X

Xanthippe (fl. 5th century BC)

Wife of the philosopher Socrates[*], to whom she bore three sons, she has become the prototype of the nagging, shrewish wife. There is, however, another model to consider:

Isis’ repeated searches for her husband’s dismembered limbs only ever result in her finding thirteen pieces, the fourteenth (the phallus) having been devoured by a fish, the oxyrinchus.

Reassembling the members and embalming the body, leaving only the head free of the wrappings, Isis creates a mock phallus from one of the trees in the Nile delta and straps it to the body of Osiris.

His divine seed is thus able to enter her, and she conceives.

[I. Maskelyne, Egypt or Atlantis? p. 124]


uxor [wife] – Luxor [capital] – lux [light]

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[*] See >Socrates & Alcibiades.