The beauty of your
face Glitters when you rise Oh come in peace.
One is drunk At your beautiful face, O Gold, Hathor. From a hymn to the goddess
Hathor, Egypt, 18th Dynasty
In Egyptian
mythology, Hathor is the mother goddess and goddess of love of ancient
Egypt. She was worshipped c. 2700 BCE or possibly earlier, to c. 400 CE,
in a cult that flourished in Ta-Netjer (‘Land of God’ – modern day
Dendera, or Dendara) in Upper Egypt, as well as Thebes and Giza, and her
priests included both men and women.
Other names for Hathor are Het-Hert, Athyr
and Hetheru. Her name appears to mean ‘house of
Horus’, a reference to her role as a sky goddess, the
‘house’ denoting the heavens depicted as a great cow. (At the temple of
Queen Nefertari at
Abu
Simbel, Nefertari is shown as Hathor, and her husband Ramses II is shown
in one sanctuary receiving milk from Hathor the cow.) Hathor was often
regarded as the mother of the Egyptian pharaoh, who styled himself the
‘son of Hathor’. During the Old Kingdom she assumed the properties of an
earlier bovine goddess, Bat. She is an ancient goddess
and appears to have been mentioned as early as the 2nd Dynasty.
Hathor existed for the
entire history of the ancient Egyptian culture as a powerful and influential
deity. She was goddess of death, and
the cow goddess. Her father is the sun god Ra (or Re);
Hathor is often
described as mother of all pharaohs. In myth, she is referred to as both Ra’s Mother and his Daughter,
serving as both his purpose to continue his daily cycle (the progression of
the sun through the sky), and alternatively as an agent of his will. In the
‘daughter’ aspect, she sits upon Ra’s brow as a coiled cobra,
breathing flames and venom at his enemies.
In early Egyptian mythology, she was the
mother of the sky god Horus, but was later replaced in this capacity by
Isis. One of
the tales of Hathor tells that she was originally a goddess of destruction (Hathor-Sekhmet),
but Hathor later became a consort and/or
protectress of Horus. She was depicted either as a cow, or in human form
wearing a crown consisting of a sun disk held between the horns of a cow.
Yet, as ‘mother’,
she might derive from a much earlier goddess, MHt wr. (Mehetweret or Methyer)
(‘Great Flood’), who, in the form of a cow, is said to have risen from
the primeval sky-waters and as part of various acts of creation, gave birth
to the sun-god Ra, and after so bearing him, placed him (as a disc) between
her horns.
“So, at dawn,
Hathor gives birth to the sun through the moisture of mist, recalling her
MHt wr.t attributes as described above. As the day progresses, so
changes the image of the goddess, with her rosy dawn maternal aspect
giving way in a ‘glittering’ effect to the clear turquoise sky of day.
In this way, the ancient Egyptians saw Hathor as beauteously dancing ahead
of the sun, and with the rattling and shaking of the sistrum and mnj.t (menat)
necklace, she provided a
seductive means of attracting the sun to follow her.”Source
Hathor was associated with erotic music and
dancing, patron of sexual love, the sky, the sun, the queen, music, dance
and the arts, and the Egyptian’s cognate of the Romans’ Venus, while the
Greeks identified her with Aphrodite.
Egyptian women prayed to Hathor for assistance during childbirth, and as a
cow deity she was envisioned as suckling infants. On the occasion of a birth
in Egypt, seven Hathors (rather like European fairy godmothers) would appear
to ‘speak with one mouth’ and determine the child's fate. These goddesses were
worshiped in seven cities: Thebes, Heliopolis, Aphroditopolis, Sinai,
Momemphis, Herakleopolis, and Keset. They are linked to the Pleiadesstar cluster in the constellation Taurus, known
even today as the Seven Sisters. (To the Greeks, they were
the seven daughters of Atlas, and the Australian Aborigines believed the Pleiades
were a woman who had been nearly raped by
Kidili, the man in the moon. Alternatively,
they were seven sisters called the Makara.)
Hathor's own child was Ihy, who was
worshipped in Dendera with her and Horus-Behdety. Like his mother, Ihy was a
god of music and dancing, and was always depicted as a child bearing a sistrum rattle.
At celebrations such as Hathor’s Moon
Festival (circa October 26), girls danced the Dance of Hathor, which they
preformed while holding mirrors in one hand and sistrum in the other. Hathor often is seen
carrying such a sistrum.
Names of the goddess
The goddess had many other titles`
such as: ‘the Mistress of Heaven’; ‘the Lady of the Stars’; the
‘Lady to the Limit’ (‘limit’ meaning the edges of the known
universe); the ‘Lady of the West’; ‘the Powerful One’; ‘the
Mistress of the Desert’; ‘Lady of the Southern Sycamore’ (the sycamore
tree was sacred to her); the ‘Divine
(or Celestial) Cow’; ‘the Lady of Drunkenness’;
‘the Gold that is Hathor’ and ‘the Golden One’, indicating a close
relationship with Ra. She was also known as ‘the Lady of Greenstone and
Malachite’ due to her being regarded as a goddess of the desert fringes
where such mines existed.
Hathor/Sekhmet licking her lips
According to one legend (‘the Destruction of Mankind’), Ra
believed that all people were plotting against him, so he sent the Eye of Ra
in the form of Hathor (as Sekhmet, a
personification of the jrt Eye) to destroy the world. However,
Ra saw how Sekhmet’s cruelty was destroying his people, and he had
compassion for them, so he devised a trick to stop her massacres.
Ra flooded the fields with beer brewed by
the women of Heliopolis and dyed red on Ra’s orders, from the red ochre of Elephantine (an island in the Nile), in order to stop Sekhmet’s rampaging slaughter of
people (as Hathor mistook it for the blood of her victims, which she
craved):
“‘Mingle
the red ochre of Elephantine with the barley-beer,’ said Ra, and it was
done, so that the beer gleamed red in the moonlight like the blood of men.
“‘Now
take it to the place where Sekhmet proposes to slay men when the sun
rises,’ said Ra. And while it was still night the seven thousand jars of
beer were taken and poured out over the fields so that the ground was
covered to the depth of nine inches …
“When
day came Sekhmet the terrible came also, licking her lips at the thought
of the men whom she would slay. She found the place flooded and no living
creature in sight; but she saw the beer which was the colour of blood, and
she thought it was blood indeed – the blood of those whom she had slain.
“Then
she laughed with joy, and her laughter was like the roar of a lioness
hungry for the kill. Thinking that it was indeed blood, she stooped and
drank. Again and yet again she drank, laughing with delight; and the
strength of the beer mounted to her brain, so that she could no longer
slay.”Source
Hathor stopped to drink of this beverage,
and, having become intoxicated, never carried out her deadly mission. Thus appeased by intoxicants, music and dance, she
reverts to her beneficent form of Hathor, and returns to the arms of her
father, Ra.Therefore,
without this wild and wilful aspect of Hathor, life itself could not exist.
She was also a harvest goddess; congruent
harvest goddesses are Demeter, Ceres, Mawu, Spider Woman, Ukemoshi, Gaia, Ge,
Rhea, Tellus Mater, Carna, Chicomecoatl, Coatlique.
Hathor may be depicted in art as a usually
slender woman swathed in turquoise (her
sacred colour) or red raiment, with a crown consisting of a sun
disc surrounded by curved cow horns; she might also be associated with
lions, and her symbols include papyrus and the snake.
“In the very late stages of Egyptian
religion (over two millennia after Hathor had first appeared) she became
almost totally absorbed into Isis (who acquired, aside from Hathor's
headdress, the sistrum as well), resulting in frequent mistaken identity
between the two. There are, however, subtle differences. When Isis is
shown with the horns she is also (usually) shown with either the vulture
headdress (which was associated with Mut, a goddess of Thebes), winged, or wearing a multi-colored
feathered dress.”Source
The Goddess month of Hathor commences on October 3.
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Nekht, the captain of soldiers, the
royal scribe, singeth a hymn of praise to Ra, and saith:- Homage to thee,
O thou glorious Being, thou who art dowered [with all sovereignty]. O Tem-Heru-Khuti
(Tem- Harmakhis), when thou risest in the horizon of heaven a cry of joy
goeth forth to thee from all people. O thou beautiful Being, thou dost
renew thyself in thy season in the form of the Disk, within thy mother
Hathor. From the Papyrus
of Nekht, British Museum, No. 10471, Sheet 21
The Osiris Ani [whose word is truth,
saith]:- I eat bread. I drink ale. I gird up my garments. I fly like a
hawk. I cackle like the Smen goose. I alight upon that place hard by the
Sepulchre on the festival of the Great God. That which is abominable, that
which is abominable I will not eat. [An abominable thing] is filth, I will
not eat thereof. That which is an abomination unto my KA shall not enter
my body. I will live upon that whereon live the gods and the Spirit-souls.
I shall live, and I shall be master of their cakes. I am master of them,
and I shall eat them under the trees of the dweller in the House of Hathor,
my Lady. I will make an offering. My cakes are in Tetu, my offerings are
in Anu. I gird about myself the robe which is woven for me by the goddess
Tait. I shall stand up and sit down in whatsoever place it pleaseth me to
do so. My head is like unto that of Ra. I am gathered together like Tem. From the
Papyrus of Ani; the chapter of making the transformation into Ptah
In 
The goddess had many other titles`
such as: ‘the Mistress of Heaven’; ‘the Lady of the Stars’; the
‘Lady to the Limit’ (‘limit’ meaning the edges of the known
universe); the ‘Lady of the West’; ‘