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Isis: The Eternal Goddess of Egypt and Rome
"Isis has the gift of universality. She is neither confined nor contained. Isis can respond to the various demands and expectations of each time and locality and can constantly be reinterpreted whilst retaining her important Egyptian soul and origins. Isis is infinitely adaptable; like a web of energy connecting many nodes she can embrace and encompass all, and each new addition strengthens and expands her web." - Lesley Jackson
The Eternal Goddess of Egypt and Rome is a thought-provoking study of one of the most enduring and enigmatic ancient goddesses. The Egyptians knew her as Aset and wrote her name with the hieroglyph of a stylised throne, emphasising her association with royalty and kingship. Isis was the wife and sister of mother of Horus and sister of the mysterious goddess Nephthys; she was also known as a great magician, healer and associated with events of cosmic significance.
Throughout the millennia of her worship she held many roles, evidenced by the many temples, symbols and writings left behind by her devotees. Her worship spread beyond Egypt before the Greek conquest, as diplomats, merchants and other travellers who spent time in Egypt spread her cult overseas. From the Isis of the Old Kingdom of Egypt through to the All-Goddess of the Greco-Roman period and beyond, the worship of Isis grew in importance and diversified. She gained powers from the strong Greek influence in Egypt but also kept all those she already had. becoming a beneficial Goddess of nature, a Saviour and, to many, the sole Goddess.
In this extensive work author Lesley Jackson draws on the primary written sources of information on Isis, being the texts of the Ancient Egyptians and those of the Classical writers, to present the most comprehensive presentation of her worship to date. Her beginnings, her birth, her place of origin, her names, her attributes, her iconography, her relationships, her symbols (including the ankh, tyet, sistrum and situla) and the development of her cult are all carefully considered.
Other books by Lesley Jackson include A Reintroduction to an Ancient Egyptian Goddess, Sekhmet and The Feline Powers of Egypt, The History of the Ancient Egyptian God of Wisdom , and The Cobra Goddess & The Chaos Serpent.
The Eternal Goddess of Egypt and Rome is a thought-provoking study of one of the most enduring and enigmatic ancient goddesses. The Egyptians knew her as Aset and wrote her name with the hieroglyph of a stylised throne, emphasising her association with royalty and kingship. Isis was the wife and sister of mother of Horus and sister of the mysterious goddess Nephthys; she was also known as a great magician, healer and associated with events of cosmic significance.
Throughout the millennia of her worship she held many roles, evidenced by the many temples, symbols and writings left behind by her devotees. Her worship spread beyond Egypt before the Greek conquest, as diplomats, merchants and other travellers who spent time in Egypt spread her cult overseas. From the Isis of the Old Kingdom of Egypt through to the All-Goddess of the Greco-Roman period and beyond, the worship of Isis grew in importance and diversified. She gained powers from the strong Greek influence in Egypt but also kept all those she already had. becoming a beneficial Goddess of nature, a Saviour and, to many, the sole Goddess.
In this extensive work author Lesley Jackson draws on the primary written sources of information on Isis, being the texts of the Ancient Egyptians and those of the Classical writers, to present the most comprehensive presentation of her worship to date. Her beginnings, her birth, her place of origin, her names, her attributes, her iconography, her relationships, her symbols (including the ankh, tyet, sistrum and situla) and the development of her cult are all carefully considered.
Other books by Lesley Jackson include A Reintroduction to an Ancient Egyptian Goddess, Sekhmet and The Feline Powers of Egypt, The History of the Ancient Egyptian God of Wisdom , and The Cobra Goddess & The Chaos Serpent.
300 pages, Paperback
Published June 25, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 14, 2021
C'est une véritable référence, il y a de nombreuses sources historiques et c'est fort appréciable. On évoque les attributs de la déesse, sa magie, mais également son impact sur les cultures actuelles. Isis a en effet assimilé de nombreuses autres déesses au fil des siècles, car son mythe aux côtés d'Osiris a inspiré beaucoup de respect à son égard. J'ai apprécié le ton de l'autrice qui n'hésite pas à expliquer lorsqu'un élément du mythe (l'actuel étant loin de l'originel) a été modifié par les auteurs grecs et romains pour coller à leur société patriarcale. Car si Isis est vue comme la mère et l'épouse par excellence, c'est également la personnalité forte dans son couple, puissante et magicienne, véritable inspiration ! C'est un ouvrage à lire en plusieurs fois du fait de sa densité mais je pense que c'est l'un des meilleurs qu'on puisse trouver !
https://www.lavoixdeslectrices.com/is...
https://www.lavoixdeslectrices.com/is...
September 22, 2024
A very disappointing book and it can more or less be boiled down to two reasons, the first of which being the most important one.
The author is not an unbiased researcher curious about the cult of Isis and pursuing the truth with the available materials. She is in fact, part of the Wiccan, Neopagan "Goddess Worship" movement, and this pops up time and time again in how she (mis)understands religious developments. To her it is not interesting that Isis, an Egyptian goddess tied with sovereignty and kingship, concerns far away from the common person, became a widely venerated supra-Mediterranean deity, indeed a mono/henotheistic cult which preceded Christianity and was its best competition, to the point that much of the Isis mythos was simply incorporated into the Mary mythos, because to the author it is natural that people need "the divine feminine". In fact, we began monotheistically, as usually goes with these people:
This leads to a lot of ink spilled over what aspect of "the Great Mother Goddess" was represented by Isis, confusion on why Isis took on the roles of seemingly all goddesses (because that's what monotheism does, of course, but we can't admit that), absolutely asinine comments where it is stated that X or Y myth or trait of Isis, such as her ties to kingship and thus war, were against her fundamental character as a nurturer, as if deities have a character "of their own" outside of the character ascribed to them by humans, it goes on... In general it subjects the reader to a lot of uncalled for nonsense and simply wrongheaded ideas like this:
Hence the myth where Horus rapes Isis, a shocking bit of imagery to be sure, is not about how the Pharaoh is self-generated, but rather because "the rape of goddesses is a way of disempowering them. It is a way of showing power over them and, through them, over women," or insane statements like "The lack of a bond between Nut and her daughters could be seen as a way of breaking the relationship between mothers and daughters and weakening matriarchy but I am not entirely convinced" (at least she recognizes how crazy an interpretation of mythology this is!). So the analysis of the book is entirely botched from the beginning, at one point Jackson actually says that "as Isis increased in popularity and importance it was inevitable that she would acquire more attributes", as if acquiring attributes was ever related to "popularity" or if far more popular deities (as Jackson herself records) didn't have far less traits than the monotheistic God-like Isis. To Jackson such things are merely "natural", not interesting, and she doesn't even realize her own contradictions when she says them.
The writing is extremely biased against monotheism of course, at one point even characterizing Akhenaten as an intolerant monotheist (lmao), and so when the obvious similarities between the Isis cults and Christianity, Jackson enters into her Terminal Cope, where we state that although they may have only worshiped Isis, this was not the same as the intolerant monotheism of Christianity, because we have never heard of the term "henotheism" lol. At one point she compares the Old Testament unfavorably with Egyptian Mythology, as if the limited textual resources of the latter even allow for such a comparison, calling it "hateful" which is very funny - as she forgotten that in some Isis myths, to her disgust, Horus rapes his own mother? Or is that "not a real myth" because the Goddess said so? Come on now.
The other one is the writing style: it is obnoxiously basic, with a very limited vocabulary (at one point Jackson actually writes "synchronized" in place of "syncretized"), with a lot of ugly repetition and in general with the awkwardness you would expect out of a highschool essay, rather than a published book. By far the most detestable writing quirk Jackson has is this Ancient Aliens-esque tactic where she will state one of her ideas in the guise of Just Asking Questions, e.g. in the famous story of Isis tricking Ra to get his true name, we have this insane statement disguised as a question: "Is Isis asserting the power of the Goddess and forcing Ra to move on from his stasis as an aging god?"
It also just contains a lot of verifiably wrong information, i.e. "The Egyptians never viewed Seth as totally evil" - this is entirely wrong, as Seth, with time, became increasingly vilified and tied with Apep, the literally pure evil snake, against whom he was once essential. The view of these goddesses as descendants of a paleolithic single mother goddess leads them to identify the nourishing of the kings at their tombs as showing that Isis is a "nourisher of the dead", rather than suckling being a means by which the king was adopted by the goddess as her son and thus cast off mortal parentage (this is indeed why heroes are often depicted as being protected by animals).
It is, however, despite all this, not a wholly irredeemable book, for it does collect a lot of data about Isis. However, all of this can be found more satisfactorily elsewhere, including in Jackson's own sources, and that is what I would recommend doing rather than reading this book.
The author is not an unbiased researcher curious about the cult of Isis and pursuing the truth with the available materials. She is in fact, part of the Wiccan, Neopagan "Goddess Worship" movement, and this pops up time and time again in how she (mis)understands religious developments. To her it is not interesting that Isis, an Egyptian goddess tied with sovereignty and kingship, concerns far away from the common person, became a widely venerated supra-Mediterranean deity, indeed a mono/henotheistic cult which preceded Christianity and was its best competition, to the point that much of the Isis mythos was simply incorporated into the Mary mythos, because to the author it is natural that people need "the divine feminine". In fact, we began monotheistically, as usually goes with these people:
In the beginning there was only the Great Mother Goddess but as her power was eroded by increasingly patriarchal religions she became fragmented into an array of deities. Is the strong feminine duality present in Egyptian philosophy and religion an echo of this?
This leads to a lot of ink spilled over what aspect of "the Great Mother Goddess" was represented by Isis, confusion on why Isis took on the roles of seemingly all goddesses (because that's what monotheism does, of course, but we can't admit that), absolutely asinine comments where it is stated that X or Y myth or trait of Isis, such as her ties to kingship and thus war, were against her fundamental character as a nurturer, as if deities have a character "of their own" outside of the character ascribed to them by humans, it goes on... In general it subjects the reader to a lot of uncalled for nonsense and simply wrongheaded ideas like this:
Research carried out by Noble into the early Goddesses suggests that the Double Goddess is a very old concept given the many depictions of twins in the ancient world especially of goddesses with their associated sacred creatures; bird, snake and lion. She says that this represents the “yin-yang female biological cycle and its shamanic relationship to life”.[175] The Great Mother has a dual nature encompassing all that is perceived as good and all that is perceived as bad. A healthier approach than denying the dark side of the divine and ending up with an irreconcilable personification of evil. Noble proposes that the healed whole isn’t male-female but is the two components of the female archetype or energy. There is an oscillation between two phases in every natural cycle and the Double Goddess illustrates this perpetual motion.
Hence the myth where Horus rapes Isis, a shocking bit of imagery to be sure, is not about how the Pharaoh is self-generated, but rather because "the rape of goddesses is a way of disempowering them. It is a way of showing power over them and, through them, over women," or insane statements like "The lack of a bond between Nut and her daughters could be seen as a way of breaking the relationship between mothers and daughters and weakening matriarchy but I am not entirely convinced" (at least she recognizes how crazy an interpretation of mythology this is!). So the analysis of the book is entirely botched from the beginning, at one point Jackson actually says that "as Isis increased in popularity and importance it was inevitable that she would acquire more attributes", as if acquiring attributes was ever related to "popularity" or if far more popular deities (as Jackson herself records) didn't have far less traits than the monotheistic God-like Isis. To Jackson such things are merely "natural", not interesting, and she doesn't even realize her own contradictions when she says them.
The writing is extremely biased against monotheism of course, at one point even characterizing Akhenaten as an intolerant monotheist (lmao), and so when the obvious similarities between the Isis cults and Christianity, Jackson enters into her Terminal Cope, where we state that although they may have only worshiped Isis, this was not the same as the intolerant monotheism of Christianity, because we have never heard of the term "henotheism" lol. At one point she compares the Old Testament unfavorably with Egyptian Mythology, as if the limited textual resources of the latter even allow for such a comparison, calling it "hateful" which is very funny - as she forgotten that in some Isis myths, to her disgust, Horus rapes his own mother? Or is that "not a real myth" because the Goddess said so? Come on now.
The other one is the writing style: it is obnoxiously basic, with a very limited vocabulary (at one point Jackson actually writes "synchronized" in place of "syncretized"), with a lot of ugly repetition and in general with the awkwardness you would expect out of a highschool essay, rather than a published book. By far the most detestable writing quirk Jackson has is this Ancient Aliens-esque tactic where she will state one of her ideas in the guise of Just Asking Questions, e.g. in the famous story of Isis tricking Ra to get his true name, we have this insane statement disguised as a question: "Is Isis asserting the power of the Goddess and forcing Ra to move on from his stasis as an aging god?"
It also just contains a lot of verifiably wrong information, i.e. "The Egyptians never viewed Seth as totally evil" - this is entirely wrong, as Seth, with time, became increasingly vilified and tied with Apep, the literally pure evil snake, against whom he was once essential. The view of these goddesses as descendants of a paleolithic single mother goddess leads them to identify the nourishing of the kings at their tombs as showing that Isis is a "nourisher of the dead", rather than suckling being a means by which the king was adopted by the goddess as her son and thus cast off mortal parentage (this is indeed why heroes are often depicted as being protected by animals).
It is, however, despite all this, not a wholly irredeemable book, for it does collect a lot of data about Isis. However, all of this can be found more satisfactorily elsewhere, including in Jackson's own sources, and that is what I would recommend doing rather than reading this book.
November 15, 2023
I think this is my favorite of Lesley's Egyptian gods collection.
These books are paramount in my studies for my historical fiction. Lesley puts everything into great perspective while hitting a plethora of details along the way. Her writing style is very open to various opinions and occasionally she will throw in a concept of her own, but never tries to sell it, like a fool on the street corner.
If you have an interest in the gods of ancient Egypt, these books are a great place to dive.
These books are paramount in my studies for my historical fiction. Lesley puts everything into great perspective while hitting a plethora of details along the way. Her writing style is very open to various opinions and occasionally she will throw in a concept of her own, but never tries to sell it, like a fool on the street corner.
If you have an interest in the gods of ancient Egypt, these books are a great place to dive.
November 4, 2022
The definitive work on one of if not the most heralded goddess. Lesley Jackson is at the forefront when it comes to writing about Egyptian spirituality and she leaves no stone unturned when discussing the evolution of Egypt’s most popular goddess. She talks about Isis’s favor not only among the Egyptians but the Romans as well. Whether you’re mythology buff, a pagan reconstructionist, or a history junkie this book is definitely for you.
April 2, 2021
Wow. So complete
A great book to know eveything about Isis. Orthodox kemetics probably don't like it because shows how Isis had changed in her long journey with us until now. A must read.
A great book to know eveything about Isis. Orthodox kemetics probably don't like it because shows how Isis had changed in her long journey with us until now. A must read.
March 24, 2023
Very good summary of Isis, from A to Z.
This covers everything from her conception to her dwindling appearance beyond Egypt.
After reading this, I will be sure to read Lesley's other installments relating to Egypt.
This covers everything from her conception to her dwindling appearance beyond Egypt.
After reading this, I will be sure to read Lesley's other installments relating to Egypt.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews