She was the Great Mother, a sky and water goddess, the earth goddess, the moon goddess. She stood for all things that are high and fine and good.1 It has been said that but for her presence in Egypt the world would never have known a madonna. She is the, Eternal Feminine. She is "Isis veiled: 'I am all that has been, all that is, and all that will be and no mortal has drawn aside my veil'." In the mystical cult Osiris was the power of light, reason, intellect. Isis was the power of matter, the receptive, the nurse, the all mother, and Horus, born from this union of spirit (or reason) and matter is the "sensible image of the mental world."
1 "Her attributes and epithets are so numerous that in the hieroglyphics she is called 'the many-named,' 'the thousand named.' . .. The true wife, the tender mother, the beneficent, queen of nature, encircled with the nimbus of moral purity, of immemorial and mysterious sanctity. . .. In that welter of religions which accompanied the decline of national life in antiquity, her worship was one of the most popular in Rome and throughout the empire. . .. In a period of decadence. . . when the fabric of empire itself, once deemed eternal, began to show ominous rents and fissures, the serene figure of Isis with her spiritual calm, her gracious promise of immortality appeared to many like a star in a stormy sky . . . and roused in their breasts a rapture of devotion not unlike that paid in the Middle Ages to the Virgin Mary. . .. Her stately ritual with its shaven and tonsured priests, its matins and vespers, its tinkling music, its baptism and aspersions of holy water, its solemn procession, its jewelledimages of the Mother of God, presented many points of similarity to the pomps and ceremonies of Catholicism." Fraser's The Golden Bough, abridged edition, pp. 382-3.
