More specifically, Isis was viewed as protector of the god Imsety. Aphrodite is the ancient Greek goddess of beauty and love. With a single finger, Iris touched Hersilia and transformed her into an immortal goddess. Finally, Isis restores breath and life to Osiris’s body and copulates with him, conceiving their son, Horus. Isis was also known for her magical power, which enabled her to revive Osiris and to protect and heal Horus, and for her cunning. Horus was equated with each living pharaoh and Osiris with the pharaoh’s deceased predecessors. Consequently they were associated with Hathor, and hence with Isis. Isis plays a more active role in this myth that the other protagonists, so as it developed in literature from the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1070 BCE) to the Ptolemaic Period (305–30 BCE), she became the most complex literary character of all Egyptian deities. p. 170. The brothers had driven off the monsters from their torment of the prophet Phineus, but did not kill them upon the request of Iris, who promised that Phineus would not be bothered by the Harpies again. The tale describes both why Anubis is seen as an underworld deity (he is a son of Osiris), and why he couldn't inherit Osiris' position (he was not a legitimate heir), neatly preserving Osiris' position as lord of the underworld. There are no known temples or sanctuaries to Iris. In the Westcar Papyrus, Isis calls out the names of the three children as they are born. Her rites were considered by the princeps Augustus to be "pornographic" and capable of destroying the Roman moral fibre. Her symbols were the ankh, her wings, and her throne headdress. Their son is Pothos (Nonnus, Dionysiaca). She is the goddess of the rainbow. Her worship may have influenced Christian beliefs and practices such as the veneration of Mary, but the evidence for this influence is ambiguous and often controversial. Beliefs about Ra himself had been hovering around the identification of Ra, a sun god, with Horus, another sun god (as the compound Ra-Herakhty), and so for some time, Isis had intermittently been considered the wife of Ra, since she was the wife of Horus. Their efforts are the mythic prototype for mummification and other ancient Egyptian funerary practices. The ploy failed, but Osiris now found Nepthys very attractive, as he thought she was Isis. Iris had numerous poetic titles and epithets, including chrysopteros (χρυσόπτερος "golden winged"), podas ōkea (πόδας ὠκέα "swift footed") or podēnemos ōkea (ποδήνεμος ὠκέα "wind-swift footed"), roscida ("dewy", Latin), and Thaumantias (Θαυμαντιάς "Daughter of Thaumas, Wondrous One"), aellopus (ἀελλόπους "storm-footed, storm-swift). Passages in the Pyramid Texts connect Isis closely with Sopdet, the goddess representing the star Sirius, whose relationship with her husband Sah—the constellation Orion—and their son Sopdu parallels Isis’s relations with Osiris and Horus. [1] Goddesses have been linked with virtues such as beauty, love, sexuality, motherhood and fertility (Mother-goddess cult in prehistoric times). The tale describes how Nephthys became sexually frustrated with Set and so disguised herself as the much more attractive Isis to try to seduce him. Isis’s Greek devotees ascribed to her traits taken from Greek deities, such as the invention of marriage and the protection of ships at sea, and she retained strong links with Egypt and other Egyptian deities who were popular in the Hellenistic world, such as Osiris and Harpocrates. If this is true then Isis is still worshipped today, and has been for at least 5000 years, and if it is not, then there has still been a recent revival of explicitly Isis based worship, among neopagans and feminists who are attracted by the matriarchal notions of goddess worship. Partly because of her relationship with Sopdet, Isis was also linked with the flood, which was sometimes equated with the tears she shed for Osiris. [2] She also watered the clouds with her pitcher, obtaining the water from the sea. Originally, she played a limited role in royal rituals and temple rites, although she was more prominent in funerary practices and magical texts. She is also known as one of the goddesses of the sea and the sky. Like Hermes, Iris carries a caduceus or winged staff. Eventually the Roman emperor Caligula abandoned the Augustan wariness towards Oriental cults, and it was in his reign that the Isiac festival was established in Rome. Various Ptolemaic funerary texts emphasize that Isis took the active role in Horus’s conception by sexually stimulating her inert husband, some tomb decoration from the Roman period in Egypt depicts Isis in a central role in the afterlife, and a funerary text from that era suggests that women were thought able to join the retinue of Isis and Nephthys in the afterlife. Her maternal aid was invoked in healing spells to benefit ordinary people. Initially the most important of these goddesses was Hathor, a feminine counterpart of Ra and Horus, whose attributes in art were incorporated into queens’ crowns. She was believed to help the dead enter the afterlife as she had helped Osiris, and she was considered the divine mother of the pharaoh, who was likened to Horus.