The Story of our Lady of the Stars

This very brief introduction to Our Lady is meant only to peak your interest in Her. It is by no means complete. I humbly suggest that if you would like to find out more about Isis and how She has come to shape Western thought, that you do some investigations on your own. I have always thought that gifts are best unwrapped by those who receive them and not by some third party.

Goddess of Ten Thousand Names

Though worshiped all over Egypt, our Lady Isis was especially venerated in much of the ancient world from Babylon to Persia to Greece to Rome.

From a list of titles it is clear that Isis was called Usert in Thebes, Aat in Heliopolis, Menkhet in Memphis, God-Mother in Coptos, Hert in Letopolis, and Queen in almost every country of the then known Middle Earth.

Among her names may be mentioned - the Divine One, the Only One, Queen of Gods, the Sacred Eye, Crown of the Sun, Our Lady of Heaven, and finally and most accurately, Queen of the World and the Mother of God.

It was by this last name that she came to be known to the early Christians, who so revered her, they incorporated her into their religion as Mary, Mother of Jesus. A study of the story of Isis and her son Horus reveals that it was taken almost verbatim and placed into the Biblical story explaining the miraculous "virgin" birth of Christ. Present day Christians will deny this, but by looking at an image of Isis holding the baby Horus in her arms one can easily see the later Western image of the Madonna and Child that all of us know today. Even Mary and Jesus' halo, symbolizing their divinity, is simply an echo of the Star Disk that Isis wore as part of her royal regalia.

Mary and Jesus: The Madonna and Child came to supplant the original source of the Mother Goddess and Child. Or did it?

"Though her worship originated in ancient Egypt, by the Hellenistic times she had assimilated the attributes of the major Greek female divinities Demeter and Aphrodite, who were in fact inspired by her. By the imperialistic period of the Roman Empire, she had become the most prominent deity of the broad Mediterranean basin and her influence on then Western thought complete, as her magnificent temple at Pompeii attests. At this time she was considered the supreme feminine spirit of all civilized Europe though she was called by many different names according to the region in which she was celebrated.

Isis' cult focused on the mysteries associated with the death and resurrection of Osiris, and on the cycles of life as created by nature. In The Golden Ass (ca.155 AD), Lucius Apuleius, an African priest of Isis, left an excellent account of her appearance into the underground stream of allegorical thought; in a dream, Apuleius saw Queen Isis arise on a clam shell from the sea, no doubt the later inspiration of The Birth of Venus by Botticelli.

During the early centuries AD the cult of Isis vied with the newly founded Christian religion for dominance. Despite the extremely violent persecutions of her followers by the Roman Catholic Church, who sought to replace her with Mary, the Isis cult stubbornly continued well into the 6th century, and even today it has not been completely silenced by the dictates of Rome."

- from Isis and Mary, Different Names, Same Woman by Magda Ova Aserkitis

Anubis, Voyager

Isis and Osirus



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