Female Symbols

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Statue in stone of the goddess Isis suckling her child, Horus, dating to the Ptolemaic period (I century B.C.) and now in the Vatican Museums, Vatican City, Italy. The scene of the goddess suckling Horus was widely popular and expressed Isis’s role as exemplar model of motherhood. The goddess was furthermore regarded as helper of women in childbirth and of their children. The goddess’s headdress was surmounted by cow horns and emphasized her identification with Hathor, the mother goddess, reinforcing her maternal role as protectress of women, of love and of children. The cult of Isis was one of the last bulwarks of paganism which withstood the diffusion of Christianity in Egypt. The temple dedicated to the goddess on the island of Philae was definitely closed only under the reign of Justinian I (VI century A.D.). For this reason, it has been advanced the hypothesis that Isis cult was not totally lost, but it had an influence on the subsequent worship of the Virgin Mary, whose iconography seems to replicate that of the ancient Egyptian goddess (Benko 2004).

[Image: http://library.artstor.org/library/]