Isis, Queen of Heaven: the Moon in the Egypt of the Greeks and in Apuleius

In the Egypt of the pharaohs Isis was not a goddess of the Moon. She was the faithful wife of Osiris, the mother of Horus, the magician who with her wisdom put back together the body of her murdered husband. The disc she wears between her horns, inherited from the iconography of Hathor, was originally solar. It was in the Greek and Roman world that Isis became the queen of night and of the Moon, and this transformation is documented by precise texts.

The Greek view of Egypt

Diodorus Siculus, a historian of the first century BC, writes in the first book of his Library of History that the ancient Egyptians, observing the sky, had recognised two eternal and primordial gods, the Sun and the Moon, and had called them Osiris and Isis. This is a Greek interpretation, not a faithful rendering of Egyptian theology, but it had an enormous influence on how the West would imagine the goddess for centuries.

Plutarch, in the treatise On Isis and Osiris, written between the first and second centuries AD, gathers various symbolic interpretations of the myth. Some, he reports, linked the twenty-eight years of reign or of life attributed to Osiris with the days on which the Moon is visible, and the dismemberment of his body into fourteen parts with the days of the waning Moon. Plutarch presents these readings as the opinions of others, alongside many different explanations.

The vision at Cenchreae

The most famous text on the lunar Isis is the eleventh book of Apuleius' Metamorphoses, the Latin novel also known as The Golden Ass, written in the second century AD. The hero Lucius, turned into an ass, wakes at night on the beach of Cenchreae, near Corinth, and sees the full Moon rising brilliantly from the sea. He purifies himself in the waves and addresses to the goddess a prayer that opens with the invocation «Regina caeli», Queen of Heaven.

In the prayer Lucius does not know by which name to call her and lists several: Ceres, heavenly Venus, the sister of Phoebus, Proserpina. The goddess appears to him in a dream with a shining disc like a mirror on her brow, and presents herself as the mother of nature, worshipped by all peoples under different names, but known by her true name, Isis, to the Egyptians.

A goddess for the whole empire

Apuleius' passage reflects the real spread of the Isiac cult across the Mediterranean. In Rome, Pompeii, Delos and many other cities there were temples of Isis, and every year, at the beginning of March, the Navigium Isidis was celebrated, the festival that opened the sailing season and that Apuleius himself describes in rich detail. The temple of Isis at Pompeii, found in the eighteenth century, is one of the best preserved.

The lunar Isis is thus largely a creation of the meeting between cultures: an Egyptian goddess read through the eyes of Greek philosophy and Roman piety. In this guise of Queen of Heaven, of many names and a single substance, she crossed antiquity and long remained a powerful symbol in the European esoteric tradition.