The Isiad

I have elected to retell an Egyptian myth. I have picked it apart, modified certain aspects of it, injected it with my own biased and opinionated self, rearranged the musical scale of its core, and recast it in a much more contemporary mould. In fact, The Isiad happens to be much more than the retelling of an ancient myth, it is the retelling of a disparately related group of Egyptian myths–The Heliopolitan Creation Myth, The Death of Osiris, Isis and the Seven Scorpions, The Contendings of Horus and Seth, The Destruction of Humankind, and Isis and the Sun God’s Secret Name–all syncretised and woven into a coherent whole as to mimic a chronicle, or an autobiographical account, of the goddess Isis. I say autobiography because of two main reasons: first and foremost, the text is written in First Person narrative, and secondly, this is her story, her confessional, her memoir.

The Isiad moves far away from the two-dimensional portrayal of the Isis archetype in traditional mythology as the upholder of moral law; the loving and faithful wife who retrieves the dismembered parts of her husband’s body in order to secure the proper burial rights, and the overprotective mother who will enact every trick under the sun to ensure that her son is neither denied the inheritance of his father or robbed of his rightful place in the universe. Instead, the text reveals the harsh terrain a non-material personality which is quite three-dimensional and human; she ponders the true nature of the universe and its inhabitants, the reality of being, she examines motivators and drives, and contemplates the meaning of responsibility, freedom, loneliness and abandonment, endless in her vacillation between the oceanic tides of truth and falsehood, of good and evil, of nobility and savagery.