Isis began as a minor Egyptian goddess and ended up worshipped across Rome
In the oldest Egyptian texts Isis plays a supporting part in royal ritual. Yet she brought her murdered husband Osiris back to life in myth, outshone every other deity in magical power, and eventually drew followers from one end of the Roman Empire to the other, until Christianity displaced her.
Her first appearances date to the Old Kingdom, roughly 2686 to 2181 BCE, inside the Osiris myth. There she revives Osiris, who was both her brother and her husband, then bears and shields his heir, Horus. Because pharaohs were likened to Horus, Isis counted as the king's divine mother, and because she had eased Osiris into the afterlife, Egyptians hoped she would do the same for them. Ordinary people called on her motherly help in healing spells. Artists usually showed her as a woman crowned with a hieroglyph shaped like a throne.
Her rise came in stages. During the New Kingdom, about 1550 to 1070 BCE, she borrowed attributes from Hathor, the leading goddess of earlier ages, including the cow horns cradling a sun disk. By the first millennium BCE she and Osiris had become the most popular gods in Egypt, and she kept soaking up the traits of other goddesses. Kings in Egypt and in Nubia to the south raised temples mainly for her; the one at Philae served worshippers from both lands. Her magic was said to exceed that of any god, extending to nature and even fate.
Greek rule after 323 BCE carried her abroad. Greeks and Egyptians honoured her alongside a newly created god, Serapis, and Greek followers credited her with inventing marriage and guarding sailors. Once Rome absorbed Hellenistic culture in the first century BCE, her cult became part of Roman religion. Devotees were never numerous, but they lived throughout the empire, celebrating festivals such as the Navigium Isidis and joining initiation rites like those of other mystery cults.
Christianity ended her worship between the fourth and sixth centuries CE. Some argue her cult shaped devotion to Mary, though that link is ambiguous and hotly disputed. She survives today in esoteric traditions and modern paganism as a figure of nature or feminine divinity.
Source: Isis
