isis

Before she was worshipped across empires, before the Greeks renamed her mysteries, before patriarchy tried to diminish her into mere "wife and mother," Isis was called Aset—She of the Throne. The throne itself was her body; pharaohs sat upon her lap to receive legitimacy. She was not seated upon power; she was power.

But the story they tell most often is the one where she seems small—searching desperately for pieces of her murdered husband Osiris, weeping, devoted, defined by her love for a man. Let me tell you what they missed.

When Set dismembered Osiris and scattered him across Egypt, he believed he was destroying power itself. He thought that what is broken cannot rule, that what is scattered cannot return, that fragmentation is final. He did not understand the nature of feminine power—how it gathers, how it remembers, how it resurrects.

Isis did not search because she was weak. She searched because she understood something Set could not: that everything broken contains the memory of its wholeness. That what has been scattered yearns to return to itself. That the work of gathering is the most powerful magic of all.

She walked the length and breadth of Egypt, collecting not just Osiris's body but stories, wisdom, tears, and transformation. With each piece she found, she became more herself. This was not devotion to a man—this was devotion to the principle of wholeness, to the understanding that nothing is truly lost, only waiting to be remembered.

When she discovered that one piece—the phallus—could not be found (consumed by fish, the stories say), she did not despair. Instead, she crafted one from gold. She used her magic, her breath, her words of power to create what was missing. This is the secret: feminine power does not simply recover what was lost; it creates what is needed.

She reassembled Osiris not to restore the old order but to birth something new—their son Horus, conceived through an act of magic with a resurrected beloved. She raised this child in the hidden marshes, teaching him strategy, protection, and the arts of power. She knew that to overthrow Set, the old patriarchal violence, required a new kind of masculine energy—one birthed from feminine magic, raised in secret, taught to honor the mother.

But even this story misses the deeper truth. Isis's real power was never about Osiris or Horus. It was about herself. When she tricked the great god Ra into revealing his secret name, she gained power over life and death itself. She did this not through force but through wisdom—she knew that all power depends on being named, that to know the true name is to understand the essence.

Isis became the goddess of ten thousand names because she understood that identity is fluid, that power takes many forms, that transformation requires multiple faces. She was mother and maiden, mourner and magician, throne and crowned one, devoted and devastatingly independent.

The Greeks and Romans tried to absorb her, to make her serve their empires, to fit her into their categories. But Isis remained herself—scattered across cultures like Osiris across Egypt, yet always whole, always gathering her people to her mysteries, always teaching the magic of reassembly.