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Isis worship began in Egypt but she became Hellenized on the way to Rome adopting the Greek language and many non-Egyptian elements. Isis was worshipped in Greece in the fourth century BC and by the time of Julius Caesar there was a temple to Isis and Serapis on Capitoline Hill. The cult remained popular for another four centuries. By the first century BC she was regarded as a universal goddess, identified with Rhea, Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Aphrodite, Leto, Nanaia, Artemis and Astarte. Isis is the feminine principle, the Mother Goddess, like Cybele. Her advantage over Cybele was being Egyptian which gave her a history much longer than that of the Anatolian goddess. Isis and Osiris were sovereigns of prehistoric Egypt, quite possibly real people, but were thought of as incarnated gods who suffered in the world before ascending to Heaven.
Their worship was widespread and popular in the Roman Empire at the time of the foundation of Christianity. Though the worship of Isis began in Rome about 100 BC, by the start of the Christian era it was so widespread that a Christian writer said that some lands were full of the madness of Isis. There was a temple of Isis in Southwark, London. The last recorded festival of Isis was held in Rome in 394 AD but it was one of the last of the old faiths to die out, surviving less flamboyantly - it was illegal - against the Christian onslaught until the fifth century AD.
Osiris and Isis were brother and sister but, after the fashion of the Pharaohs they married. Osiris was murdered and thrown in a coffin into the Nile. The coffin was washed up on the coast of Syria and became lodged in the trunk of a tree which was cut down and used in the construction of the palace at Byblos where Isis eventually found it. She took the coffin and set the tree in a temple swathed in linen like the tree of Attis. Back in Egypt the evil powers found the body of Osiris and tore it into shreds. Finding him mutilated Isis reincarnated him from the pieces and Osiris was resurrected. But she could not find a penis and had to make a synthetic one to conceive their child Horns. Osiris then reigned as the king of the dead while Horns reigned on earth. Osiris, Isis and Horns are the Egyptian Trinity.
Serapis, the god of Alexandria, was the personification of Osiris through the Apis Bull, worshipped at Memphis. He was the equal of Isis with whom he ruled and eventually became an alternative aspect of the Sun-God.
The followers of Isis liked two of her aspects in particular, the bereaved wife weeping for her dead husband and the heavenly mother of the child Horns. Isis' first role likened her to Demeter who mourned Persephone in the Eleusinian mysteries, to Astarte who mourned her dead son Adonis and to Cybele who mourned her dead son Attis. In her second role Isis had a pronounced effect on the Christian perception of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Isis was endlessly depicted holding the divine child Horns, so there was no break in continuity when the Christian image of the Madonna and Child took over. Looking at old figurines it is often quite impossible to tell which was which.
Mary was first called the Mother of God in Alexandria, the home of the Essenes, the Egyptian centre of Isis worship, in the third century. Just after 400 AD Epiphanius denounced women who worshipped Mary as a goddess. Yet by 430 AD Proclus hailed her as the Mother of God and an intermediary between God and man. Nestorius objected to this. But a decisive sermon was preached in 431 AD at Ephesus which led to Nestorius being discredited and Mary elevated to the Queen of Heaven. In another of those pointed coincidences, Diana or Artemis, whose day was 13 August, had been the goddess of the Ephesians and represented an aspect of Isis. In the sixth century a popular myth that Mary had been miraculously carried to Heaven by Jesus and his angels was officially recognized by the Church as The Assumption. Now it is a great Roman Catholic festival held on... 13 August!