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Isis [Note 1] was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. Isis was first mentioned in the Old Kingdom ( c. 2686 – c. 2181 BCE ) as one of the main characters of the Osiris myth , in which she resurrects her slain brother and husband, the divine king Osiris , and produces and protects ...
The exclusion of all but one god from worship was a radical departure from Egyptian tradition and some see Akhenaten as a practitioner of monolatry or henotheism rather than monotheism, [37] [38] as he did not actively deny the existence of other gods; he simply refrained from worshipping any but the Aten. Under Akhenaten's successors Egypt ...
Ancient Egyptian deities were an integral part of ancient Egyptian religion and were worshiped for millennia. Many of them ruled over natural and social phenomena, as well as abstract concepts [1] These gods and goddesses appear in virtually every aspect of ancient Egyptian civilization, and more than 1,500 of them are known by name. Many ...
The mysteries of Isis were religious initiation rites performed in the cult of the Egyptian goddess Isis in the Greco-Roman world. They were modeled on other mystery rites, particularly the Eleusinian mysteries in honor of the Greek goddesses Demeter and Persephone, and originated sometime between the third century BCE and the second century CE.
Of those gods who did have temples of their own, many were venerated mainly in certain areas of Egypt, though many gods with a strong local tie were also important across the nation. [13] Even deities whose worship spanned the country were strongly associated with the cities where their chief temples were located.
An Egyptian could worship any deity at a particular time and credit it with supreme power in that moment, without denying the other gods or merging them all with the god that he or she focused on. Hornung concludes that the gods were fully unified only in myth, at the time before creation, after which the multitude of deities emerged from a ...
Isis's iconography in these paintings closely resembles and may have influenced the earliest Christian icons of Mary holding Jesus. [124] In the late centuries BCE, the worship of Isis spread from Egypt across the Mediterranean world, and she became one of the most popular deities in the region.
During the Hellenistic period between 323 and 30 BC, the goddess Isis became associated with Bastet and cats, as indicated by an inscription at the Temple of Edfu: “Isis is the soul of Bastet”. In this period, cats were systematically bred to be killed and to be mummified as sacrifices to the gods. [20]