Hathor- Egyptian GodDeity"Mistress of the West"

The Eye of Ra

In the Book of the Heavenly Cow, humanity plotted rebellion against the aging sun god. Ra sent his Eye, his daughter Hathor, to punish them. She descended as Sekhmet, the lioness, and raged across Egypt with such ferocity that the Nile ran red. The killing intoxicated her. She waded through the carnage and could not stop. Ra ordered seven thousand jars of beer dyed red with ochre poured across the fields near Dendera. Hathor-Sekhmet, mistaking the beer for blood, drank until she collapsed into sleep. When she awoke, her fury had passed.

Each year at Dendera, the Festival of Drunkenness reenacted this deliverance. Beer flowed and sistra roared through the temple precinct, intoxication itself made sacred.

The Distant Goddess

In the Myth of the Eye of the Sun, Hathor raged away from Egypt entirely. She fled into the southern deserts of Nubia as a wild lioness, and without her the land dried up. Joy vanished. Fertility vanished. Thoth was sent to find her. He told her stories and flattered her until the lioness relented and agreed to return. Her homecoming was celebrated with processions and wine as the land's abundance returned with her.

The Celestial Cow

Hathor's name means "House of Horus." She was the sky itself, the body through which the falcon god flew each day. In this form she appeared as an immense cow whose four legs were the pillars of heaven and whose belly was the star-spangled vault above. The Milky Way was her milk, streaming across the heavens.

As mother of Horus, she was mother of every pharaoh, since each king was the living Horus. The Deir el-Bahari relief shows Hathor as a cow tenderly licking the hand of Hatshepsut. Other depictions show pharaohs suckling directly from her udders, receiving the divine milk that confirmed their right to rule.

The Golden One

Love poetry addressed her directly: "I worship the Golden One, I praise her Majesty, I exalt the Lady of Heaven." Women brought mirrors and perfume to her shrines, praying for fertility and safe childbirth. Her sacred instrument was the sistrum, a handled rattle whose metallic jingling drove away malevolent spirits. Her priestesses, the songstresses of Hathor, performed ecstatic dance in her temples. To play music there was to call the goddess into the room.

The Seven Hathors

Seven forms of Hathor appeared at a child's birth to decree the manner of its death. No one escaped what they pronounced. They appeared as seven women playing tambourines. In the Tale of the Doomed Prince, they declare that a royal child will die by snake, crocodile, or dog. The prince spends his life trying to outrun the decree.

The Temple at Dendera

Hathor's temple at Dendera survives nearly intact. Sacred ground since the Old Kingdom, the surviving structure dates to the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Its hypostyle hall holds eighteen columns crowned with Hathor-headed capitals, the goddess's face on all four sides of each column.

Each year during Epiphi, her cult statue traveled by barge upriver to the temple of Horus at Edfu for the Feast of the Beautiful Reunion. The journey covered one hundred kilometers, with crowds lining the riverbanks. For fourteen days the two divine images resided together in celebration of their marriage before Hathor's statue returned.

On New Year's Day, priests carried her statue to the temple roof and exposed it to the first rays of the rising sun. The Eye of Ra returned to her father.

Mistress of the West

Hathor was Mistress of the West, the guide who welcomed the dead. The west was where the sun descended and where the dead journeyed. At Thebes, she emerged from the western mountain as a cow stepping from a papyrus thicket on the cliff face. Tomb paintings show her as a tree goddess, her arms reaching from the trunk to offer figs and cool water to the newly dead.