Who is Isis? Guide to the Egyptian Goddess of Magic

Q: What does the name Isis mean?

Her Egyptian name is Aset (or Iset), meaning "throne." Her characteristic headdress is the hieroglyphic throne itself. The name reflects the Egyptian belief that the throne of the pharaoh rested on Isis - that whoever became pharaoh, in effect, sat on her. The name "Isis" is the Greek transliteration, which is what has come down to us in English.

Q: What are Isis's powers?

Isis is called Weret Hekau - "Great of Magic" - and is the most powerful magician in the Egyptian pantheon. She can heal, resurrect, transform herself into a kite or other birds, protect the vulnerable through spells, and, most consequentially, has knowledge of the secret true name of Ra, which she extracted from him through a scheme involving a serpent she made from his own saliva.

Isis is the most consequential goddess in Egyptian mythology. Her power is not the raw force of Sekhmet or the solar authority of Ra. It is knowledge, cunning, and the will to act on both. She stole the secret name of Ra to become the most powerful magician in the world. She searched the length of Egypt to gather the scattered pieces of her murdered husband. She hid her infant son in the marshes and raised him to reclaim his father’s throne. What she wanted, she got. What she loved, she saved.

Key Takeaways

Isis is the Egyptian goddess of magic, motherhood, healing, and resurrection, and one of the most powerful figures in the Egyptian pantheon.
She is the daughter of the earth-god Geb and the sky-goddess Nut, and sister to Osiris, Set, and Nephthys.
Her husband is her brother Osiris, whom she resurrected after his murder by Set. Their son is Horus, the falcon-god who becomes king of Egypt.
She is called Weret Hekau - “Great of Magic” - and is credited with mastering the secret name of Ra, giving her power over him.
Her worship spread far beyond Egypt into the Greek and Roman worlds; temples to Isis operated as far as Britain, and her cult was one of the last pre-Christian religions to survive.
Her sacred symbols include the throne (which her name pictographically represents), the tyet knot, and the sun disk cradled between cow horns.
She is often depicted with wings, either as a kite (the bird form she took when searching for Osiris) or with outstretched arms in the shape of wings.

Who is Isis?

Isis is the Egyptian goddess of magic, motherhood, and the protection of the dead. She belongs to the Ennead, the group of nine primal Egyptian gods descended from the creator Atum, and she is one of the five children born of the earth-god Geb and the sky-goddess Nut.

Definition - Isis

The Egyptian goddess of magic, motherhood, healing, and resurrection. Isis is the sister and wife of Osiris, mother of Horus, and one of the most powerful figures in the Egyptian pantheon. Her Egyptian name is Aset, meaning “throne.” The Greek and Roman worlds knew her as Isis, and her cult became one of the most widespread religions of the ancient Mediterranean.

Her Egyptian name is Aset (or Iset), meaning “throne.” Her characteristic headdress is the hieroglyphic throne itself, worn on her head. The name reflects a foundational Egyptian idea: kingship rested on the throne, and the throne rested on Isis. Whoever became pharaoh sat on her.

The Greeks and Romans called her Isis, and it is that name that has come down to us in English. In her Greek form she was identified with Demeter and Persephone, and later, in her Roman form, absorbed features of many other Mediterranean goddesses.

The birth of Isis: the Ennead of Heliopolis

Egyptian creation begins with Atum, the self-created god who arose from the primordial waters and gave birth to Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture). Shu and Tefnut produced Geb (earth) and Nut (sky). Geb and Nut, in turn, produced five children: Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys, and, in some tellings, Horus the Elder.

The five were born on the epagomenal days, the five days added at the end of the Egyptian calendar year. Isis was born on the fourth of these days. She and her siblings were the first generation of gods to walk on the earth as it had been prepared for them, and the drama that followed - the murder of Osiris, the birth of Horus, the contendings with Set - is the founding narrative of Egyptian mythology. Read the story of the birth of the five gods.

The murder of Osiris and Isis’s search

The Osirian story is the most consequential myth in the Egyptian tradition, and Isis is its principal actor.

Osiris was the first king of Egypt, and his rule was benevolent. His brother Set, jealous of the throne, invited Osiris to a banquet at which he presented a beautifully carved chest and offered it to whichever guest fit inside perfectly. The chest had been made to Osiris’s exact measurements. When Osiris climbed in, Set slammed the lid, sealed it, and threw the chest into the Nile. Read the story of the murder of Osiris by Set.

Isis began to search. The chest had been carried by the Nile out into the Mediterranean and eventually washed ashore at Byblos in what is now Lebanon, where a tree grew around it. Isis, following divine signs, reached Byblos, worked as a nursemaid for the local queen to gain access to the palace, and eventually recovered the chest. Read Isis’s search for Osiris.

She brought Osiris’s body back to Egypt and hid it in the marshes. Set found it. He dismembered Osiris into fourteen pieces and scattered them across the country. Isis, with the help of her sister Nephthys and the jackal-headed god Anubis (Nephthys’s son, whom Isis often protected), gathered thirteen of the pieces - all but the phallus, which had been eaten by a fish. She reassembled Osiris, and through her magic long enough to conceive their son Horus, resurrected him. Osiris then descended to rule the underworld. Read the myth of Anubis and the chest of Osiris.

The Isis of this story is the tradition’s central figure. She is not a passive mourner. She is the one who acts, gathers, reconstitutes, and resurrects.

Isis as mother of Horus

Isis raised her son Horus in secret in the marshes of the Nile Delta. She feared Set, who wanted the child dead as much as he had wanted Osiris dead. Horus’s infancy is a series of dangers: he is bitten by a scorpion, stung, attacked by predators. Isis heals him each time using magic, and the spells she is said to have used passed into Egyptian magical practice for protecting children. Read the story of the birth of Horus and Isis and the seven scorpions.

When Horus came of age, Isis presented him at the court of the gods to claim Osiris’s throne from Set. What followed was the eighty-year contest between Horus and Set for the kingship of Egypt, and Isis’s role in it is decisive. She schemes for her son. She intervenes at critical moments. When the gods send her out of a decisive tribunal because she keeps interfering, she disguises herself and returns, and eventually tricks Set into condemning himself in front of the assembled gods.

Horus wins. He takes the throne. Isis retires, in a sense, into the role she is most often depicted in: the mother enthroned, holding the infant Horus on her lap. That image, in the Roman period, became one of the most powerful in the Mediterranean world - and one of the visual sources for later Christian depictions of Mary and the infant Jesus.

Isis as magician: the secret name of Ra

The story that best captures Isis’s character is the one in which she tricks the sun-god Ra out of his true name.

Every Egyptian god had a secret, true name - a ren - that gave anyone who knew it power over the god. Ra had never told his name to anyone. Isis, wanting the fullness of magical power, decided to acquire it.

She waited until Ra was old and drooling. She gathered a drop of his saliva from the ground, mixed it with earth, and shaped a serpent. She left the serpent where Ra would walk. When Ra passed, the serpent bit him. Ra, immortal but not invulnerable, was in agony - because the serpent was made from his own substance, no god could heal him except by knowing what had bitten him and how to counter it.

Isis approached. She offered to heal him. She said she needed to know his true name to do it. Ra listed his many names: I am Khepri in the morning, Ra at noon, Atum in the evening. Isis rejected all of them. The venom worked deeper. Finally, in pain, Ra whispered his true name into her ear. She healed him. She kept the name. Read Ra’s secret name and Isis’s cunning.

From that moment, Isis was the most powerful magician in the Egyptian pantheon. The story is entirely characteristic of her. What she wants, she plans for. What she plans for, she gets.

Isis compared to other great goddesses

Isis’s combination of magic, motherhood, resurrection, and cunning is unusual for its completeness. Most goddesses specialise. Isis does not.

Tradition	Goddess	Sphere	Fate
Egyptian	Isis	Magic, motherhood, resurrection	Worshipped from Egypt across the Roman empire
Sumerian	Inanna / Ishtar	Love, war, kingship	Descends to the underworld and returns
Greek	Demeter	Harvest, grief, mysteries	Loses and recovers her daughter Persephone
Norse	Freyja	Love, sexuality, war, magic	Receives half of the battle-dead
Hindu	Durga	War, protection, divine feminine	Slays the buffalo-demon Mahishasura

The parallel with Demeter is close, and the Greeks noticed it. Both goddesses lose a beloved and search for them. Both are associated with mysteries, mortality, and the promise of new life. When Isis’s worship spread into the Greek world, it merged with Demeter’s mysteries at Eleusis, and the two figures became closely identified in the Mediterranean religious imagination.

Read the stories

Isis appears throughout the Egyptian tradition, most centrally in the cycle of Osiris, Horus, and Set. Some entry points:

Isis outlasted her pantheon. When the temples of Ra and Osiris fell silent, her cult continued for centuries in the Greek and Roman worlds, and her image - a mother with a divine child on her lap - became one of the visual vocabularies from which later religion drew. The tradition preserves her as it found her: the goddess who wanted her husband back and refused to accept that death had the last word.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Isis’s husband?

Osiris, who is also her brother. In Egyptian tradition, sibling marriage among the gods was not scandalous but the norm, reflecting the divine order’s self-contained lineage. When Osiris was murdered by their brother Set, Isis searched the length of Egypt to recover his body, reassembled him from the pieces Set had scattered, and used her magic to conceive their son Horus before Osiris descended to rule the underworld.

Who is Isis’s son?

Horus, the falcon-headed god, who becomes king of Egypt and the divine model of the pharaoh. Isis raised Horus in secret in the marshes of the Nile Delta to protect him from Set, healed him from many childhood dangers using her magic, and championed his claim to the throne of Egypt through the long contendings against Set.

What does the name Isis mean?

Her Egyptian name is Aset (or Iset), meaning “throne.” Her characteristic headdress is the hieroglyphic throne itself. The name reflects the Egyptian belief that the throne of the pharaoh rested on Isis - that whoever became pharaoh, in effect, sat on her. The name “Isis” is the Greek transliteration, which is what has come down to us in English.

What are Isis’s powers?

Isis is called Weret Hekau - “Great of Magic” - and is the most powerful magician in the Egyptian pantheon. She can heal, resurrect, transform herself into a kite or other birds, protect the vulnerable through spells, and, most consequentially, has knowledge of the secret true name of Ra, which she extracted from him through a scheme involving a serpent she made from his own saliva.

Is Isis the same goddess as Ishtar or Astarte?

No, though the Mediterranean world often blurred them. Isis is Egyptian; Ishtar is Mesopotamian (originally the Sumerian Inanna); Astarte is Levantine (Phoenician). All three are powerful goddesses associated with love, magic, and the fates of nations, and Roman-era syncretism sometimes identified them. But they come from distinct traditions with distinct myths, and Isis’s central story of resurrecting Osiris is her own.

How did Isis worship spread beyond Egypt?

Isis’s cult began spreading during the Ptolemaic period (from 305 BCE), when Egypt was ruled by a Greek dynasty descended from Alexander the Great’s general Ptolemy. The Greeks identified her with Demeter and Aphrodite, and her mysteries became popular across the Hellenistic world. Under Rome she spread further: temples to Isis operated from Roman Britain to the Arabian peninsula, and her cult was one of the last pre-Christian religions to survive, with worshippers continuing into the sixth century CE.