arched, star-covered body, the solar disc she swallows and births each day
Aset, Throne, Lady of Ten Thousand Names
also called
—
Where they meet
The atlas records no shared domain or symbol between them. What connects them is elsewhere: Isis and Nut are recorded in a parent-and-child line within the Egyptian Pantheon.
Where they part
Isis alone
magic, motherhood, healing, protection, wisdom
Nut alone
the sky, the stars, the daily solar cycle, rebirth
How each was worshipped
Isis
Cult sites: Philae, until late antiquity, Temples across Egypt and, later, the Roman Mediterranean.
Festivals: Isia, Navigium Isidis (in the Roman world), Khoiak with Osiris.
Throne, magic, and the search for Osiris. Philae kept her when other houses closed. In Rome she became a mystery goddess of sailors and households. The knot of Isis and the sistrum are working tools, not ornaments.
Nut
Cult sites: No major independent state temple; honored chiefly through funerary art and coffin decoration.
Festivals: The five epagomenal days at year's end were associated with the births of her children.
Nut's presence in Egyptian religion is felt overwhelmingly through funerary art: her image, arched across coffin lids and tomb ceilings, was meant to receive the dead into her body each night just as she received the sun, promising the same daily rebirth to the deceased.
Isis
Egyptian Pantheon
The most powerful goddess in the Egyptian pantheon, wife of Osiris and mother of Horus. Goddess of magic, healing, and protection.
Isis is the goddess of magic, healing, and motherhood. Her cleverness and magical power allowed her to learn the secret name of Ra, gaining dominion over the cosmos.
Goddess of the sky, daughter of Shu, consort of Geb, and mother of Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. Nut's star-covered body arches over the earth, swallowing the sun each evening and giving birth to it again each dawn.
Nut was born to Shu and Tefnut and, with her brother and consort Geb, formed the third generation of the Ennead. Ra, angered by her secret pregnancy by Geb, forbade her from giving birth on any day of the calendar year, until Thoth won five extra days through which Nut bore Osiris, Horus the Elder, Set, Isis, and Nephthys.
Nut is the sky itself, depicted as a woman whose elongated, star-covered body arches over the reclining earth god Geb, held apart from him by their father Shu. Daughter of Shu and Tefnut, Nut forms, with Geb, the next generation of the Heliopolitan Ennead after Atum, Shu, and Tefnut.