I hope that you will benefit from these powerful and inspiration messages offered to you on behalf of the Goddesses who inspired me to create this deck, channel their Divine Wisdom and share it with you!
Isis is the Egyptian goddess who was revered for healing the sick and protecting the dead. Apothecaries and healers would invoke her name while they were mixing remedies for their patients. Worshipped in ancient Greece and Rome as well as Egypt, Isis is widely known for bringing her husband and brother, Osiris, back from the underworld to give him eternal life.
Osiris was once the king of Egypt, and Isis was his trusted advisor. In a jealous rage, their brother Seth trapped Osiris in a sarcophagus and threw it in the Nile. When Isis retrieved the body, Seth dismembered it and scattered the pieces. Isis put the body back together to conceive their son, Horus, before Osiris left for the underworld. After his death, Osiris became the ruler of the underworld and the judge of the dead. Meanwhile, Isis protected Horus until he was old enough to challenge Seth for the Egyptian throne. The name Isis means “throne,” and her role in protecting Osiris’s legacy makes her an enduring symbol of royalty as well as resurrection.
Oshun is the Yoruban orisha, or goddess, of the Osun River in Nigeria. Beautiful and sensual, she is the favorite wife of the thunder orisha Shango. Oshun was the only female out of the seventeen original orishas on earth. When the men ignored her suggestions, she gathered a group of women to stage a protest. Together, the women kept the men from working, roaring until their voices were heard.
Oshun provides good health, wealth, and fertility to those who live in the towns along her river, but she can also punish them with droughts or floods. Shrines to her can be found along the banks of the Osun River and in the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove. She is also honored every year in the Oshun festival, which is held in Osogbo, Nigeria, the sacred place where Oshun and human beings first met.
She is also known as Princess Mio Shan, a mortal woman who begged her father to let her be a nun. Her father agreed, but he compelled the other nuns to make life hard for her, hoping she’d grow tired of the role and agree to be married instead. When Mio Shan cheerfully fulfilled her duties, her father set the monastery on fire. When she put out the fire, he tried to cut off her head. When the sword failed to pierce her throat, he strangled her to death. When she went to hell, she continued to help others until the god of the underworld sent her back, threatened by her good deeds. Back on earth, she gave her eyes and arms to help her father, who by then was very ill. In one version of her story, the Buddha sent her to the island of P’u T’o for nine years to perfect herself. She is now revered as a Bodhisattva, a being who devotes her life to helping others achieve enlightenment.