Troubles of Biographers: I is for Iconic Isis

Trouble: Is it possible to write a biography of a mythical figure?

The attendant trouble is, How much should history rely on myth?

In an Ancient Rome course I took years ago (I ended up using many of the notes from the course in my first Donna Howard book), the class read Livy's The History of Rome and then debated this precise issue. 

Livy is obviously attempting to write history, a story about ancestors and where the state/nation came from. He isn't trying to write fable or poetry. Yet he relies on the Romulus and Remus myth, which no current history of Ancient Rome includes except to say, Hey, there was this myth...

Was Livy aware of what he was doing? I think so. He seems a pretty savvy guy as he parcels out his "facts." He uses phrases like "the story goes" and "they say that." Yet at the same time, he isn't exactly apologetic. If anything, he seems rather resigned: "My opinion, however, is that the origin of so great a city and an empire next in power to that of the gods was due to the fates."

The modern view of history writing states that history is about interpreting primary evidence. You can't interview the wolf who mothered the twins? Well, that's kind of a problem. 

On the other hand, the gray areas of history have always existed. And they have always interested me the most. When I was younger, I even shied away from Ancient Egyptian history because I mistakenly believed it to be "complete." 

The first major historical research I did on my own (not for school) was of the "real" King Arthur or, rather, the possibly Romano-British chieftain (Artos) who may have fought off encroaching Saxons when the Romans abandoned England. Artos is referenced possibly once in a text by a nutty monk contemporary to the period. 

Not terribly conclusive, yet the clanking armor version was far less enthralling than the shadowy, never-entirely-provable version. The parts of history where myth becomes a resource continue to fascinate me.  

Some historians oppose this approach, of course. Other historians try the nearly impossible task of teasing "facts" from stories. In the end, unfortunately, lore is still not enough. Other documents and material artifacts become necessary.

Consequently, any biography of a goddess will, by default, become the biography of a belief. But can it give us a clue to the goddess's personality as understood by believers? 

I picked Isis the goddess (not the terrorist group). It was terrifically difficult to find books on Isis that weren't (1) about the terrorist group; (2) story books; (3) quasi-religious books about the supposed good old days when female goddesses ruled. Here are my choices:

Witt, R.E. Isis in The Ancient World. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971.

Hollis, Susan Tower. Five Egyptian Goddesses. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.   

Overview: Isis had tremendous significance in the ancient Mediterranean world. Nearly all goddesses got connected to her while belief in Isis--which lasted beyond Cleopatra's era--washed over into the reverence shown Mary, Lady Madonna. 

She does not token utopian matriarchal beginnings. In fact, the unique and rather marvelous thing about Isis is that she and Osiris were nearly always paired. They were worshiped separately, even in Ancient Egypt, and Osirian beliefs, initially populist in nature, got interwoven into top-down hierarchical beliefs, yet brother/sister-husband/wife were continually referred to as a pair and eventually a triad of husband/wife/son. 

On the other hand, Isis persisted longer than Osiris. He lingered but as an Egyptian deity while the Romans and others took Isis on wholeheartedly. Rather like a Catholic saint, specifically the mother of Jesus, she became the ultimate compassionate intercessor, the mother figure to which any confessor can go. She was both pure and sexy, agricultural and cosmopolitan.

Regarding the books about her:

R.E. Witt's book is considered a seminal text, being the most complete scholarly book about Isis. Hollis references it in her chapter on Isis and Nephthys. Witt's book is also a good example of how love for a subject can occasionally override good sense. Witt argues, correctly, that Isis became an international goddess in the Graeco-Roman world, easily subsuming--as noted above--other goddesses' identities and functions within herself. Isis was surprisingly more flexible than most cultures' gods and goddesses, even those within Egypt. 

However, Witt's exaltation of Isis's celebrity status borders on the worshipful, not of the deity but of the thesis. I reached a point where I couldn't help but think, Uh, I think other things were going on in the Greco-Roman world OTHER than the worship of Isis. At one point, for instance, Witt attempts to argue that Apostle Paul was using Isiac beliefs in his letters. After two paragraphs, the argument becomes ridiculous. It is not that Paul wouldn't have been familiar with Egyptian beliefs (they were prevalent in the Ancient World). It is that Paul grew up in a cosmopolitan city and was a trained Pharisee. He would have been familiar with Egyptian beliefs, Babylonian beliefs, possibly Buddhist beliefs, not to mention Jewish and Palestinian lore and beliefs stretching back centuries. 

Witt is making the same mistake as Breasted. Because a line can be traced between my thesis and the extant evidence, that means that such a line existed. 

Well--maybe...but...post hoc ergo propter hoc.

One thing that Witt does impressively right is show how religious observance hasn't changed much since, oh, the beginning of time. Although, again, Witt attempts to tie all human behavior back to Isis, scholarly thoroughness thankfully triumphs over obsession. My reaction was, Huh, human beings revel in certain artistic modes of expression regarding belief. Hymns. Festivals. Priests and priestesses. Sacrifices. Art. Recitations. Rituals. 

C.S. Lewis once argued that human beings need new stuff coupled with the known. We are curious, so we want "new," but we are human and easily tired (and kind of dumb), so we need repetition. Traditions, holidays, festivities, and religious observances supply a perfect combination of new alongside repetition. 

When the author stops worshiping at the altar of the thesis, Witt makes a similar point: "It is well-known that in the higher religions, as for instance Christianity, the central figure undergoes kaleidoscopic transformations according to the standpoint of the individual behavior" (112). 

The most impressive aspect of Witt's book is the thorough research. The human interest in religion--and how that interest is expressed--is clarified by detailed notes that span the worship of Isis in Egypt to the worship of Isis in Pompeii. 

Hollis's book makes the fascinating argument that Isis and her sister goddess Nephyths as a pair are survivals from pre-Pyramid mortuary rites in Egypt (possibly the oldest mortuary rites that have survivable texts) in which the two goddesses represent rites performed for the dead. 

Hollis argues that Isis and Nephthys originally had equal weight, Isis only rising to the fore in the later eras. I found Hollis's argument interesting but not entirely plausible. Although Nephthys obviously did exist as a separate goddess and may even have been more directly involved in death rituals, the texts that Hollis quotes present Nephthys as a kind of echo to Isis. It is hard not to get all Jungian and see her as the "dark side" of another face. 

I have no idea whether ancient Egyptians were that figurative or were more literal. 

(And neither does anyone else, really.) 

In sum, it is possible to detail the "character" of a mythic being--but it might help if that mythic being is rarely currently worshiped, so there are few believers around who will get personally offended.