Isis Luminous Festival - The Lychnapsia

The Iseum celebrated the festival of Isis Luminous--also called Aset Webenut in antiquity and the Lychnapsia in later times--a bit late this year, owing to a health issue with one of the temple cats.  Our celebration was small and low-key, but still quite lovely. Here are a couple of pictures of the altar:

Isis Luminous altar.

The bowl at Her feet is a copy of a faience bowl in the Turin Museum, bearing a design of Hathor-faces and papyrus reeds. In it are tiny flower-shaped floating candles, each one carrying a prayer or wish; some people like to create origami boats for this festival, on which they write their petitions and in which they float small candles, but space being at a premium we went with the floating candles. (My flash was malfunctioning, so I wasn't able to photograph the altar in darkness with the candles burning.)

Here's a closer shot, in dimmer light:

You can see the Hathor faces in the bowl more clearly, as well as the eye of Horus on the cloth beneath it. The offerings were pure water, held in the cup to the viewer's left, and kyphi incense in the burner on the right. I will say that, for those who read the omens in the way a petition candle burns, that one of them drowned its own wick and the other had a long, clean burn, and that the results in each case were exactly what you'd have expected!