“I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my robe no mortal has yet uncovered.” The Greek writer Plutarch reported these words in the first or second century CE, describing an inscription on the statue of a goddess in the Egyptian city of Sais. He identified her with Isis, and the saying became one of the best-known lines in the history of esotericism.
The fruit that she brought forth
Later writers added another line. The philosopher Proclus, commenting on Plato in the fifth century CE, gave the inscription as ending “the fruit which I have brought forth is the sun.” Both phrases are lettered on this painting.
Who was Isis?
In Egyptian myth Isis is the devoted wife of Osiris. When their brother Set murdered Osiris and scattered his body, she searched for the pieces, reassembled him and conceived their son Horus. She was also the great magician of the gods, who gained power over the sun god Ra by learning his secret name. Her devotion, her magic and her motherhood made her one of the most beloved deities of the ancient world.
Isis and the mystery religions
Her worship spread across the Roman world as one of the great mystery religions, with rites of initiation. A temple of Isis stood in Pompeii, and its wall paintings were among the early finds of the excavations there. The novelist Apuleius gave a famous account of an initiation in the last book of The Golden Ass. Scholars have long noted how images of Isis nursing the infant Horus resemble later pictures of Mary and the Christ child, though how much one influenced the other is debated.
The veil in modern imagination
For centuries afterwards the unveiling of the goddess stood for the search for hidden truth: Friedrich Schiller wrote a poem about a young man who lifts the veil at Sais, and Helena Blavatsky titled her 1877 Theosophical book Isis Unveiled. The painting was made in 1926, only a few years after the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 set off a worldwide craze for Egypt, and the same mood fed the interest of many Masonic and occult groups in the mysteries of the Nile.
The painting
The goddess stands crowned in a gauzy rose-colored veil between two Egyptian columns. It was painted by J. Augustus Knapp for Manly P. Hall’s The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928).
Little-known facts
- The last working temple of Isis was on the island of Philae in Egypt. Worship there is said to have continued until the sixth century CE, when the emperor Justinian had the temple closed.
- Mozart’s 1791 opera The Magic Flute, steeped in Masonic imagery, is set among priests who invoke Isis and Osiris.
- Plutarch was himself a priest of Apollo at Delphi, an outsider looking at Egyptian religion through Greek philosophy.
- Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled reportedly sold out its first printing in about ten days.
The Saitic Isis appears on our: