Isis

Isis began as one Egyptian goddess among many, attested in the Pyramid Texts by about 2400 BCE as the wife of Osiris and mother of Horus. From the Hellenistic period her cult broke out of Egypt and crossed the Mediterranean. By the first century CE she was worshipped from Alexandria to Asia Minor, Hispania, Gaul and Germania; her Iseum in Rome was rebuilt under Vespasian and Domitian, the temple at Pompeii was reconstructed and left almost intact under the ash of 79 CE, and a flagon found in Southwark records a shrine to her in Londinium. She had mysteries and initiates, a priesthood, and a festival calendar: every 5 March the Navigium Isidis sent a votive ship out to open the sailing season, a rite Apuleius wrote into The Golden Ass in the second century. For several centuries she was among the most widely worshipped deities in the Roman world.

Christianity ended the cult. Imperial law against pagan worship closed temple after temple, and Isis outlasted nearly all of them: her sanctuary at Philae in southern Egypt kept operating into the sixth century, staffed by hereditary priests, until Justinian ordered it shut around 537 CE — the priests imprisoned, the cult statues carried off to Constantinople. That closure is conventionally marked as the end of ancient Egyptian religion. Scholars have noted that some of her epithets and her image — “Queen of Heaven,” the mother nursing her child (Isis lactans) — reappear in later depictions of the Virgin Mary. That is iconographic influence and echo, the reuse of a familiar form by the religion that displaced her. It is not the survival of her worship. No one sails a ship for Isis on 5 March, and Philae has received no prayer to her in roughly fifteen hundred years.