Indeed her stately ritual, with its shaven
and tonsured priests, its matins and vespers, its tinkling music,
its baptism and aspersions of holy water, its solemn processions,
its jewelled images of the Mother of God, presented many points of
similarity to the pomps and ceremonies of Catholicism. The
resemblance need not be purely accidental. Ancient Egypt may have
contributed its share to the gorgeous symbolism of the Catholic
Church as well as to the pale abstractions of her theology.
Certainly in art the figure of Isis suckling the infant Horus is so
like that of the Madonna and child that it has sometimes received
the adoration of ignorant Christians. And to Isis in her later
character of patroness of mariners the Virgin Mary perhaps owes her
beautiful epithet of _Stella Maris,_ "Star of the Sea," under which
she is adored by tempest-tossed sailors. The attributes of a marine
deity may have been bestowed on Isis by the sea-faring Greeks of
Alexandria. They are quite foreign to her original character and to
the habits of the Egyptians, who had no love of the sea.
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