About the Isis Project

The Isis project is the newest contribution to a branching series in WEARABLES called DIVINES. I’ve already created three designs about divine females, and I always felt like they didn’t quite fit in with the mortals, especially after I started making perSISTERS prints. Some of the wearables people became perSISTERS people, but the divine people could never be. So I thought it would be interesting to make more scarves about divine females, because there is power in their stories too. The task: how to recalibrate a representation of a divine female power without being mired in the spiritual language crafted by patriarchy. This was a language that developed to define female power vis à vis, and subservient to, patriarchy. 

Here I would like to establish my approach to spiritual beings and the impulse in feminist thought to look for an original matriarchy that we can all call home. First, although I am an atheist, I also believe that our understanding and perception is limited, so true explanations about how the universe works are likely to be beyond our ability to express. I believe that expressions of Absolute Truths are more about humans, and how we think, than about the world, let alone a “more real” world than ours. To me these expressions are aesthetic. Second, I don’t believe there was a primeval matriarchy (there is no clear record of this in the archeology) and I don’t believe that ancient thinking was truer than modern. I think it’s up to us to make something new and it can be legitimate without having to belong to an older and truer or purer time. What is true about the ancient symbols is the way they tap into our nervous systems to express powerful ideas. So I am trying to access that same power with fresh images that might be surprising and familiar at the same time. 

The Isis Project is a collaboration with Rose Black, Queen of the Nihil (and my daughter). Besides being a photographer and digital artist—and a gifted writer—she has been building elaborate and beautiful earrings. She picked Isis. She did the research. She proposed the idea that Isis could be the goddess of emotional labor and unpaid work. She co-wrote the writing that follows. A post about the earrings and her design inspirations is coming soon. Please follow Rose Black on Instagram @sleepingci.ty and the web sleepingcity.online.

Isis repairs the world

The goddess Isis is always trying to repair things. Often seen as the most popular and enduring of the Egyptian deities, she evolved into The Universal Caretaker, according to her Egyptian worshippers, and her rituals spread throughout the mediterranean and Europe with the march of the Romans. Isis’s identity is fluid because she’s been popular for so long. At some times she is only one in a divine family of bickering sibling-spouses. At other times she absorbs many of these personalities into her self, becoming an all-goddess. In almost all her roles she is depicted as some sort of mother, or sister, or widow deep in mourning for a lost loved one. When she isn’t directly caring for one of her family, she is picking up the messes caused by the rash actions of her godly siblings. Or she is grieving the results of those siblings’ fiery, chaotic wills. Her grief is epic: it is emotional labor as divine engine.

In the Egyptian pantheon, the married siblings, Isis and Osiris, govern the human world as benevolent and wise rulers. The goddess gives power and legitimacy to human kings and queens (mostly kings). In fact, the most iconic image of Isis depicts her with a throne on her head: a right-angled, blocky shape. A man has power because a woman gave it to him. 

In many of the stories, Isis is seen battling the chaotic tendencies of a particular brother, Set. The ultimate annoying brother, Set is a destructive trickster who hates Osiris in particular, and thrills at upsetting the order that was brought to the world by his authoritative siblings. Isis’s task is always, forever, to restore her beautiful order to the world, again and again and again. This pull and push between the trickster and the goddess of order is the fundamental engine powering the universe. When I think of the geography of ancient Egypt, this cosmogony makes a lot of sense. The Nile river flooded regularly, wreaking havoc on the human landscape, while providing an essential boost to the ecosystem. An orderly disorder was the engine of life in that place, with the river functioning like the unruly brother to the goddess of fertility.

A foundational story brings together all the themes behind Isis’s power. In it she is in turn the grieving widow, the magician, the mother, the caretaker of the Egyptian people, and the eternal defender against the forces of chaos. In almost every story, she appears as either mother, widow, or maiden, and here she is all three. This is how it goes: Through a series of elaborate tricks, Set finally manages to trap Osiris in a coffin and kill him. When Isis discovers her lover’s body, and is on the brink of reviving him, Set again seizes Osiris’s corpse. This time Set cuts Osiris into small pieces, scattering him up and down the Nile’s landscape. Isis has to start all over again. She finds the pieces and gathers them together and, taking the form of a bird, uses her wings to beat the air to force life back into Osiris’s body only long enough for her to draw his sperm into herself, thus ensuring an heir to the divine kingship of Egypt. Even in all her power as the divine caretaker—and her skilled arts as The Great Magician—Isis cannot sustain Osiris’s life beyond this point. Osiris leaves to rule as king of the underworld where the dead reside, and Isis is left alone to grieve, with only her ever-swelling belly as consolation. She has failed in her ultimate goal, but has gained enough in the process to keep the world alive through her love, her will, her fertility, and her grief.

What can Isis mean to us? What power does she embody with this failure to save her lover, this constant fixing-of-messes, this emotional laboring in the grief factory? When we do unpaid work we often console ourselves with the thought that it is fulfilling work. Is Isis fulfilled by this work, the way we think women can be fulfilled by similar work in their families and political or social causes? Fulfillment really implies an eventual perfect state of order or of justice, of fullness. How can we be fulfilled if we build something that just gets knocked over? How can we fill a vessel that is always leaking? I propose that the ideal of a perfect household or society is a trap, because failure is inevitable, and shame and blame the result. Your work is never enough and it never ends and you will never, ever, get paid. 

Her lover dies, but still Isis produces offspring through her magical art, without even touching her undead mate. Her son, Horus, is the sun. Isis’s failure is inevitable because death is inevitable. Death is inevitable because Isis’s failure is inevitable. The order and perfection that Isis seeks is beautiful, yes, but isn’t the striving also beautiful? Is the order she would otherwise have imposed better than this dance of imperfection? In the affairs of humans, when we imagine the most orderly state, aren’t we imagining a controlling, fascist state in which only the dominant can flourish? Is the throne on the goddess’s head the throne of a despot? Isn’t it the natural order of things to fall apart in the end? Entropy is not misrule, it is the rule. Wouldn’t true power come from knowing this and still striving for beautiful but imperfect outcomes? I propose that a loving mess is infinitely better than an order based on control.

The Throne of Female Power

This is why I have depicted the throne of female power, displayed by our Isis, as a fancy comfy chair. It is a place to sit in love and comfort and it is wide enough to support you and your offspring. But, like the soft look of puffy clouds—which are really cold and wet mist—it is a throne of art and not of hard and certain order. It is beautiful and it does hold you up, as long as you keep beating your wings.

If you proceed with the knowledge that everything you try to set right will eventually deteriorate and need to be fixed again, and if you can still find motivation to keep fixing and caring and living your life—this living that is beautiful and messy, full of pleasures and grief—then you are pretty well fortified. One day you might find yourself among the few who can still pick themselves up and keep going, keep fixing or fighting or caring or loving, no matter the blow that’s been struck. While so many people are busy mourning the loss of the possibility of a perfect world, you’ll be the reason the world we have keeps on turning.

This is the power that Isis can teach us. Because it takes an incredible amount of strength—yes, possibly even the strength of a goddess—to keep going whilst holding in one’s mind both the drive to fix and the certainty that all that is fixed will again be broken.