Isis Returns with A New Consciousness

Recently I recorded a conversation with Hebba el Naggar — an Egyptian cosmic Sufi dancer with whom I will be holding The Return of Isis retreat. In that dialogue, I touched briefly on the myth of Isis and Osiris. I want to go deeper now, because this myth is not a relic. It is a map of psychic and civilisational evolution which could not be more relevant right now.

In the story, Set dismembers Osiris and scatters his body across Egypt. Isis gathers the pieces, reassembles him - minus the phallus - and through sacred intelligence conceives Horus from a resurrected Osiris. On the surface, it is myth. Psychologically, it is anatomy.

Osiris is not simply a benevolent king. He is the organising principle of consciousness; the inner sovereign aligned with higher law. Set is not cartoon evil; he is the unrestrained lower nature, the shadow unintegrated, instinct divorced from order. Their conflict is perennial: higher self and lower impulse, logos and chaos, coherence and fragmentation.

When Set dismembers Osiris, it symbolises psychic and cultural fragmentation. The body scattered across the land mirrors consciousness scattered across complexes. This is what corruption looks like. Not merely moral failure, but loss of inner kingship. When instinct rules without integration, the kingdom falls.

Isis does not confront Set through force. She gathers.

This is essential.

Isis represents divine nature aligned with cosmic law, not man-made law. She is not sentimental motherhood. She is disciplined participation in universal order. In Jungian terms, she performs the work of integration: retrieving what has been dissociated. Piece by piece, she restores structure to what was fragmented.

But she cannot restore the old order entirely.

The phallus is missing.

This absence is symbolic. The generative masculine principle - true creative potency - has been damaged. The old form of consciousness cannot simply be revived. It must be transmuted. Isis fashions what is missing through magic; not fantasy, but imagination aligned with archetypal law. What Jung would call the transcendent function: from tension, a third thing emerges.

Horus is not Osiris reborn.

He is a new synthesis.

The myth complicates itself further: Osiris’ union with Nebthet produces Anubis, the opener of ways, the embalmer, the psychopomp. Anubis is the wound between the four: Isis, Osiris, Set and Nebthet. He stands at the threshold between worlds. Like Chiron, he carries the mark of rupture, yet becomes guide through death. He swims in the realm between Saturn (time) and Uranus (divine flame of creation). Without this wound, there is no descent. Without descent, no resurrection. Without resurrection, no Horus. In time, Anubis guides the king-to-be towards the divine spark of self-creation.

The pattern echoes elsewhere. Isis conceives through divine intervention. Mary conceives Christ also through divine intervention. In both stories, a corrupted order reaches its peak; a feminine vessel holds steady to higher law; a miraculous conception occurs outside the diseased system; and a single mother raises a child who will confront tyranny.

This is not about biological virginity. It is about psychic integrity: conception untouched by collective distortion.

Consciousness evolves through crisis.

There are moments in myth when corruption becomes systemic — when oppression of women and children marks the decay of a civilisation. In Egyptian cosmology, Sekhmet is sent when shadow overruns the field. History is replete with cycles of child sacrifice, infanticide, annihilation of the vulnerable and from those ashes, new consciousness arises. Moses. Horus. Christ. The tyrant always fears the child because the child represents the future pattern.

The child is not only literal. It is emergent awareness.

The Flower of Life engraved at Abydos is not decorative. It encodes recurrence; the fractal architecture of becoming. Consciousness flowers in precise geometry. Nothing is random. Every culture carries this pattern because it is structural to the psyche.

Isis, then, is not a static image of the Divine Mother. She is the dynamic process required to gestate and protect new consciousness. She gathers fragments. She fashions what is missing. She conceives against the odds. She raises alone. She protects the child from Set until he is strong enough to confront him… A familiar story among most of us today.

And we find ourselves again at such a threshold.

Aquarius speaks of networks, circuits, collective reorganisation. The future is not abstract; it is the child, ours or otherwise because our children are not safe and free unless all children are safe and free. When many women feel called to gather, it is not regression into nostalgia; it is structural intelligence responding to fragmentation. Saturn disciplines the vision. Venus coheres it. The Moon gestates it. Uranus rewires it. This is divine psychic architecture.

So the question becomes simple, though not easy:

Can we gather what has been scattered within us?
Can we integrate the shadow rather than project it?
Can we conceive a new pattern without replicating the corruption of the old?
Can we mother what is emerging long enough for it to stand?

And can we do it regardless of our differences - our ethnicities, economic status, demography, etc?

To flower is not naïve. A rose blooms because its structure holds. Venus is not softness; she is coherence through attraction. Flowering requires discipline.

The myth of Isis and Osiris is not about the past. It describes an ongoing process: fragmentation, retrieval, sacred imagination, miraculous conception, disciplined protection, and eventual confrontation with the shadow.

Blessed are the children - the emerging consciousness.
Blessed are the mothers - those willing to gather, gestate and guard it.

The challenge remains before us: Can we bloom?

Join me in The Return of Isis retreat in Cairo April 30th - 4th May.

Let’s bloom for the sake of our collective decedents. It is our duty as future ancestors.