Against Hyperborea

[sdi]

So, Tacitus says something odd about the Suebi, a Germanic tribe living in what is now Eastern Germany:

Some of the Suebi sacrifice also to Isis. I cannot determine the reason and origin of the foreign cult, but her emblem, fashioned in the form of a Liburnian ship, proves that her worship comes from abroad.

(Tacitus, Germania IX, as translated by J. B. Rives.)

Possibly this is simply interpretatio romana, and this is what most scholars seem to assume as a matter of course. But let's suppose it isn't? Diodoros claims, after all, that Leto (= Isis) and her children came to Greece from Hyperborea, so perhaps Isis really is from the north and it shouldn't be surprising to see her in Germany?

But I realized something just now. I have said that the Isis myth is astrological, and is written in the constellations; we even see the various parts of the myth in the rising and setting of these constellations. But the ship of Isis, which we call Argo Navis, is too far south to be seen even from Greece. (I've lived on the same latitude as Cythera, and only the very, very tip of the nose of the ship is visible from there!) I suppose that this is why the Greeks, when they imported the Isis-Horos myth as Danae-Perseus, found new constellations for it in the northern sky.

But Germany is much further north even than that, and Hyperborea further still. So if the myth originated in the north, why are the constellations for it found in the south?

So while none of this is conclusive, it's another datapoint in favor of, no, Leto being Egyptian after all.