witchcraft. Druidry
and Heathenry have much to thank Isis for too, if indirectly, and their rites
are different again. Even Christianity has some direct debt to Her, in that
the Church borrowed aspects of Isis’ iconography to clothe Mary, Mother
of God and Queen of Heaven.5 No one rite fits all, so it would be
inappropriate to propose a single formula.
Read Dion Fortune’s novel, Moon Magic, and her Rite of Isis. Read
The Golden Ass. Find a quiet spot by the Thames, river of Dark Isis,6 to
commune with Her, or even a traditional Marian shrine.
I would not subscribe to the literal belief that, as Dion Fortune wrote,
all goddesses are one goddess, because deities and saints, however
exalted, are place-specific. There is however still a connection. As Erik
Hornung articulated so well, all Egyptian deities are the Creator, as all
come from the Creator and share the essence of the Creator (as of course
do we).7
Isis can be contacted through Her spiritual daughters, in the anima of
the Thames, in many Our Ladies, in Hathor, Sekhmet, Nut, Neith,
Nepthys, Bast, even Artemis, Aphrodite, Persephone, Demeter, Hecate
and Fortuna, in as much as their presence has been vouchsafed us in the
folds of the Veil of Isis, down through the centuries when their Names
seemed unimportant to the poets, artists and Enlightenment scientists who
used Isis to clothe a secular notion of Mother Nature (just as in recent
times the Name of Gaia was adopted by James Lovelock for his
hypothesis of planetary homeostasis).
As Isis and Nepthys gather and re-member Osiris, so perhaps the
many Names gathered to the shores of modern consciousness by Isis can
be called upon to honour that part of themselves that is Her. And we too
are Horuses, Her children. We too can honour that part of ourselves that is
Isis. To paraphrase Aleister Crowley,8 there is none of us that is not of the
gods, so let us join with Her other children, both human and divine, and
praise Isis.
For here is where my concerns about hubris become focussed. What
right have we to challenge other people’s abuse of a name if we have not
cleansed ourselves of the negative associations with which it has been
tainted? Which of us does not need to make some mental effort, however
small, to put aside the images conjured by the slur on Isis’ Name?
 Dion Fortune has given us the beautiful example of a Rite of Isis; we
can re-attune ourselves to the beauty of Her Name, for we must first clear
the veil of taint from our own sight. As Isis instructs Lucius Apuleius
towards the end of The Golden Ass, we can, if we choose, fearlessly accept
the roses from the sistrum-ankh9 and slough off the hide of “the most
hateful beast in the universe”.
And that beast is fear itself.

Notes
1 There is in fact no such organisation as ‘ISIS’. The actual Arabic name is al-Dawlah
al-Islāmīyah fī al-Irāq wa-al-Shām, which translates as ‘Islamic State of Iraq and
the Levant’. The second ‘S’ used in ‘ISIS’ comes from al- Shām, actually an area
much larger than Syria. The Arabic abbreviation transliterates as Daesh. The
organisation now, in any case, goes by the simpler (if unwelcome from a Muslim
perspective) name of Islamic State. As a starting point for more detail, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_Levant .
2 The exhibition ran from 19th May to 27th November, and there is an associated book:
Sunken Cities: Egypt’s lost worlds, edited by Franck Goddio and Aurélia Masson-
Berghoff, published by Thames & Hudson, 2016.
3 See Dion Fortune’s Rites of Isis and of Pan, edited by Gareth Knight and published
by Skylight Press in 2013.
4 The Golden Ass, by Lucius Apuleius, translated by Robert Graves and published by
Penguin in 1950.
5 See ‘The early cult of Mary and inter-religious contexts in the fifth-century Church’,
by John McGuckin, pp. 1-22 in The Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary, edited
by Chris Maunder and published by Burns & Oates (Continuum) in 2008.
6 The dark river Thames flows through the city of London, where there was a Roman
temple to Isis, and has significant Marian church dedications along its course. One
of the two main tributaries of the river has been known as the Isis since the 16th
century. Peter Ackroyd, in his Thames: Sacred River (Chatto & Windus, 2007)
states quite baldly that Isis is the tutelary deity of the river. The Isian presence of the
Thames is perhaps the third main character, hidden in plain sight, in Dion Fortune’s
Moon Magic.
7 Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many, by Erik Hornung,
translated by John Baines and published by Cornell University Press in 1982.
8 In his Gnostic Mass (1913), Crowley wrote “There is no part of me that is not of the
gods”, which is itself paraphrased from spells in Graeco-Roman-period Egyptian
papyri.
9 Lucius is instructed to make his way to the front of an Isian procession and pluck a
garland of roses that the High Priest has himself been told by Isis to carry tied to his
sistrum. Lucius is immediately restored to human form. The form of the sistrum is
considered to be based on the ankh, symbol of life. As such, a rose-festooned
sistrum is, effectively, an interesting early example of a rose cross.