Neith- Egyptian GodDeity"Goddess of War"

Before the Gods

Neith's worship reaches back before the pyramids. Her crossed-arrows emblem appears on predynastic pottery and ivory labels from Naqada I and II, placing her cult among the oldest in the Nile Valley. First Dynasty queens bore names compounded with hers: Neithhotep, Merneith. Merneith may have ruled as regent, her name meaning "Beloved of Neith."

The texts at Esna made her the mother of Ra himself: a primordial goddess who emerged self-created from the waters of Nun before anything else existed, who needed no parent or partner. She spoke the first words and brought creation into being through seven utterances. Everything that followed, every god and every creature, descended from that first act of speech.

The Weaver

Neith wove the world into existence on her cosmic loom. The warp and weft became the structure of the cosmos, the interlocking threads that held creation together. If the threads frayed, the cosmos itself might unravel. This was not metaphor to the Egyptians. Every cloth woven in her workshops was made under her protection, every strip of linen an act that echoed hers.

At her temple in Sais, Greco-Roman writers recorded an inscription: "I am all that has been, that is, and that will be, and no mortal has yet been able to lift the veil that covers me." Whether genuinely ancient or a Hellenistic addition, the words became inseparable from Neith across the classical world. Plutarch preserved them in his account of the Egyptian mysteries.

The Contending

The contest between Horus and Set for the throne of Egypt had dragged on for eighty years. Ra favored Set. Thoth argued legal precedent. The Ennead squabbled and split. In desperation, Banebdjed suggested they write to Neith at Sais.

Her letter was brief. The throne must go to Horus as the son and rightful heir of Osiris. Set should be compensated with doubled possessions and marriages to the foreign goddesses Anat and Astarte, receiving honor without power. Then she added a warning: if her counsel was not followed, the sky would crash to earth. Only the goddess who had woven the world's fabric could credibly make that threat. The gods obeyed.

The scene is preserved in Papyrus Chester Beatty I. Neith does not appear in the tribunal. She does not argue. She writes a letter, and eighty years of divine conflict end.

Guardian of the Dead

Neith was one of the four goddesses who guarded the dead, alongside Isis, Nephthys, and Serqet. Her crossed arrows were carved on the western corner of sarcophagi and canopic chests. She protected the canopic jar of Duamutef, one of the Four Sons of Horus, which held the stomach of the deceased.

Mummy bandages were called "the gifts of Neith." The wrapping of the dead in linen returned them to the material she had first drawn across her loom. Spells in the Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts invoke her protection, asking her to shield the dead from the serpents and demons of the Duat. Her arrows served against the supernatural as well as the living.

The Feast of Lamps

Neith's cult center was Sais in the western Delta. During the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, the Saite pharaohs restored her temple and made the city Egypt's capital. Psamtik I and his successors revived archaic rites in her honor, reaching back to Egypt's earliest traditions for their legitimacy.

Herodotus visited the temple and described the Feast of Lamps held in Neith's honor. The entire city of Sais blazed with oil lamps through the night. And not only Sais. All of Egypt lit their own lamps simultaneously, the whole country illuminated in a single act of devotion to the goddess who had woven the world. Herodotus also recorded sacred lakes and underground chambers at the temple where mysteries of Osiris were performed, the sanctuary of the creator goddess serving double duty as a site of the resurrection god's rites.