The short answer being her brother Osiris, of course, both being the children of Seb (earth) and Nut (sky). Another brother, Set, killed Osiris and hacked him to pieces. Isis gathered his missing body parts, resurrected him, became pregnant with their son Horus and then Osiris went to be king of the Underworld. In The Golden Bough, Frazer writes:
“Under the names of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis, the peoples of Egypt and Western Asia represented the yearly decay and revival of life, especially of vegetable life, which they personified as a god who annually died and rose again from the dead. In name and detail the rites varied from place to place: in substance they were the same. The supposed death and resurrection of this oriental deity, a god of many names but of essentially one nature, is now to be examined.”
So, Osiris can be seen as an example of the risen god who permeates the myths of the Mediterranean region, most famously in the Christian mythos. As a fertility god, the story of Osiris’ death and resurrection is a cyclical one, with the sacred marriage being an annual enactment of the god fertilizing the earth. Frazer again:
“These conjectures are confirmed by the little we know both of the popular and of the official Egyptian religion. Thus we are told that the Egyptians held a festival of Isis at the time when the Nile began to rise. They believed that the goddess was then mourning for the lost Osiris, and that the tears which dropped from her eyes swelled the impetuous tide of the river. Now if Osiris was in one of his aspects a god of the corn, nothing could be more natural than that he should be mourned at midsummer. For by that time the harvest was past, the fields were bare, the river ran low, life seemed to be suspended, the corn-god was dead. At such a moment people who saw the handiwork of divine beings in all the operations of nature might well trace the swelling of the sacred stream to the tears shed by the goddess at the death of the beneficent corn-god her husband.”
Let’s take the pyramids as symbolic of Egypt, when the river runs low the land is dead, frozen in ice, so to speak, but when the water runs (like drizzlin’ rain) life returns. So the year begins with the marriage on the fifth day of May, and ends when the dead god is back on or by the 4th to renew his marriage and with it the land.
I said, “Where are we goin’?” He said we’d be back by the fourth.
I said, “That’s the best news that I’ve ever heard.”
A key test here is Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, a book Dylan write about in Chronicles:
I read The White Goddess by Robert Graves, too. Invoking the poetic muse was something I didn’t know about yet. Didn’t know enough to start trouble with it, anyway. In a few years’ time I would meet Robert Graves in London. We went out for a brisk walk around Paddington Square. I wanted to ask him about some of the things in his book, but I couldn’t remember much about it.
According to Clinton Heylin, in his The Double Life of Bob Dylan Vol. 1: A Restless Hungry Feeling: 1941-1966, Dylan was probably turned on to Graves by his then girlfriend, Suze Rotolo:
Other chance meetings on this madcap trip included one with poet-classicist Robert Graves, arranged by the poet Rory McEwen. Dylan was reading Graves’s ‘historical grammar of poetic myth’, The White Goddess, having probably been turned onto it by Suze. If, as the Chronicler claimed, ‘invoking the poetic muse was something I didn’t know about yet’, he was presumably also unaware that Graves had taught a class in traditional ballads and published a Child Lite collection in the twenties. According to Jack Elliott, Dylan ‘wanted to get his approval… [and] came on a little too strong.[i]
This meeting, although a disappointment, meant enough to Dylan to still be in his mind 40 years later while writing Chronicles.
In the book, Robert Graves writes:
“The Orphic ‘ox of seven fights’ is hinted at in Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris, where he describes how at the Winter solstice they carry the golden cow of Isis, enveloped in black cloth, seven times around the shrine of Osiris, whom he identifies with Dionysus. ‘The circuit is called “The Seeking for Osiris”, for in winter the Goddess longs for the water of the Sun. And she goes around seven times because he completes his passing from the winter to the summer solstice in the seventh month.’”
So even if he never read Frazer, Dylan is likely to have been familiar with the significance of the Osiris/Isis marriage, mythologically speaking while writing this very circular song that ends where it begins and where the chord structure emphasises the circularity. Graves’ phrase ‘the water of the Sun’ sems to me at least to shed some light on Dylan’s ‘I came in from the East with the sun in my eyes’; the god of the yearly cycle is, of necessity, a solar deity of sorts.
And then there’s ‘Oh Sister’ which can, I think, be listened to as a companion track to ‘Isis’:
We grew up together
From the cradle to the grave
We died and were reborn
And then mysteriously saved
Union with a sister, death and resurrection, another song about marriage. Of course, the Christian myth is there, but part of Frazer’s point was that ‘Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis’ are forerunners of Christ, or rather that Christ belongs to the same mythic pattern as the others do. And Graves agrees when he has ‘heretical’ poets say:
‘The Pope, though he permits our typifying Jesus as a Fish, as the Sun, as Bread, as the Vine, as a Lamb, as a Shepherd, as a Rock, as a Conquering Hero, even as a Winged Serpent, yet threatens us with Hell Fire if we ever dare to celebrate him in terms of the venerable gods whom He has superseded and from whose ritual every one of these symbols has been derived. Or if we trip over a simple article of this extraordinarily difficult Athanasian Creed. We need no reminder from Rome or Canterbury that Jesus was the greatest of all Sacred Kings who suffered death on a tree for the good of the people, who harrowed Hell and who rose again from the Dead and that in Him all prophecies are fulfilled. But to pretend that he was the first whom poets have ever celebrated as having performed these wonderful feats is, despite St. Paul, to show oneself either hypocritical or illiterate. So at his prophesied Second Coming we reserve the right to call him Belin or Apollo or even King Arthur.’
There is, of course, a third song about marriage on Desire, the very personal ‘Sara’
Radiant jewel, a mystical wife….Scorpio Sphinx in a calico dress
Here, Dylan’s flesh and blood wife is identified with sacred marriage to the ‘mystical child’ Isis (these are, to the best of my knowledge, the only Dylan songs where the word ‘mystical’ is used), Egypt and the moon goddess Diana the Huntress:
Glamorous nymph with an arrow and bow
Turning to Graves again, we find:
“But both Nemesis and Diana Nemorensis are associated with the deer … Nemesis carries a wheel in her other hand to show that she is the goddess of the turning year, like Egyptian Isis and Latin Fortune, but this has been generally understood as meaning that the wheel will one day come full circle and vengeance be exacted on the sinner.”
And so, we arrive at the conclusion that in these songs Sara is Diana (Nemorensis, of the woods) is Isis, which means that the narrator is Osiris is the King of the Wood, completing the circle.
Which also brings us to a fourth Desire track, ‘One more Cup of Coffee’. I recently read Spirit of Place: Mediterranean Writings by Lawrence Durrell. There’s a piece on the Rhône that was first published in 1960. Durrell follows the river through France, ending in the Middle Sea. A few sentences jumped out at me from near the end:
The two branches – les Rhônes morts – now cross the Camargue, that strange and rather desolate sand-delta, which is today a great zoological preserve. Of the two Rhônes the eastern is the only one worth following to the sea for it leads to the little Church of the Two Marys on the seacoast, the spiritual headquarters of the Gypsies of all Christendom.
…
There is little to see at the Stes. Maries save the beautiful and melancholy church where the gypsies come in May every year to worship St. Sara, their patron saint.
It’s an interesting cross-light on Dylan’s story of the song’s composition, but it is, of course, the name of the saint/goddess being worshipped that links this song to the other three I’ve discussed in this post.
There are, of course, other parallels left unexplored here. Is the ‘man in the corner’ Set? It would make sense that if Set kills Osiris, then the risen Osiris should kill Set, in an endless cycle of death and renewal. The man’s burial seems to me to reflect the story that Osiris was killed by being tricked to lie in a casket, just as the ‘body I’m trying to find’ reflects Isis’ gathering of the parts of Osiris. Isis says that things will be different the next time they wed, but the audience is aware that they will be exactly the same. There is no way out of here. Except divorce.
Or ritual. Seen in this light, Dylan’s extraordinary performances of ‘Isis’ during the Rolling Thunder tour can be viewed as hieratic, shamanistic even. He enters into the song as completely as is possible, the combination of voice and gesture draw the audience in to another plane of reality, the mythic:
Or, as he wrote years earlier:
It’s all new to me, like some mystery
It could even be like a myth
One final passage from The Golden Bough:
But Diana was not merely a patroness of wild beasts, a mistress of woods and hills, of lonely glades and sounding rivers; conceived as the moon, and especially, it would seem, as the yellow harvest moon, she filled the farmer’s grange with goodly fruits, and heard the prayers of women in travail. In her sacred grove at Nemi, as we have seen, she was especially worshipped as a goddess of childbirth, who bestowed offspring on men and women. Thus Diana, like the Greek Artemis, with whom she was constantly identified, may be described as a goddess of nature in general and of fertility in particular. We need not wonder, therefore, that in her sanctuary on the Aventine she was represented by an image copied from the many-breasted idol of the Ephesian Artemis, with all its crowded emblems of exuberant fecundity. Hence too we can understand why an ancient Roman law, attributed to King Tullus Hostilius, prescribed that, when incest had been committed, an expiatory sacrifice should be offered by the pontiffs in the grove of Diana. For we know that the crime of incest is commonly supposed to cause a dearth; hence it would be meet that atonement for the offence should be made to the goddess of fertility.
Now on the principle that the goddess of fertility must herself be fertile, it behoved Diana to have a male partner. Her mate, if the testimony of Servius may be trusted, was that Virbius who had his representative, or perhaps rather his embodiment, in the King of the Wood at Nemi. The aim of their union would be to promote the fruitfulness of the earth, of animals, and of mankind; and it might naturally be thought that this object would be more surely attained if the sacred nuptials were celebrated every year, the parts of the divine bride and bridegroom being played either by their images or by living persons. No ancient writer mentions that this was done in the grove at Nemi; but our knowledge of the Arician ritual is so scanty that the want of information on this head can hardly count as a fatal objection to the theory. That theory, in the absence of direct evidence, must necessarily be based on the analogy of similar customs practised elsewhere.
Which relates, in my view, to the weather in the song. Bride and groom come together in the sun, and then their union brings forth the drizzlin’ rain; sun and rain, the conditions required for the fertility of the earth. Their sundering results in devilish cold, ice and snow. The world asleep, life in abeyance, requiring their (re)union to begin the cycle of life anew.
Of course, there are potential objections to this reading, not least those inspired by a comment by Dylan’s co-writer, Jacques Levy in an interview On the Road with Bob Dylan:
The only thing it has to do with the Egyptian goddess is that at some point we threw in the pyramids instead of the Grand Teton Mountains, which is probably what it’s really about. Going up into the hills somewhere in Wyoming or something. I don’t know how the story came about and Bob doesn’t either. It came about through the two of us, just a kind of unconscious connection we were making.[ii]
To which my response is that the pyramids are far from being the only Egyptian reference in the song. In addition to the Set/Osiris parallel outlined above, the lines “There’s a body I’m tryin’ to find/If I carry it out it’ll bring a good price” are a pretty clear reference to the history of tomb discovery (and tomb raiding) in the pyramids, the most famous instance being Howard Carter, discoverer of Tutankhamun’s tomb[iii]. Carter’s dig was spectacularly successful, but many others had a similar experience to the narrator in the song:
I broke into the tomb, but the casket was empty
There was no jewels, no nothin’, I felt I’d been had
Anyone who has seen pictures of Tutankhamun’s funerary mask (or other similar Pharaonic artefacts) will have no problem identifying the source of the line ‘I was thinkin’ about turquoise, I was thinkin’ about gold’. In fact, the Pharaonic turquoise mines are still in use to this day, and while the Usekh collar may not be the world’s biggest necklace, it’s pretty impressive. This ornamentation is widely known from the much-reproduced image of Tutankhamun above, all three elements, gold, turquoise and necklace, are also regularly associated with Isis and Osiris:
Diamonds, sadly, are the odd one out here; the Egyptians lacked the ability to cut and polish them. So, while Levy might argue that he and Dylan didn’t know where the story came from, to me it’s pretty clear that the original source was Dylan’s reading of The White Goddess, and the Isis/Osiris myth in general.
One final note. There’s a strong tradition in 19th and Early 20th century fiction of ascribing magical (or mystical)powers to Egyptian artefacts, and there’s a further instance of this in an earlier Sara-inspired Dylan song, ‘She Belongs to Me’:
She wears an Egyptian ring that sparkles before she speaks
She’s a hypnotist collector, you are a walking antique
Anyone interested in this learning more about this tradition should really read Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology, by Eleanor Dobson. I can’t recommend it too highly.
As a final note, one of the few books about Dylan that I actually own is Sam Shephard’s Rolling Thunder Logbook. Here’s Shephard’s entry on Isis:
[i] I want to thank Expecting Rain user Flora Eastwood for pointing me at the Heylin reference. https://www.expectingrain.com/discussions/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=79062&start=75#p2129947 In another post, the same user pointed out that Levy would have been familiar with Isis/Osiris via Jung: https://www.expectingrain.com/discussions/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=58295&hilit=levy+jung&start=125#p2126049
[ii] Thanks to another Expecting Rain user, Lookout Kid, for this quote. https://www.expectingrain.com/discussions/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=58295&start=150#p2126877
[iii] In his 1977 interview with Playboy, Dylan said ‘Clara is the symbol of Freedom in this movie. She’s what attracts Renaldo at the present. Renaldo lives in a tomb, his only way out is to dream. Renaldo first appears in a mask, then he’s told in the cafe, “That’s the way it is.”’
Elliptical Movements 
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