page_title: Mysteries of Isis
section_title: Influence in modern times
hierarchical_section_title: Mysteries of Isis / Influence on other traditions / Influence in modern times
caption_attribution_description: English: Frontispiece to Erasmus Darwin's poem The Temple of Nature, an engraving based on a drawing by Johann Heinrich Füssli.
context_page_description: The mysteries of Isis were religious initiation rites performed in the cult of the goddess Isis in the Greco-Roman world. They were modeled on other mystery rites, particularly the Eleusinian Mysteries in honor of the Greek goddess Demeter, and originated sometime between the third century BCE and the second century CE. Despite their mainly Hellenistic origins, the mysteries did allude to beliefs from ancient Egyptian religion, in which the worship of Isis arose. By undergoing the mystery rites, initiates signaled their dedication to Isis, although they were not required to worship her exclusively. The rites were seen as a symbolic death and rebirth, and they may have been thought to guarantee that the initiate's soul, with the goddess's help, would continue after death in a blissful afterlife.
  Many texts from the Roman Empire refer to the mysteries of Isis, 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. In it, the initiate undergoes elaborate ritual purification before descending into the innermost part of Isis's temple, where he has an intense religious experience, seeing the gods in person.
context_section_description: 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 thus form an important part of the Western perception of ancient Egyptian religion. People reusing these motifs often assume that mystery rites were practiced in Egypt long before Hellenistic times.
  An influential example is the 1731 novel Life of Sethos by Jean Terrasson. Terrasson claimed he had translated this book from an ancient Greek work of fiction that was based on real events. The book was actually his own invention, inspired by ancient Greek sources that assumed Greek philosophers had derived their wisdom from Egypt. In the novel, Egypt's priests run an elaborate education system like a European university. 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. Based on Lucius's statement in The Golden Ass that he was "borne through all the elements" during his initiation, Terrasson describes the initiation as an elaborate series of ordeals, each based on one of the classical elements: running over hot metal bars for fire, swimming a canal for water, and swinging through the air over a pit.
  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. Assuming that all mystery rites derived from Egypt, Warburton argued that the public face of Egyptian religion was polytheistic, but the Egyptian mysteries were designed to reveal a deeper, monotheistic truth to elite initiates. One of them, Moses, learned this truth during his Egyptian upbringing and developed Judaism to reveal it to the entire Israelite nation.
  Freemasons, members of a European fraternal organization that attained its modern form in the early eighteenth century, developed many pseudohistorical origin myths that traced Freemasonry back to ancient times. Egypt was among the civilizations that Masons claimed had influenced their traditions. After Sethos was published, several Masonic lodges developed rites based on those in the novel. Late in the century, Masonic writers, still assuming that Sethos was an ancient story, used the obvious resemblance between their rites and the initiation of Sethos as evidence of Freemasonry's supposedly ancient origin. Many works of fiction from the 1790s to the 1820s reused and modified the signature traits of Terrasson's Egyptian initiation: trials by three or four elements, often taking place under the pyramids. The best-known of these works is the 1791 opera The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emmanuel Schikaneder, in which the main character, Tamino, undergoes a series of trials overseen by priests who invoke Isis and Osiris.
  Karl Leonhard Reinhold, a philosopher and Freemason writing in the 1780s, drew upon and modified Warburton's claims in an effort to reconcile Freemasonry's traditional origin story, which traces Freemasonry back to ancient Israel, with its enthusiasm for Egyptian imagery. He claimed that the sentence "I am that I am", spoken by the Jewish God in the Book of Exodus, had a pantheistic meaning. He compared it with an Egyptian inscription on a veiled statue of Isis recorded by the Roman-era authors Plutarch and Proclus, which said "I am all that is, was, and shall be," and argued that Isis was a pantheistic personification of Nature. 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 contrast, some people in the wake of the dechristianisation of France during the French Revolution used the imagery of a pantheistic Isis to represent their opposition to the clergy and to Christianity in general. For instance, an esoteric fraternal organization in Napoleonic France, the Sophisian Order, regarded Isis as their tutelary deity. To them, she symbolized 
caption: The unveiling of a statue of Isis as a personification of nature, depicted as the climactic moment of an Isiac initiation, in an 1803 engraving by Henry Fuseli[114]
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