Sekhmet

In the precinct of Mut at Karnak the lionesses sit in rows, black granodiorite gone warm to the touch under the Upper Egyptian sun, each one a seated woman with a lion’s head and a sun disc riding above it. Hundreds survive. Some counts put the original commission above seven hundred, carved during the single reign of Amenhotep III and distributed between his mortuary temple across the river at Kom el-Hettan and the temple of Mut here. No other Egyptian deity was ever given a crowd like that. The king was not decorating a courtyard. He was managing something.

Her name states the case without ornament. Sekhem means power, the raw capacity to act, and Sekhmet is that word made feminine and given a body. She is the heat of the midday sun rather than its light, the part of the solar disc that kills crops and dries wells, and Egyptian theology never pretended otherwise. She belongs to a family of feline goddesses who shade into one another until the inscriptions themselves stop distinguishing them: Hathor, Bast, Tefnut, Mut. The statues at Karnak sometimes say outright that all of them are aspects of a single entity. That fluidity is not confusion on the ancients’ part. It is the point.

The story that made her reaches us from the walls of royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, where it is inscribed as part of what Egyptologists call the Book of the Heavenly Cow. It appears on the interior panels of Tutankhamun’s outer golden shrine and, in fuller versions, in chambers beside the sarcophagus halls of Sety I, Ramesses II and Ramesses III, with a papyrus fragment from Deir el-Medina now in Turin. In it Ra has grown old. His bones are described as electrum, his flesh as gold, his hair as lapis lazuli, and humanity, reading age as weakness, plots against him. Ra convenes the older gods, including Nun of the primordial waters, and asks what should be done. Their advice is to send down his Eye.

The Eye goes down as Hathor and comes back as something else. She reports that she has slaughtered people in the hills, and she describes herself wading in their blood. This is where the text turns, because Ra, who ordered it, is frightened by how well it is going and tells her to stop, and she does not stop. The goddess who cannot be recalled is the goddess called Sekhmet. Ra sends to Yebu, the island at Elephantine, for red ochre; the high priest at Heliopolis grinds it, maidservants crush barley for beer, and the mixture is poured out until seven thousand jars of it flood the fields. She arrives at dawn to resume the killing, finds the ground red, and drinks what she takes for blood. She drinks until she can no longer stand, let alone hunt. The world was saved by beer.

She is rarely shown in that moment. The statues catch her afterwards, composed, hands at rest, and the sculptors were exacting about it: whiskers incised at the muzzle, radiating hair around the face, wig strands falling to the shoulders, rosettes at the nipples, bracelets at wrist and ankle. Standing or seated, she is larger than life at close to human height and a half, cut from stone hard enough to blunt copper. The face is not a stylised cat. It is a specific wild feline expression, repeated hundreds of times without going slack, which is the harder thing to do.

What she does to people arrives in the form of her messengers. Egyptian magical and medical texts speak of the seven arrows of Sekhmet and of the seven agents who carry them, and a person struck by sudden fever or epidemic could be described as having been shot. The danger concentrated at the hinge of the year, in the five days added outside the twelve months, when her agents were understood to go out over the land. So the calendar came with a countermeasure. A ritual known as sehetep Sekhmet, the pacifying of Sekhmet, was performed to turn her away from the coming year, and the French Egyptologist Jean Yoyotte argued in 1980 that Amenhotep III’s mass of statues was that ritual rendered permanent in granite, a litany fixed in stone so that the appeasement would recite itself forever. It remains a hypothesis, but it is the only one that explains the arithmetic.

The logic runs the other way as well. Because she commanded the sickness, she could withdraw it, and the men who served her ended up in charge of the practical business of health. The wab priests of Sekhmet appear across pharaonic history as healers and diagnosticians, working alongside the lay physician and the magician, checking meat supplied to temples and reciting spells against her own arrows. A wab priest of Sekhmet held both ends of the rope: the office that spread the disease and the office that lifted it. Egypt saw no contradiction there, and neither did she.

Her cult attached her to Memphis, where she was worshipped beside Ptah the craftsman god and named as mother of Nefertem, the lotus of the sunrise. In the Old Kingdom she carries older maternal associations, and by the New Kingdom she is above all the Eye of the Sun, the defending edge of the creator. The uraeus at her forehead is the same weapon in serpent form, the cobra that spits fire at whatever approaches the god from the wrong direction. Against Ra’s enemies she is exactly what is wanted.

Her power is total inside its own domain and almost useless outside it. She cannot be argued with, bribed, or overruled, not even by the god who sent her, and the myth is candid that Ra loses control of his own instrument the moment he uses it. What works on her is appetite. She can be diverted, distracted, drenched, made drunk, honoured with music and rattles and jars of beer at a festival that celebrates her stopping. She has no counter-plot and no cunning of her own, only momentum. In late antiquity someone worked through the Karnak statues with hard metal chisels and struck the heads and hands from most of them, a systematic defacement rather than casual quarrying. They were not destroying decoration. They were disarming her, and the parts they went for were the parts that see and the parts that reach.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sekhmet?

Sekhmet is the lion-headed Egyptian goddess of war, plague and healing, whose name means “the Powerful One”. She is the violent form of the Eye of Ra, sent by the sun god to punish humanity, and was worshipped at Memphis as the consort of Ptah and the mother of Nefertem.

What is the myth of Sekhmet and the beer?

In the Book of the Heavenly Cow, Ra sends his Eye to destroy a rebellious humanity, and the goddess kills so thoroughly that she cannot be called off. Ra has seven thousand jars of beer dyed red with ochre from Elephantine poured over the fields; the goddess drinks it believing it to be blood, becomes too drunk to continue, and the surviving humans are spared.

Why are there so many statues of Sekhmet?

Amenhotep III commissioned hundreds of granodiorite statues of Sekhmet, by some counts more than seven hundred, for the temple of Mut at Karnak and his mortuary temple at Kom el-Hettan. Jean Yoyotte proposed in 1980 that they were a permanent version of the ritual for pacifying the goddess, a litany in stone intended to keep her calm year after year.

Is Sekhmet a goddess of plague or of healing?

Both, and for the same reason. Epidemic illness was understood as her arrows, carried by her seven messengers, so the priests who knew how to appease her were also the people who could lift the sickness, and the wab priests of Sekhmet served as physicians throughout pharaonic history.

What is the difference between Sekhmet and Bastet?

Sekhmet is the lioness and Bast is the cat, and Egyptian sources treat them as two faces of a single feline power rather than rivals. Sekhmet carries the destructive, solar and epidemic side of that power, while Bast is the protective and domestic side, and inscriptions on Sekhmet’s own statues sometimes identify all such goddesses as aspects of Hathor.

Related Entries

Ra, Hathor, Bast (Bastet), Ptah, Maat, Apep/Apophis, Tefnut, Wadjet, Nut, Shu, Thoth, Amun-Re, Sphinx, Ishtar, Durga