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Veil of Isis


The veil of Isis is a metaphor and allegorical artistic motif in which nature is personified as the goddess Isis covered by a veil, representing the inaccessibility of nature's secrets. It is often combined with a related motif, in which nature is portrayed as a goddess with multiple breasts who represents Isis, Artemis, or a combination of both.

The motif was based on a statue of Isis in the Egyptian city of Sais mentioned by the Greco-Roman authors Plutarch and Proclus. They claimed the statue bore an inscription saying "I am all that has been and is and shall be; and no mortal has ever lifted my mantle." Illustrations of Isis with her veil being lifted were popular from the late 17th to the early 19th century, often as allegorical representations of Enlightenment science and philosophy uncovering nature's secrets. Authors at the end of the 18th century, foreshadowing the Romantic movement, began using the lifting of Isis's veil as a metaphor for revealing awe-inspiring truth. Helena Blavatsky, in Isis Unveiled in 1877, used the metaphor for the spiritual truths that her Theosophical belief system hoped to discover, and modern ceremonial magic includes a ritual called the Rending of the Veil to bring the magician to a higher state of spiritual awareness.

The first mention of the veil of Isis appears in On Isis and Osiris, a philosophical interpretation of ancient Egyptian religion by Plutarch, a Greek writer in the late first and early second centuries CE. Plutarch wrote of a seated statue of a goddess in the Egyptian city of Sais that bore the inscription "I am all that has been and is and shall be; and no mortal has ever lifted my mantle." Plutarch identified the goddess as "Athena, whom [the Egyptians] consider to be Isis." Sais was the cult center of the goddess Neith, whom the Greeks compared to their goddess Athena and was thus the goddess that Plutarch spoke of. In Plutarch's time Isis was the preeminent goddess in Egyptian religion and was frequently syncretized with Neith, which is why Plutarch equated the two. More than 300 years after Plutarch, the Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus wrote of the same statue in Book I of his Commentaries on Plato's "Timaeus". In this version, "no mortal" is replaced by "no one" and a third statement is added: "The fruit of my womb was the sun".


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