The Temple of Isis on the Nile

Thus far in the Fallen Temple we have been trying to reimagine a generic goddess temple...a kind of nature worship with common characteristics throughout the Mediterranean. We have tried to reimagine this generalised temple by interpretations of fragments of myth and poetry and music, but if challenged by an archaeologist (say) to take him to the site of this temple, to show him the actual stones on Lesbos that are the remains of Sappho's priestesshood, we would be unable to do so. An actual mother temple on Crete we have assumed lost in the calamities around 1600bc. However, there were many goddess temples founded by the ancient sea traders, and some lasted into more recent times, into recorded times, and so we have a more detailed source for understanding the nature of the goddess temples. Foremost of these are the temples of Isis in Egypt, which persisted until the middle of the first millennium AD. So, in this instance, we can offer an archaeologist not only the stones he requires, but also written records.
Isis is not so much an Egyptian goddess as a Greek one. She is the spirit of the all-important Nile, a water goddess of the Aphrodite Anadyomene ("blue Venus, or Venus rising") kind, and her annual association with Osiris can be seen as paralleling that of the goddess and the year-kings we have seen in other cultures. Thanks to Robert Graves who gave a new perspective through his exposition of Greek myths, modern historians have a new understanding of Greek and Roman cultures. This new insight, namely that the goddess was all-important in those times, has not yet been applied in the case of Egyptian archaeology. True, the male sun-god was of great importance in ancient Egypt, but in parched climes, water is more important than sunshine, and so the water and rain goddess was more important than the sun god. In Egyptian myth as in Greek, the goddess gave birth to all things, including the other gods, at the dawn of time. In Egyptian carvings in all periods, the pharoah's position in this life and the hereafter is represented as a ritual to Isis, attended by dancing priestesses, who were more than mere attendants. It is Isis and her priestesses who annually revive Osiris, (equivalent to the Mediterranean and European god of the new year, say Zeus) after his annual murder by his brother/rival Set (equivalent to the god of the old year, say Saturn), and as in the case of Sappho, it is the priestesses who have access to the heavens, and who say who is to be a god and who is not to be. Thus, Egyptian religious beliefs in the early period had more in common with other goddess cultures than is presently supposed, even before the late period, when Greek beliefs were imposed by the conquerer, Alexander the Great.

Many who have tried to re-imagine the temples of the ancient goddess have believed that the "wisdom of the ancients" has been lost to us forever, either in such events as the geological upheaval which ended the supremacy of the culture on Crete; or by the burning of the Library of Alexandria, or by religious suppression of individuals who carried the flame of that ancient knowledge. Undoubtedly some details have been lost, but we are in possession of more knowledge from those ancient sources than we currently recognise... we simply have failed to recognise and respect the sources.

A conventional or popular view of the history of western civilisation is this: writing and religion begins with the Hebrew bible, which is passed on to the Romans, who pass it on to the western European nations, who have been the most advanced and scientific nations ever since. In fact, settled urban civilisation begins in Iraq; reaches a high sophistication on Crete, is spread to all points on the Mediterranean; east to India and tropical Asia, and as far as Ireland in the west by the Minoans, is carried forward by the Greeks, and reaches a late flowering in the Greek enclave in Egypt. From Alexandria and Menouthis, the astronomy, medicine, mathematics, poetry, and music developed in the goddess temples was passed to the Arab cultures. Thereafter, the knowledge came to western Europe largely from this source, bringing an end to the Dark Ages. The Christian west was reluctant to acknowledge the intellectual debt owed to the Moors (Arabs), while it was happy adopt and adapt Arabic mathematics, architecture, social structures and medicine (which it obtained as a whole with the surrender of the Moorish cities in Spain, and in the course of the Hapsburg conflict with Istanbul). Nonetheless, Arabic sources (under Latinised names) were drawn on extensively by Christian monks and scholars, that is, they drew on the knowledge developed by the Arabs from the original source in Alexandria. Included in their libraries were: the Almagest (Arabic: "great work"), ancient herbals, commentaries on the life of Hypatia, and the works in Latin of Lucius Apuleius.

Then by little and little I seemed to see the whole figure of her body, mounting out of the sea and standing before me, wherefore I purpose to describe her divine semblance, if the poverty of my human speech will suffer me, or her divine power give me eloquence thereto.
First she had a great abundance of hair, dispersed and scattered about her neck, on the crown of her head she bare many garlands interlaced with flowers, in the middle of her forehead was a compass in fashion of a glass, or resembling the light of the Moon, in one of her hands she bore serpents, in the other, blades of corn, her vestment was of fine silk yielding divers colours, sometime yellow, sometime rosy, sometime flamy, and sometime (which troubled my spirit sore) dark and obscure, covered with a black robe in manner of a shield, and pleated in most subtle fashion at the skirts of her garments, the welts appeared comely, whereas here and there the stars glimpsed, and in the middle of them was placed the Moon, which shone like a flame of fire, round about the robe was a coronet or garland made with flowers and fruits.
In her right hand she had a timbrell of brass, which gave a pleasant sound, in her left hand she bare a cup of gold, out of the mouth whereof the serpent Aspis lifted up his head, with a swelling throat, her perfumed feet were covered with shoes interlaced and wrought with victorious palm. Thus the divine shape breathing out the pleasant spice of fertile Arabia, disdained not with her divine voice to utter these words unto me: Behold Lucius I am come, thy weeping and prayers hath moved me to succour thee.
I am she that is the natural mother of all things, mistress and governesse of all the Elements, the initial progeny of worlds, chief of powers divine, Queen of heaven, the principal of the Gods celestial, the light of the goddesses: at my will the planets of the air, the wholesome winds of the Seas, and the silences of hell be disposed;

Picture: A statue of Isis discovered by the Goddio team. Text: Vision of Isis described by Lucius Apuleius

The Temple of Isis on the Nile, or rather its stones, has recently been re-discovered. Statues of Isis have been raised from the water, together with artefacts which decorated the temple and its environs. Principal among them is the Naos of the Decades, a large stone box which was housed within the main temple, and which originally contained the statue of Isis. The Naos is carved with recognisable astrological symbols and (presumably, for I have been denied access to the photos) the star chart schema of Ptolemy (see below).

Artefacts associated with the priestesses of the temple of Isis. The silver objects; the blue gems, the spiral and lotus patterns on the cups, and the snake bracelet remain as goddess symbols to this day.

No commentator has yet associated the temple of Isis with the other temple roles we have discussed. There has been no mention of a high priestess; of temple musicians; of a high poet, of astronomers, of mathematicians, so let us turn to these topics in detail, using other, established sources, even if those other sources have never signalled a relationship between these individuals, other than that, once upon a time, they each lived by the sacred Nile.

Hypatia's name occurs in western literature for two reasons. She is mentioned in a report by the first Christian bishop in Alexandria, who gives an account of her death at the hands of a crowd of anti-pagans. The account says that she was cut with oystershells - whether this meant that she was roughly flayed (skinned) or whether some kind of popular vote is implied, or it is a reference to the wrecking of the temple itself remains unclear. What is certain is that Hypatia, who until that time was the most respected and honoured woman in Alexandria, was heard of no more.
Hypatia is better known to modern mathematicians than to students of goddess culture. She was the daughter of temple mathematician Theon, and extended his work after his death. Modern mathematicians have attempted to find (by stylistic analysis) whether the work sprang from her own genius or whether she merely edited her father's late works. That question does not concern this author: I see in Hypatia a typical high priestess of a typical goddess-temple, and in Theon a typical servant-priest, who stood at the end of a long chain of astronomer mathematicians whose only wish was to have their work accepted and recognised by the living representative of the great goddess, the high priestess.

Lucius was a Nubian-born scholar, who can be called the last great pagan philosopher. His misfortune was to live in a time when the goddess-culture was being suppressed at home and throughout the empire by the great world power of that time, Rome. Lucius was an inspired writer and poet. He wrote in Latin as well as other languages, and mounted a defence of the goddess, debating the Roman philosophers in their own terms. Two of his works in Latin were part of the literature available to the Christian monks of later centuries, as they are to us. They are The Apology (Apologia) and The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses). The Apology is an account of the real-life trial in which Lucius defended himself against a charge that he had obtained benefits from a rich widow (then his wife) by sorcery. Lucius was successful in his suit, in the course of which he used logical argument from presented evidence, cross-examination, and every other ploy (such as flattering the judge) to win the case. The Apology is to this day required reading at many law schools, as a model of how to present and argue a case. To modern students of goddess history, however, it provides a glimpse of a man holding all the intellectual benefits of the temple, struggling against a multitude for whom the possession of such knowledge was a sign of a practitioner of witchcraft. An example from the trial was his interest sea creatures (Lucius collected and classified fish in the manner of Plato) from which the prosecution implied a devotion to the sea goddess.
Where The Apology became a guide for future lawyers, The Golden Ass was a guide for writers of fiction...it has been hailed as the first novel. The hero is called Lucius, and although the events described in the story are wildly fantastic, there is clearly autobiographical content. The story: Young Lucius meddles with the wrong witches, and is turned into an ass as punishment. He then wanders the countryside, being mistreated by one group of captors after another. Each of these episodes makes a moral point about different kinds of behaviour, about the social factions of that time, which reveals to us that there was morality projected by the goddess-temples, including a denunciation of cross-dressing libidinous soothsayers. There are several tales-within-a-tale, the most glorious being Cupid and Psyche which may be seen as a rite-of-passage story for young women.

Eventually, Lucius comes at midnight to a moonlit shore, where he has a personal meeting with the goddess Isis. This passage is heavy with meaning: the poet Robert Graves was so taken by this text that he undertook his own translation from the Latin, and made this scene, a poet's description of the goddess, his definition of the function of a true poet.
Isis restores Lucius to his human shape, and there follows a description of an Isis ceremony which is our best source of detail about them. The fact that this document was present in the libraries of Christian scholars may have provided the Church with the material from which they constructed their slanders against witches and sorcerers: the scene in which Lucius speaks with Isis can be twisted into the classic "selling your soul to the devil" contract, if Mephistopheles is substituted for Isis, and Faust for Lucius.

Lucius also provided a model for later men with knowledge of the goddess. He does not write directly about his forbidden and dangerous topic, rather he places the important content "between the lines" or in the background, where it will be overlooked by many, but clearly understood by an important few. Whether it was his intention or not, Lucius used his skill as a poet to encode threatened goddess knowledge in a form which would permit its transfer across millennia, a powerful spell indeed.

The Almagest (arabic "great work") is (in the writer's view) the most significant document to come to us from ancient times. It consists of a collection of scrolls devoted to mainly to mathematics and astronomy, and it used to be said that these were the few scrolls saved when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed by fire. To date, no archaeologist has excavated a site, pointed to charred relics, and declared them remnants of this famed library. The Library of Alexandria may never have existed. What we do know is that nearby Alexandria was a goddess-temple with a high-priestess; that such a priestess was traditionally served by astronomers, mathematicians and scribes; that her temple was surrounded by a precinct housing a large staff. It may soon emerge that the "burning of the Library of Alexandria" was in fact "the sacking of the Temple of Isis".
Included in the Almagest are the star charts of Ptolemy, which are the basis for all of modern astronomy, providing the original names of the constellations; a map of the zodiac constituting a calendar, and a uniform system for measuring and recording the angle (position) and brightness of individual stars with great accuracy. Ptolemy was also a philosopher who pondered the very question modern scientists might wish to ask of him: whether his work was an investigation of pure physics, or of observation of the divine. Ptolemy concluded, as did Pythagorus, that mathematics was the divine revealed.

The fundamentals of modern science spring directly from the goddess temples. The process of proof from established and agreed assumptions is there in Euclid. The process of publication and peer review is there. It is surprising therefore that modern science pays little respect to the temples and the theology of the ancients, dismissing them as the source of astrology and superstition, while ignoring their role as the font of medicine; mathematics, literature, music and man's sense of being a natural part of a single awesome and beautiful creation.