An aretalogy is a series of statements, recounted in the first person, that lists the great deeds performed by a god or a goddess. Put another way, it is a deity's hymn of self-praise, designed to inspire awe. The word is derived from the Greek words arete, "virtue," and logos, "word"; it can be loosely translated as "list of virtues."

Aretalogies are not restricted to any one literary genre. In classical Greece and Rome, aretalogies appear in epitaphs, temple records, private letters, and popular literature of various sorts. Egyptian deities, particularly Isis, are the most likely to speak in aretalogies, and some scholars believe that the form descends directly from Egyptian religious poetry.

A famous aretalogy was described by Diodorus Siculus, a historian who lived in the first century BCE. He writes of a stela that he encountered in the city of Nysa, which was already damaged in his day but parts of whose inscription were clear enough to read:

I am Isis, the queen of every land, she who was instructed of Hermes;
And whatsoever laws I have established, these can no man make void.
I am the eldest daughter of the youngest god Cronus.
I am the wife and sister of the king Osiris.
I am she who first discovered fruits for mankind; I am the mother of Horus the king.
I am she who riseth in the star that is in the Constellation of the Dog;
By me was the city of Bubastis built.
Farewell, farewell, O Egypt that nurtured me!
-- History 1.27

Osiris also had a stela inscribed with an aretalogy in Nysa. Diodorus quotes it thus:

My father is Cronus, the youngest of all the gods, and I am Osiris the king, who campaigned over every country as far as the uninhabited regions of India and the lands to the north, even to the sources of the river Ister, and again to the remaining parts of the world as far as Oceanus. I am the eldest son of Cronus, and being sprung from a fair and noble egg I was begotten a seed of kindred birth to Day. There is no region of the inhabited world to which I have not come, dispensing to all men the things of which I was the discoverer.

Notice how both of these examples combine Greek elements (Hermes and Cronus are both Greek gods) with Egyptian ones (Horus is an Egyptian god, and Bubastis is an Egyptian city). This sort of syncretism is typical of aretalogies, particularly Isis-aretalogies. The most dramatic example of this blending of cultures can be found in what is probably the most famous Isis-aretalogy of all, the sublime Latin hymn found in the final chapter of Apuleius' Metamorphoses. I reproduce only a fragment here:

I am Nature, the Universal Mother,
mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time,
sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals,
the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are. (...)
Some know me as Juno, some as Bellona of the Battles;
others as Hecate, others again as Rhamnubia,
but (...) the Egyptians who excel in ancient learning
and worship me with ceremonies proper to my godhead,
call me by my true name, namely, Queen Isis.

When Christianity came on the scene, it absorbed many elements of the Greco-Roman culture that surrounded it, and aretalogy was no exception. Historians have noticed the aretalogical tenor of many of Jesus' statements, particularly those found in the Gospel of John.

I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever.
John 6:48-51a

Yet Jonathan Z. Smith argued in an influential article entitled "Good News is No News" that the gospels are "anti-aretalogies," since they present a series of pronouncements that are consistently misunderstood by those who accompany the protagonist of the story. The reader of a gospel is presented with a disjunction between the self-understanding of the divine hero and the understanding of him that his followers have. Jesus' "I-am" statements are notoriously obscure, and in the story this obscurity leads to frustration and suffering for all the characters.

A careful study of the relationship between various aretalogical texts in the ancient world has much to tell us about the development of ritual and what we might anachronistically call fiction in both paganism and Christianity. In the 1970s, Karl Kerényi developed the theory that the ancient novel might have had its roots in aretalogy; in his view, a deity's list of deeds would be "acted out" by worshippers in the temple, and the eventually the ritual would be allegorized into a narrative like Apuleius'. This view still has some supporters, though generally it has become unfashionable to view the history of literary and ritual forms in such a linear way.

Finally I should mention the magnificent Thunder, Perfect Mind, a Gnostic aretalogy filled with luscious paradoxes. This poem enjoyed a minor surge of popularity in the mid-90s; at least two bands put it to music, and it became a favourite text of many neo-Gnostics and other occultists of various stripes. Unusually, the figure who is speaking in this poem is not explicitly identified, though odds are good that she is Sophia, the personification of wisdom.

Further Reading:

This is a very technical field. Many of the important studies on aretalogy are published by small European university presses in languages other than English. If you can read German and have access to a good university library, try Jan Bergman's Ich bin Isis and Reinhold Merkelbach's Isis regina - Zeus Sarapis, both of which were published in the late 1960s.

Some interesting articles on the subject do exist in English, though even these will be hard to find if you are not near a university. Roger Beck's "Mystery Religions, Aretalogy, and the Ancient Novel" appeared in Gareth Schmeling, ed., The Novel in the Ancient World in 1996. Jonathan Z. Smith's article "Good News is No News: Aretalogy and Gospel" appears in a number of places, but the easiest place to find it is in his classic essay collection from 1978 entitled Map is Not Territory, still in print through the University of Chicago press. Neither of these are easy reads, but they reward careful attention.

If it's Isis herself you're interested in, the classic book on Isis-worship in late antiquity is R.E. Witt's Isis in the Graeco-Roman World. The paperback has a slightly different title: Isis in the Ancient World, but so far as I am aware, the contents have not changed.