| Hathor | |
|---|---|
 | |
|
Real Name |
Hathor |
|
First Appearance |
Egyptian Myth |
|
Created by |
Egyptian Myth |
Origin[]
Hathor was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion who played a wide variety of roles. As a sky deity, she was the mother or consort of the sky god Horus and the sun god Ra, both of whom were connected with kingship, and thus she was the symbolic mother of their earthly representatives, the pharaohs. She was one of several goddesses who acted as the Eye of Ra, Ra's feminine counterpart, and in this form, she had a vengeful aspect that protected him from his enemies.
Her beneficent side represented music, dance, joy, love, sexuality, and maternal care, and she acted as the consort of several male deities and the mother of their sons. These two aspects of the goddess exemplified the Egyptian conception of femininity. Hathor crossed boundaries between worlds, helping deceased souls in the transition to the afterlife.
Hathor was often depicted as a cow, symbolizing her maternal and celestial aspect, although her most common form was a woman wearing a headdress of cow horns and a sun disk. She could also be represented as a lioness, a cobra, or a sycamore tree.
In a late creation myth from the Ptolemaic Period (332–30 BC), the god Khonsu is put in a central role, and Hathor is the goddess with whom Khonsu mates to enable creation. Hathor could be the consort of many male gods, of whom Ra was only the most prominent. In the late periods of Egyptian history, the form of Hathor from Dendera and the form of Horus from Edfu were considered husband and wife and in different versions of the myth of the Distant Goddess, Hathor-Raettawy was the consort of Montu and Hathor-Tefnut the consort of Shu.
In "The Contendings of Horus and Set", a New Kingdom short story about the dispute between those two gods, Ra is upset after being insulted by another god, Babi, and lies on his back alone. After some time, Hathor exposes her genitals to Ra, making him laugh and get up again to perform his duties as ruler of the gods.
In a cryptic fragment of a Middle Kingdom story, known as "The Tale of the Herdsman", a herdsman encounters a hairy, animal-like goddess in a marsh and reacts with terror. On another day he encounters her as a nude, alluring woman. Most Egyptologists who study this story think this woman is Hathor or a goddess like her, one who can be wild and dangerous or benign and erotic.
Hathor was praised for her beautiful hair. Egyptian literature contains allusions to a myth not clearly described in any surviving texts, in which Hathor lost a lock of hair that represented her sexual allure. One text compares this loss with Horus's loss of his divine Eye and Set's loss of his testicles during the struggle between the two gods, implying that the loss of Hathor's lock was as catastrophic for her as the maiming of Horus and Set was for them.
In the funerary text known as the Book of the Heavenly Cow, Ra sends Hathor as the Eye of Ra to punish humans for plotting rebellion against his rule. She becomes the lioness goddess Sekhmet and massacres the rebellious humans, but Ra decides to prevent her from killing all humanity. He orders that beer be dyed red and poured out over the land. The Eye goddess drinks the beer, mistaking it for blood, and in her inebriated state reverts to being the benign and beautiful Hathor.
She was one of many goddesses to take the role of the Eye of Ra, a feminine personification of the disk of the sun and an extension of Ra's own power. Ra was sometimes portrayed inside the disk, which is interpreted as meaning that the eye goddess was thought of as a womb, from which the sun god was born. Hathor's seemingly contradictory roles as mother, wife, and daughter of Ra reflected the daily cycle of the sun. At sunset the god entered the body of the sky goddess, impregnating her and fathering the deities born from her womb at sunrise: himself and the eye goddess, who would later give birth to him. Ra gave rise to his daughter, the eye goddess, who in turn gave rise to him, her son, in a cycle of constant regeneration.
Public Domain Appearances[]
All published appearances of Hathor from before January 1, 1930 are public domain in the US.
Some notable appearances are listed below:
Public Domain Literary Appearances[]
- Tale of Two Brothers
- Tale of the Doomed Prince
- The Contendings of Horus and Set
- The Tale of the Herdsman
- Love poems from Papyrus Chester Beatty I
- Ptolemaic Period Creation Myth
- Book of the Heavenly Cow
- The Gods of the Egyptians; or, Studies in Egyptian Mythology (1904)
- The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians (1914)
- Myths and Legends of Ancient Egypt by Lewis Spence (1915)
- Ancient Egyptian Legends (1920)