Hathor

Seven thousand jars of beer, dyed red with ochre, were poured across the barley fields in the dark so that by dawn the whole valley lay shining like a lake of blood. The goddess came down at first light to finish what she had begun the day before. She had been killing since morning, wading through the people who had plotted against her father, and she meant to drink the land dry of them. She lowered her mouth to the red flood, mistook it for what she craved, and drank until the slaughter went soft at the edges and she forgot why she had come. That is how the world kept breathing. Hathor got drunk, and humanity survived the night.

This is the same goddess the Egyptians loved above almost all their others, the mistress of music and dance and drink, of desire and childbirth and every ordinary joy. The lioness who nearly emptied the earth and the smiling cow-goddess who presided over weddings were one being. Love and slaughter came from the same throat.

Her name in Egyptian is Hwt-Hor, the House of Horus, and it names the sky itself: the heavens imagined as the dwelling of the falcon-god, and Hathor as that dwelling made divine. She is among the oldest gods in the country, worshipped from the earliest dynasties and rooted in a still older cattle-goddess of the Nile valley. The sky was pictured as an enormous cow standing over the flat of the world, her belly the field of stars, her four legs the pillars planted at the corners of the earth, the sun sailing the length of her each day. The stories never fixed her into a single family and did not seem to need to. She is the daughter of Ra in one telling and the mother who births the sun each morning in another, the consort of Horus at Edfu and the mother of his child, all at once and without apology.

The cattle in her form are never far. She appears as a full cow, heavy and calm; as a woman with a cow’s soft ears set into her hair; and most familiarly as a woman crowned with a sun disk held between two great curving horns, a broad collar of faience beads across her chest. In her hands she carries the sistrum, a bronze rattle whose loose crossbars ring when it is shaken, and the menat, a weighted necklace of many strands swung as percussion. Both instruments were thought to carry her power directly into the body of anyone who heard them.

At Dendera, the heart of her worship, priestesses shook the sistrum until the hall filled with a bright metallic hiss, dancers turned, and wine went round. She was the Lady of Drunkenness as well as of music, and her worshippers drank themselves to the floor at the Festival of Drunkenness in the hope of meeting her in the haze between waking and sleep. The joy was the point. Warmth, noise, the smell of poured beer, the ache of dancing too long: these were her offerings, and she was believed to be present in all of them.

The rage was the other half of her. Ra had grown old, and the people muttered against him and plotted to pull him down. He sent his Eye against them in the form of Hathor, who took the shape of the lioness Sekhmet and fell on the rebels with a hunger that would not stop at the guilty. When Ra saw she would not leave a single human alive, he could not call her off. She had passed beyond command. So he had the red beer brewed and flooded the fields with it overnight, and when she stooped to drink she took it for gore and drank her fill and fell asleep. She woke gentle. The destroyer could only be tricked, never overpowered, and the god who unleashed her had to outwit his own weapon to undo what he had ordered.

She kept a station at the desert’s edge, where the red land meets the black and the living do not go. There she waited in the branches of a sycamore, and when a soul came stumbling up out of the west she leaned down through the leaves and held out bread and cool water in the dust and shade. To die in Egypt was, with luck, to be received by her. She was the Mistress of the West and the Lady of Turquoise whose name the miners cut into the rock of Sinai, a goddess of the far edges as much as of the crowded temple.

Each year her image was carried from Dendera upriver to the temple of Horus at Edfu for the festival called the Beautiful Reunion, weeks of feasting while the two gods were said to keep company. Their child was Ihy, the sistrum-player, joy given a small divine body. At the birth of a mortal child the Seven Hathors were said to gather and speak its fate aloud, kind or cruel, and there was no arguing with them.

Her powers run the whole width of a life. She gives love and fertility and safe birth, music and dance and the loosening that drink brings, the golden light of the sun she carries on her head. She healed the wounded eyes of Horus. She nourishes the dead and lights their road into the afterworld. Her weakness is written into that same nature. Her tenderness and her fury are a single temper, and the fury, once loosed, obeys no one, not even the god who owns her. And time wore at her from a rival’s direction: as the cult of Isis rose, it drew Hathor’s cow horns and sun disk onto Isis’s own head and took much of what had been hers, until the older goddess stood in the shadow of the younger she had once outshone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Hathor?

Hathor is one of the oldest and most widely worshipped goddesses of ancient Egypt, a sky and cow goddess associated with love, beauty, music, dance, joy, fertility, and motherhood. Her name, Hwt-Hor, means “House of Horus” and refers to the sky as the dwelling of the falcon-god Horus. She was also a goddess of the dead, welcoming souls into the afterlife.

What is Hathor the goddess of?

Hathor is the Egyptian goddess of love, beauty, music, dance, drunkenness, fertility, and motherhood, and she is also a sky goddess and a guide of the dead. As “Mistress of the West” she received the souls of the dead into the afterlife, and as the “Lady of Turquoise” she was linked to the mines of Sinai. She was one of the most beloved deities in Egypt, tied to nearly every joy of daily life.

What is the myth of Hathor and the destruction of mankind?

When humans plotted against the aging sun god Ra, he sent his Eye against them in the form of Hathor, who took the shape of the lioness Sekhmet and began slaughtering humanity. Fearing she would kill everyone, Ra had seven thousand jars of beer dyed red and poured over the fields; Hathor drank it believing it was blood, fell into a drunken sleep, and woke as the gentle goddess again. The trick saved mankind and was later commemorated with festivals of red beer and drinking.

Why is Hathor depicted as a cow?

Hathor descends from an ancient Nile-valley cattle goddess, and the Egyptians pictured the sky itself as a giant cow standing over the world, with her legs as the pillars holding up the heavens. Because of this she appears as a full cow, as a woman with a cow’s ears, or as a woman crowned with a sun disk set between two cow horns. The cow imagery expressed her roles as a nurturing mother and a celestial goddess.

Who were the Seven Hathors?

The Seven Hathors were a group of goddess-forms of Hathor believed to appear at the birth of a child to foretell its destiny. They were worshipped in seven cities across Egypt and were sometimes linked to the stars. Because they spoke a child’s fate at birth, they were both protective and inescapable figures in Egyptian belief.

Related Entries

Ra, Sekhmet, Horus, Isis, Osiris, Nut, Bes, Taweret, Thoth, Set, Apis, Neith, Aphrodite, Ishtar, Inanna