Mysteries of Isis

Many texts from the Roman Empire refer to the Isis mysteries, but the only source to describe them is a work of fiction, the novel The Golden Ass, written in the second century CE by Apuleius.

There the hierophant who presided over the ceremony shouted a cryptic announcement that may have alluded to the birth of the god Ploutos and displayed objects that represented Demeter's power over fertility, such as a sheaf of wheat.

[11][12] Ancient Egyptian funerary texts contained knowledge about the Duat, or underworld, that was characterized as profoundly secret and was believed to allow deceased souls to reach a pleasant afterlife.

[9][16] The most sacred rituals in Egyptian temples were performed by high-ranking priests out of public view, and festivals formed the main opportunity for commoners to participate in formal ceremonies.

[48] One inscription, from Prusa in Bithynia, mentions a priest of Isis named Meniketes who furnished beds that were "forbidden to the laymen", suggesting that they were connected in some way with the mysteries,[49] although they may have served some other ritual function instead.

[53] The Tigrane tomb at Kom El Shoqafa, near Alexandria, contains a painting of a man carrying palm branches that the art historian Marjorie Venit interpreted as an image of a new initiate emerging from the rites.

[54] Hellenistic and Roman temples to Isis varied widely in form, and although some contained underground areas that have been proposed to have been sites where the mysteries were performed, the evidence is inconclusive.

[67] The priests in Lucius's initiation read the procedure for the rite from a ritual book kept in the temple that is covered in "unknown characters", some of which are "shapes of all sorts of animals" while others are ornate and abstract.

[75] On the evening of the tenth day, Lucius receives a variety of unspecified gifts from fellow devotees of Isis before donning a clean linen robe and entering the deepest part of the temple.

He then stands on a dais carrying a torch and wearing a crown of palm leaves—"decorated in the likeness of the Sun and set up in the guise of a statue", as Apuleius describes it.

[97] Griffiths argued that the sun in the middle of the night, in Lucius's account of the initiation, might have been influenced by the contrasts of light and dark in other mystery rites, but it derived mainly from the depictions of the underworld in ancient Egyptian funerary texts.

[98] The five scholars who authored a 2015 commentary on Book 11 caution that the solar and underworld imagery could be based solely on Greek and Roman precedents, and they doubt Griffiths's assertion that Lucius undergoes a mystical union with Osiris.

[99] In the course of the book, as Valentino Gasparini puts it, "Osiris explicitly snatches out of Isis's hands the role of Supreme Being" and replaces her as the focus of Lucius's devotion.

[101] In contrast, Serapis, whose identity largely overlapped with that of Osiris and who was frequently worshipped jointly with Isis, is mentioned only once in the text, in the description of the festival procession.

Jaime Alvar considers the text to treat Serapis and Osiris as distinct figures, whereas the authors of the 2015 commentary doubt that Apuleius meant to sharply distinguish the two.

Devotees of Isis were among the very few religious groups in the Greco-Roman world to have a distinctive name for themselves, loosely equivalent to "Jew" or "Christian", that might indicate they defined themselves by their exclusive devotion to the goddess.

Several people in late Roman times, such as the aristocrat Vettius Agorius Praetextatus, joined multiple priesthoods and underwent several initiations dedicated to different gods.

Some of these initiations did involve smaller changes in religious identity, such as joining a new community of worshippers or strengthening devotees' commitment to a cult of which they were already part, that would qualify as conversions in a broader sense.

[111] Many ancient sources, both written by Isiacs and by outside observers, suggest that many of Isis's devotees considered her the focus of their lives and that the cult emphasized moral purity, self-denial, and public declarations of devotion to the goddess.

[124][Note 2] If the symbolism in Lucius's first initiation was a reference to the sun in the Egyptian underworld, that would indicate that it involved Osirian afterlife beliefs, even though Osiris is not mentioned in the description of the rite.

[127] As the classicist Robert Turcan put it, when Lucius is revealed to the crowd after his initiation he is "honoured almost like a new Osiris, saved and regenerated through the ineffable powers of Isis.

Before the early fourth century CE, baptism was the culmination of a long process, in which the convert to Christianity fasted for the forty days of Lent before being immersed at Easter in a cistern or natural body of water.

[137] Feasts in which worshippers ate the food that had been sacrificed to a deity were a nearly universal practice in Mediterranean religions and do not prove a direct link between Christianity and the mysteries of Isis.

"[139] Motifs from Apuleius's description of the Isiac initiation have been repeated and reworked in fiction and in esoteric belief systems in modern times, and they form an important part of the Western perception of ancient Egyptian religion.

[144] To join their ranks, the protagonist, Sethos, undergoes an initiation presided over by Isis, taking place in hidden chambers beneath the Great Pyramid of Giza.

[145][Note 3] The Divine Legation of Moses, a treatise by the Anglican theologian William Warburton published from 1738 to 1741, included an analysis of ancient mystery rites that drew upon Sethos for much of its evidence.

The best-known of these works is the 1791 opera The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder, in which the main character, Tamino, undergoes a series of trials overseen by priests who invoke Isis and Osiris.

According to Reinhold, it was this pantheistic belief system that Moses imparted to the Israelites, so that Isis and the Jewish and Christian conception of God shared a common origin.

In 1790, the poet Friedrich Schiller wrote an essay based on Reinhold's work that treated the mystery rite as a meeting with the awe-inspiring power of nature.

He argued that Moses's people were not prepared to grasp such an understanding of divinity, and thus the Jewish and Christian conception of God was a compromised version of the truth devised for public consumption.