Evil Gods: Hathor

Key Facts

Other names	Hah-Thor
Year of origin	2700 BCE
Location
Parent(s)
Partner(s)
Children
Aspect(s)
Major Centre(s)
Period of worship

Background

Hathor (Pronounced Hah-Thor) (Egyptian for house of Horus) was originally a personification of the Milky Way, which was seen as the milk that flowed from the udders of a heavenly cow. Hathor was an ancient goddess, and was worshipped as a cow-deity from at least 2700 BC, during the second dynasty.

Her worship by the Egyptians goes back earlier however, possibly, even by the Scorpion King who ruled during the Protodynastic Period before the dynasties began. His name, Serqet, may refer to the goddess Serket.

Hathor is referred to as She with Two Faces, which is symbolic both for her ability to be cruel to humanity as well as kind and hence her ability to change shape from a woman into a bull or a serpent.

It was said that, with her motherly character, Hathor greeted the souls of the dead in Duat, and proffered them with refreshments of food and drink. She also was described sometimes as mistress of the acropolis.

Hathor also became associated with the menat, the turquoise musical necklace often worn by women. A hymn to Hathor says:

Thou art the Mistress of Jubilation, the Queen of the Dance, the Mistress of Music, the Queen of the Harp Playing, the Lady of the Choral Dance, the Queen of Wreath Weaving, the Mistress of Inebriety Without End.

Essentially, Hathor had become a goddess of Joy, and so she was deeply loved by the general population, and truly revered by women, who aspired to embody her multifaceted role as wife, mother, and lover. In this capacity, she gained the titles of Lady of the House of Jubilation, and The One Who Fills the Sanctuary with Joy.

The worship of Hathor was so popular that more festivals were dedicated to her honor than any other Egyptian deity, and more children were named after this goddess than any other deity. Even Hathor's priesthood was unusual, in that both women and men became her priests.

Mythology

In the tale following the war, Ra (representing the pharaoh of Upper Egypt) was no longer respected by the people (of Lower Egypt) and they ceased to obey his authority, which made him so angry that he sent out Sekhmet (war goddess of Upper Egypt) to destroy them. Sekhmet became bloodthirsty and the slaughter was great because she could not be stopped.

As the slaughter continued, fear that all of humanity would be destroyed arose among the deities and Ra was charged with stopping her. Ra poured huge quantities of blood-coloured beer on the ground to trick Sekhmet. She drank so much of it—thinking it to be blood—that she became too drunk to continue the slaughter and humanity was saved. Afterward Sekhmet became loving and kind.

The gentle form that Sekhmet had become by the end of the tale was identical in character to Hathor, and so a new cult arose, at the start of the Middle Kingdom, which dualistically identified Sekhmet with Hathor, making them one goddess, Sekhmet-Hathor, with two sides.

Consequently, Hathor, as Sekhmet-Hathor, was sometimes depicted as a lioness. Sometimes this joint name was corrupted to Sekhathor (also spelt Sechat-Hor, Sekhat-Heru), meaning (one who) remembers Horus (the uncorrupted form would mean (the) powerful house of Horus but Ra had displaced Horus, thus the change).

When Horus became identified as Ra in the changing Egyptian pantheon, under the name Ra-Horakhty, Hathor's position became unclear, since in later myths she had been the wife of Ra, but in earlier myths she was the mother of Horus.

Thoth was identified as the creator, leading to it being said that Thoth was the father of Ra-Horakhty, thus in this version Hathor, as the mother of Ra-Horakhty, was referred to as Thoth's wife. In this version of what is called the Ogdoad cosmogeny, Ra-Herakhty was depicted as a young child, often referred to as Neferhor. When considered the wife of Thoth, Hathor often was depicted as a woman nursing her child.

Hathor in Palestine and Sinai

Hathor was worshipped in Canaan in the eleventh century BC, which at that time was ruled by Egypt, at her holy city of Hazor, or Tel Hazor

The Sinai Tablets show that the Hebrew workers in the mines of Sinai about 1500 BC worshipped Hathor, whom they identified with their goddess Astarte. Some theories state that the golden calf mentioned in the Bible was meant to refer to a statue of the goddess Hathor

A major temple to Hathor was constructed by Seti II at the copper mines at Timna in Edomite Seir. Serabit el-Khadim (Arabic: سرابت الخادم) (Arabic, also transliterated Serabit al-Khadim, Serabit el-Khadem) is a locality in the south-west Sinai Peninsula where turquoise was mined extensively in antiquity, mainly by the ancient Egyptians. Archaeological excavation, initially by Sir Flinders Petrie, revealed the ancient mining camps and a long-lived Temple of Hathor.

The Greeks, who became rulers of Egypt for three hundred years before the Roman domination in 31 BC, also loved Hathor and equated her with their own goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite.


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