Ancient Egyptian form of the Mediterranean mother-goddess. Sister and consort of Osiris, she was equated with Demeter by Herodotus (ii.59.2, ii.56.5). Her worship spread to Greece during the Hellenistic period and reached Italy in approximately 100 bce. Roman poets of the time of Augustus made reference to praise (laudes) offered twice daily to Isis (Tibullus, i.3.31) and services held at night (Propertius, ii.33.2). Frescoes at Herculaneum and Pompeii, both buried by the eruption of 79 ce, show scenes of ritual dancing and antiphonal singing in her honour (Witt, pls.23, 26).
The north African rhetorician Apuleius (fl c160 ce) was the first writer to comment in detail on the role of music in the worship of Isis. He described a chorus singing hymns to the accompaniment of the tibia and syrinx, and noted an oblicus (obliquus) calamus which ‘reached to the right ear’ of the piper (Metamorphoses, xi.9). This cannot have been a double aulos of the Phrygian kind, with one bell-shaped mouth, nor is it likely to have been a transverse flute (see Wille, p.65). Apuleius must have been describing a monaulos (see Virgil), with a reed mouthpiece set into the single tube at an angle and a recurved bell. Such an instrument appears on a Roman bas-relief (Witt, pl.30; not identified). Other archaeological evidence indicates that worshippers of Isis at Rome also used drums, cymbals and even trumpets.
Literary sources repeatedly make clear the special importance of the sistrum (a Latin transliteration of the Greek seistron, from seiō, ‘shake’; more properly crepitaculum). Apuleius noted that this was shaken in triple rhythm (Metamorphoses, xi.4). Isis was regularly shown holding a Sistrum (Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris, 376c–e) and her priests carried it, originally as a means of putting to flight Set, the evil twin brother of Osiris. It was the most distinctive token of the worship of Isis.
In the time of Augustus, Tibullus (i.3.24) and perhaps Ovid as well (Amores, iii.9.33–4) credited the sistrum with powers of healing, although in the hand of an angry goddess it could cause blindness (Juvenal, Satires, xiii.93), and Lucan associated it with mourning (Pharsalia, viii.832; c60 ce). Other writers of the Augustan period used it to symbolize Egyptian decadence: so Virgil, in the Aeneid, of Cleopatra summoning her troops with its rattle instead of a trumpet-call (viii.696).
G.A. Villoteau: Abhandlung über die Musik des alten Aegyptens … aus dem grossen französischen Prachtwerke: Description de l'Egypte (Leipzig, 1821)
R. Helm, ed.: Apulei Platonici Madaurensis Metamorphoseon libri xi (Leipzig, 1913, 3/1931/R)
C. Sachs: Die Musikinstrumente des alten Ägyptens (Berlin, 1921)
F.C. Babbitt, trans.: ‘Isis and Osiris’, Plutarch's Moralia, v (London and Cambridge, MA, 1936/R), 6–191
E. Iversen: The Myth of Egypt and its Hieroglyphs in European Tradition (Copenhagen, 1961, 2/1993), 38–56
V. Tram Tam Tinh: Essai sur le culte d'Isis à Pompéi (Paris, 1964)
G. Wille: Musica romana (Amsterdam, 1967), 38, 63ff, 714–15
R.E. Witt: Isis in the Graeco-Roman World (Ithaca, NY, 1971)
F. Dunand: Le culte d'Isis dans le bassin oriental de la Méditerranée (Leiden, 1973)
J.G. Griffiths, ed. and trans.: The Isis Book of Apuleius (Leiden, 1975)
L. Manniche: Music and Musicians in Ancient Egypt (London, 1991), 57–73
WARREN ANDERSON/THOMAS J. MATHIESEN