Horus

A falcon holds still against the wind above the Nile, wings set, the whole sky pouring past it, and for a moment it does not seem to be flying at all but simply occupying the highest point in the world. That was how Egypt pictured its god of kingship. Not enthroned, not armoured, but hanging in the blue with the sunlight sliding off oiled feathers, watching the land the way a king is supposed to watch it. Horus was the sky itself, and the two great lights were his eyes: the sun the right, the moon the left, opening and closing over the world in turn.

He is one of the oldest gods Egypt had, older than most of the stories later told about him. Long before the priests worked him into a family, he was a falcon on a perch, a sky power worshipped up and down the river, and traces of that first god never went away. The theologians ended up with two of him and never quite decided to merge them. There is Horus the Elder, Haroeris, the great sky falcon whose eyes are sun and moon and who belongs to the first age of the world. And there is the other Horus, the son, born late into a story of murder, who spends his childhood as hunted prey and his manhood in a courtroom. The Egyptians kept both and let them blur into each other.

The son’s story begins with a corpse. Set, god of the desert and of everything that refuses to be governed, murdered his brother Osiris and seized the throne, and the widowed Isis, using magic no other god could match, drew enough life back out of her dead husband to conceive a child by him. She carried the boy into the papyrus swamps of the Delta and raised him in secret at a place called Chemmis, hiding a future king in the one landscape nobody rules. It was not a safe nursery. The reeds hissed with snakes, scorpions moved through the black mud, and more than once the child was found cold and rigid with poison and had to be sung back to life by his mother and by Thoth. He grew up as something that could be killed. That marked him.

Grown, he is shown two ways. Most often he is a man with a falcon’s head, lean and straight-backed, the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt on his brow, the tall white cone nested inside the red to say he holds both halves of the land. The head is exact: the hooked beak, the round unblinking eye, the dark line running down from it like a permanent tear, the mark a real peregrine wears. Sometimes he is simply the bird, a falcon crouched on a royal standard with the crown balanced on its skull, or a falcon with the sun carried as a disk between its wings. In his oldest and youngest guise he is a naked child with a shaved head and one plaited sidelock, a finger lifted to his lips, and the Greeks who met that image read the childish gesture as a call for silence and turned him into Harpocrates, a little god of secrets.

When Horus came of age he went to claim what was his, and what followed is the strangest lawsuit in mythology. The gods convened as a tribunal, the Ennead, to settle the question: was Egypt to go to Set, the strong uncle in possession, or to Horus, the rightful heir? It should have been quick. It took eighty years. Ra, presiding, kept leaning toward Set, who was older and stronger and who guarded the sun’s boat each night against the serpent of chaos, and the court dithered while Isis schemed. There were contests. The two gods turned themselves into hippopotami and sank beneath the water to see who could last longest. They raced boats that were meant to be carved from stone, and Horus won by cheating, building his of cedar and plastering it to look like stone while Set’s genuine stone boat went straight to the bottom. And there was an uglier episode, in which Set tried to degrade Horus by mounting him, and Isis turned the trick inside out so that Set was the one shamed in front of the whole court. Somewhere in the long brawl Set tore out Horus’s eye, and Horus in return unmanned Set, and the mutilations they dealt each other became the Egyptian shorthand for disorder let loose.

The eye is the part everyone remembers. Torn away and broken into pieces, it was found and made whole again by Thoth, the god of writing and reckoning, and the restored eye became the wedjat, the emblem of everything sound and complete: healing, protection, the offering that puts a thing back together. Horus did not keep it. He carried the healed eye down into the shadowed hall where his murdered father sat among the dead, and gave it to Osiris to swallow, and the cold king was quickened enough by it to rule the world below while his son ruled the world above. After that the eye was everywhere, painted on coffin sides, cut into amulets, worn against illness and the envious look, a small bright promise that what is damaged can be restored.

In the end the court found for Horus. Osiris himself sent word up from the land of the dead, threatening the living gods with the terror he now commanded, and even Ra gave way. Set was made to surrender the throne, and Horus took the double crown as the first king of a single Egypt and the template for every king who came after. This was the whole point of the story. Each living pharaoh was Horus on earth, the falcon in the palace, and when he died he became Osiris and passed the falcon to his son. The oldest element of a royal name, older than the cartouche, was the Horus name, written inside a niched rectangle with the falcon perched watchfully on top. A god had become a job description.

His powers are the powers of the open sky and of legitimate rule. He commands the heavens, sees all the earth beneath him with sun and moon for eyes, shields the king and the land, and heals through the eye that was itself healed. As a warrior he is the avenger, the son who forces a wrong back into its right shape, and in that role he was welded to the sun god as Ra-Horakhty, Horus of the Two Horizons, the falcon-headed sun crossing the sky each day. But he is not an untouchable god. He began as an infant a scorpion could kill, dependent on his mother’s spells simply to keep breathing, and that early helplessness never quite let go of him. He lost his eye and could not mend it himself; another god had to. He could not just take his throne but had to grind it out of eighty years of argument and trickery, leaning on the cunning of Isis and the eventual verdict of a dead man. His right was never in question. His power to enforce it always was. That is the Egyptian idea of kingship folded into one figure: sacred, rightful, and forever obliged to prove itself against an older, stronger chaos that never entirely goes away.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Horus in Egyptian mythology?

Horus is the ancient Egyptian falcon god of the sky and of kingship, and one of the oldest deities in the Egyptian pantheon. In his best-known form he is the son of Osiris and Isis who avenges his murdered father and wins the throne of Egypt from his uncle Set. Every living pharaoh was considered a form of Horus on earth, which made him the divine guarantor of Egyptian kingship.

What is the Eye of Horus?

The Eye of Horus, called the wedjat, is the god’s left eye, which Set tore out during their long conflict and which Thoth then restored and made whole. Because it was healed and made complete, it became the Egyptian emblem of healing, protection, and wholeness. Egyptians painted it on coffins and wore it as an amulet to guard against sickness and the evil eye.

Who are the parents of Horus?

In the developed myth, Horus is the son of Osiris and Isis. After Set murdered Osiris, Isis used powerful magic to conceive Horus and then hid the child in the marshes of the Nile Delta to protect him from his uncle. An older tradition also knows Horus the Elder, a primeval sky god who is not born of Osiris and Isis but belongs to the first age of the world.

What happened between Horus and Set?

Horus and Set fought a long struggle over the throne of Egypt, which Set had seized after murdering Osiris. The best-known account presents it as an eighty-year legal trial before the tribunal of gods called the Ennead, filled with contests, trickery, and violence, during which Set tore out Horus’s eye and Horus castrated Set. In the end the gods ruled in favor of Horus, who took the double crown and became king.

Why was the pharaoh connected to Horus?

The pharaoh was believed to be Horus in living form, the god embodied in the ruling king, because Horus was the rightful heir who took the throne of a unified Egypt. When a king died he was identified with Osiris, and his successor became the new Horus, so the myth modeled the passing of the crown from father to son. The oldest part of the royal titulary, the Horus name, wrote the king’s identity inside a rectangle topped by the falcon.

Related Entries

Osiris, Isis, Set, Ra, Thoth, Anubis, Nephthys, Hathor, Nekhbet, Wadjet, Maat, Bennu, Sobek