Contrary to popular opinion, the Egyptians did not worship animals, but rather the characters of deities were symbolized in animal forms. Cows and vultures were among those animals considered motherly. Many female goddesses had the characteristics of the perfect wife and mother – kind, gentle and nurturing – and were thus depicted in cow or vulture form. However, there were also aggressive, fiery goddesses, who killed and maimed, and here the lioness was a more suitable metaphor. Strangely, to us, goddesses could change form.
The ancient Egyptians did not consider deities as individuals, like people. Their specific names were not as important as their characters. Thus, deities could be merged, or in the case of the myth of the ‘Return of the Distant One’, could even transform from one to another. In some instances, a deity apparently represented as one individual could be given two names, or names could be combined. On a Twenty-first Dynasty coffin in the Egypt Centre, Swansea, a tree-goddess is called both Nut and Maat.
While there are parallels between the way gods are described and the way women were understood in ancient Egypt, we need to be wary of assuming that goddesses acted as role models for female human society. Goddesses are often shown in ways in which a female human would never be: goddesses are shown suckling, elite women are not; goddesses are shown holding knives, women are not. Here, a selection of deities will be explored with the aim of revealing the essential nature of some of the most important ones.
The Eye of Re, or Horus, is a vital element of the male god Re. However, this is a female entity, the daughter of Re, sometimes associated with Hathor, and at other times with Mut, Sekhmet, and Tefnut. It appears as the protective uraeus on the forehead of the king. It always relates to the illuminating, active, creative or seeing aspect of Re,1 so goddesses are described as the Eye when creative, or active roles are ascribed to them.
Nut was considered the daughter of Shu, the sister and wife of Geb, and the mother of Isis, Seth, Osiris and Nephthys and sometimes of Re. She was never a goddess of everyday life, but instead is connected to temple and tomb.2 She is the protector of the deceased and the concealed uterine space from which the deceased may be reborn.
In the Pyramid Texts, Nut is a protector of the king, allowing him to be reborn. As such, she is later identified with the lids of coffins and the interiors of some examples are decorated with depictions of the goddess. On Twenty-first Dynasty coffins, in particular, Nut is portrayed as the tree-goddess providing sustenance and protection for the deceased. She is shown either in front of the sycamore fig, or as an integral part of the tree, pouring refreshment for the deceased.
The scene of a Nut stretching over the heavens and above a reclining Geb develops from the New Kingdom, becoming particularly popular at Thebes in the tenth and eleventh centuries BC. Here Nut is the sky-goddess. In New Kingdom iconography, Nut is frequently depicted as naked. This may correspond with the idea of a sexual union between Geb and Nut, which is described in the Pyramid Texts, or may be to show that Nut is giving birth, as ancient Egyptian women may have given birth naked.3
Most cultures consider the earth female; in ancient Egypt, however, the sky-goddess, Nut, is depicted as arching over the male earth god, Geb. A convincing explanation has been proposed for why this should be so: in most cultures the sky is the active entity bringing forth rain to fertilize the passive earth. In Egypt, the earth was fertilized by the annual inundation of the Nile, which came from the earth and not the sky. The female sky, however, acted to stimulate the earth into procreation.4
As a sky-goddess, the sun passed through Nut’s mouth and body each night and was reborn again each morning. One myth describes how Geb quarrelled with Nut because she kept swallowing their children, the stars. The idea of Nut receiving her children by swallowing and giving birth to them, and of the quarrel between Geb and Nut, is recorded for the first time in the Osirian text in the cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos.5
Nut could also be portrayed as a cow arching over the sky, although Nut as a cow is never a common motif. The Hathor horns with sun disk are, however, not infrequently used to adorn her head from the New Kingdom onward. Occasionally too, Nut may take other maternal forms such as a vulture or hippopotamus.
Neith is possibly the earliest of the commonly worshipped female deities to which we can attribute a name. She is attested as early as the Predynastic Period, or at least her sign of crossed arrows appears on Naqada III pottery and on Predynastic rock art.6 A wooden label of King Aha, the first ruler of a united Egypt, from Abydos (c.3100 BC), shows him visiting her sanctuary. Two of the most important First Dynasty royal women, Neithhotep (meaning ‘Neith is content’) and Merneith (meaning ‘Beloved of Neith’) had names which incorporated that of the goddess. That her standard appears above the names of these women, in the same way that Horus appears above the name of early kings, might suggest that Early Dynastic women had similar roles to that of the king.7
Although early evidence for Neith comes from Abydos in Upper Egypt, she was usually shown wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt and as such personified the kingship of Lower Egypt. The king was known as ‘He of the Sedge and the Bee’ and Neith’s temple at Saïs, Lower Egypt, was sometimes known as the ‘House of the Bee’. In Roman times, inscriptions at the temple of Khnum in Esna claim she was an Upper Egyptian goddess who only later settled in Lower Egypt. The importance of Neith in Early Dynastic Egypt may reflect the importance of the Delta and Saïs, in particular, during the period of state formation.8 In the Early Dynastic Period, Neith was associated with both male and female royalty. As shown in the Pyramid Texts, she is a protector of the king in the afterlife, though the fact that she is mentioned less frequently than Isis and Nut may suggest she was more a goddess of the living at this date. By this date, Neith had become known as the consort of Seth and the mother of Sobek.
From early times, Neith appears to have been associated with the sign of the crossed arrows, sometimes overlaid on a shield. Some have suggested that another sign, that of the elatarid (the coleoptera beetle or click beetle) placed head to head was earlier and then reinterpreted as a shield with two crossed arrows.9 Which emblem came first is open to debate. The sign of the arrows suggests her warrior or huntress nature, but why she should be associated with the beetles is unclear. Click beetles are often found near water, and Neith was associated with both Mehet-Weret, the goddess whose name means ‘The Great Flood’, and with the waters of origins.10 Additionally, some of these beetles are luminous, perhaps relating to Neith’s Old Kingdom epithet ‘Opener of the Way’, in which role she can be seen as a double of Wepwawet, the male jackal god of Upper Egypt, whose name also means ‘Opener of the Way’. The title perhaps referred to her role as opening up the afterlife ways for the deceased, or perhaps her role as opening the path for the daily journey of the sun across the sky and its cycle of rebirth.
The importance of Neith in the Old Kingdom is clearly shown in the fact that of personal names containing those of deities, 40 per cent are of Neith. After the Fourth Dynasty, her importance appears to have given way to that of Hathor.
However, she is never an insignificant goddess. In the Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom, for example, the deceased is associated with her. In the Coffin Text 846 (CT 846), she is described as a cow sky-goddess whose horns are ‘adorned with two stars’ recalling the enigmatic Predynastic-Early Dynastic bovine deity discussed in Chapter 2. As a sky and mother goddess she was also associated with the ‘Great Cow’ and with Nut and Hathor. As one of the goddesses of weaving, she was linked with mummy bandages. She also continued her role as a protector of kings and the deceased.
At times, she is considered sexless and associated with the primeval waters of the Nun. She is said to be the first born of the gods. In the New Kingdom, she is sometimes referred to as ‘The Mother and Father of All Things’. It is notable that other primeval deities are also considered androgynous, one example being Atum who is said to have masturbated to create himself. Such gods are usually primeval, alone in the beginning and without consorts. Although certain gods are said to be androgynous, they are usually largely one sex or another. Thus Neith is largely female, but with some male characteristics.
Neith’s androgynous, or at least partly masculine, character is said to be shown by her symbol of the crossed arrows,11 warfare and hunting being male pursuits. Her masculinity is emphasized in the Eighteenth Dynasty; in the Eleventh Hour of the Amduat, her name is written with the phallus determinative.12 At Esna, she is described as ‘the male who acts the role of the female, the female who acts the role of the male’.13
In the Twenty-sixth Dynasty (664–525 BC), with the rise of Saïs as the capital of Egypt, the importance of Neith also increased. Indeed, she continued to be referred to as a mother, sky-goddess and primeval goddess until at least the Ptolemaic Period. The arrows of Neith were able to shoot the enemies of the sun-god Re14 and she became associated with the Greek warrior goddess Athena.
The two sisters Isis and Nephthys were essential in the revival of Osiris, king of the deceased, and thus are pivotal in rebirth rites. Isis and Nephthys first appear in the Pyramid Texts of Unas c.2400BC. They continue in importance until the Graeco-Roman Period. Isis in particular assumes huge popularity in this period, her fame spreading throughout the Roman Empire.
From the Pyramid Texts and later documents, we see Isis and Nephthys as a pair, sisters who together mourn the death of Osiris and are instrumental in bringing him to life. They are sometimes referred to as the two ‘mooring posts’, ‘to be moored’ being a phrase used to denote death. The pair are shown standing together behind the throne of Osiris, or at the head and foot of the deceased. Isis and Nephthys could be depicted as two birds, kites, their plaintive and shrill cries mourning the death of Osiris. In the Graeco-Roman Period, the laments of Isis and Nephthys for the death of Osiris, and their search for his body, would be acted out by two women during the Osirian festivals, and at funerals of mortals, professional mourners would re-enact their story. Isis cries:
While I can see I call to you
Weeping to the height of heaven!
But you do not hear my voice,
Though I am your sister whom you loved on earth,
You loved none but me, the sister the sister!15
The two could also be depicted individually, though Isis is the best known of the sisters. She is the sister and wife to Osiris and mother of Horus. There are many hundreds of Late Period bronzes showing Isis with baby Horus on her lap. Some have seen this image as being paralleled in later Christianity in representations of Mary and the baby Jesus. Isis is a protector of the young and has magical powers. She cures bites of poisonous animals; she is sent by Re to deliver his sons. In her role as a goddess reviving the deceased, she is shown as a kite hovering above Osiris to bring him to life. Isis also has a devious side. She tricks the sun god Re into telling her his secret name by making a snake mixed from Re’s saliva and mud, which bites him. Isis offers to cure the god of his terrible pain if he tells her his secret name. In the Contendings of Horus and Seth, her cunning enables her son Horus to gain the throne of his father.
In the Old Kingdom, to some extent she shared in Hathor’s glory at Qusae in Middle Egypt; and during the Middle and New Kingdoms, she was worshipped along with Osiris at Abydos, and Min at Coptos. From the New Kingdom onward, she is often associated with Hathor and, like Hathor, wears the sun disk between cow horns. However, until later periods, Hathor had a great many more temples than Isis.
In the fourth century BC, Isis rises to prominence and temples to her alone were founded for the first time, of which the temple of Isis at Philae is perhaps the best known. Nineteenth century visitors called this temple ‘The Jewel of the Nile’. The Romans adopted the cult of Isis throughout the Empire, so that temples to Isis were set up in Rome and as far away as London. Even after most Egyptian temples had been desecrated by Christians, the worship of Isis was continued by Egyptian nomadic desert peoples until the sixth century AD.
Nephthys was never as famous as Isis and had no temple or cult centre. Her name, Nebet-hwt, means ‘Mistress of the Mansion’. She was the wife of Seth and sister of Osiris. In the Pyramid Texts, she is the helper of the deceased. Like Isis, she had magical powers. She was one of the goddesses of weaving, and mummy bandages were sometimes referred to as the tresses of Nephthys. Plutarch, a Greek writer of the First and Second Centuries AD speaks of Nephthys sleeping with Osiris through trickery and then giving birth to Anubis. Plutarch describes Nephthys as representing the barren desert, and therefore as a goddess of death, while Isis was associated with life. Plutarch was, however, reporting a Romanized version of stories concerning the goddess.
There were more temples to Hathor than any other goddess. She personified love, beauty and rebirth, but was also a goddess of minerals and the Eastern Desert. Her name means ‘Mansion of Horus’. Generally, Hathor is a nurturing goddess and is associated with many other goddesses.
From early times, Hathor was linked with Giza, Memphis and Dendera, as well as other sites and, as outlined in Chapter 2, the cult of Hathor followed the ruling elite of the Old Kingdom. In the Middle Kingdom, Mentuhotep Nebhepetre used Hathor’s cult to legitimize his rule. At Dendera, she is shown offering her sistrum and menit-necklace to the king for the first time, and suckling him.16 Her link with royal women from the Middle Kingdom, and especially the New Kingdom, is discussed in an earlier chapter. The king celebrated his regenerative potency through union with Hathor as wife and mother.17
In many ways, Hathor is a link to other worlds. Jan Assmann,18 who seeks to deny the ecstatic experience in Egyptian religion in general, admits that the cult of Hathor was an exception. The other worlds of distant mines, the other worlds of ecstatic experience and the other world of death and rebirth are all Hathorian.
Cross culturally, women have a proclivity to embrace ecstatic religion, possibly due to their subordinate status.19 Ecstatic religion, if it existed to any great extent in Egypt, may be difficult to identify, especially if largely associated with women. This is due to the fact that state religion, writing, and so forth were largely in the hands of men.20 To some extent, the association of ecstatic religion with Hathor and women can only be supposition, but the female prominence in music and dance together with Hathor’s otherworld connections support this.
Hathor as a mortuary goddess is described in the Pyramid Texts and in the Coffin Texts.21 The dying desired to be ‘in the following of Hathor’. She is depicted stepping out of the other world to greet the deceased. However, not only the deceased, but also the living, could commune with her; two stelae record joyous epiphanies of men meeting Hathor.22 She was also associated with the desert and foreign lands, mines and mining, and thus with mountains (mines were linked with mountains in the Egyptian mind). She was ‘The Lady of Byblos’ and was also associated with the sky. The Seven Hathors were goddesses of prophecy, seeing across time.
Some23 do not see Hathor as a mother goddess, but rather a goddess of childbirth and related to this, sexuality. The goddess Nebethetep, the personification of djeret, the hand of the creator god, became known as the ‘Lady of the Vulva’. By the Eighteenth Dynasty, this aspect had become associated with Hathor. It has been suggested that the dancers in Papyrus Westcar, who act as midwives, were Hathor dancers as they hold out sistra and menit-necklaces to the woman’s husband.24 As we have seen, Hathor even revives the aged Re by displaying her genitals. While childbirth and pregnancy are not normally associated with ecstatic status, the sexual act is; Hathor is associated with the entangled ideas of intoxication, love, erotic beauty and euphoric dancing.
At Dendera, Hathor is ‘mistress of the dance, queen of happiness’.25 Music, dance and intoxication are not only Hathorian, but occur in many religions in association with breaking down barriers between our world and that of the gods and the deceased. Ecstatic emotion is one means of transcending this world. The association of Hathor, and hence of Hathorian dancers, with breaking down barriers between one world and another appears in a text which describes the movements performed by Hathorian musicians in night-time dances for the goddess26: ‘Singers, vital and beautiful, are intoxicated by speedily moving their legs out before them’. Perhaps this was a kind of zikr designed to bring on an altered state of consciousness during the ritual.
One might wonder if at times the goddess Hathor was a means by which it was possible to see into ‘other worlds’. The mirrors associated with the goddess, as well as being linked to her solar and beauty aspects, might be linked with scrything (a means of seeing into other worlds through reflective surfaces), and music (hand clappers and sistra) is also associated with inducing trance-like states. Mirror dances, like other dances, took place for Hathor;27 mirrors were used in religious rituals, not simply for personal grooming, and were often owned by priestesses.28 The words ‘for your ka’ are associated both with offering alcohol and with offering mirrors.29 The phrase ‘for your ka’ might be taken literally, with the mirror being the depository of the soul. Each person has his ka – a part of his soul – and he goes to it when he dies.
While intoxication by alcohol was not normally approved of, ‘holy intoxication’ was encouraged, possibly as a link to the world of the gods, an alternative state of being. It is difficult to prove, but one may postulate that such intoxication also included erotic euphoria. The link between drunkenness and erotic euphoria is also apparent in today’s western cultures, where it is a cliché that men and women tend to become intimate after heavy drinking. Hathor was not only a goddess of love, but also of drunkenness.
That drunkenness had the possibilities of mystical communion is suggested by the Middle Kingdom Dispute Between a Man and his Ba. The nearness and desirability of death is suggested:
‘Death is before me today
Like the fragrance of a lotus
Like sitting on the shores of drunkenness’30
This might explain tomb scenes of banquets in which no food is eaten, but at which guests imbibe alcohol. The tomb of Paheri at Elkab has a banqueting scene in which a female cousin of Paheri declares, ‘Give me eighteen cups of wine; I want to drink to drunkenness; my throat is as dry as straw’.31 It is noticeable that while women and drunkenness are particularly disapproved of in the west, there was not this apparent gender-linked disapproval of drunken women in ancient Egypt. There is even one scene of a woman vomiting from overindulgence.
‘The Festival of Drunkenness’, associated with Hathor, is known in the Middle Kingdom, but is more usually associated with the Graeco-Roman Period. The twentieth day of the first month was marked by the ‘Festival of Drunkenness’. Menou-jugs were filled with wine and offered to Hathor, ‘Lady of Drunkenness in the Place of Drunkenness’. At the temple of Hathor at Philae, scenes on columns show Bes dancing at the return of the ‘Lady of favours, mistress of the dance, great of attraction . . . Lady of drunkenness with many festivals’.32
In the last few years, the American Egyptologist, Betsy Bryan, has been excavating at the Temple of Mut at Karnak (1470 BC) and has uncovered evidence that the Festival of Drunkenness was celebrated in the New Kingdom. Mut was a goddess closely linked with Hathor. Bryan has discovered a ‘Porch of Drunkenness’ associated with Hatshepsut. It seems that in the Hall of Drunkenness, worshippers got drunk, slept and then were woken by drummers to commune with the goddess, Mut. Some scenes linked drunkenness with ‘travelling through the marshes’, a possible euphemism for sexual activity. The festival re-enacted that of Sekhmet after the inundation (this is a version of the myth of the ‘Return of the Distant One’). Bryan believes that the Festival of Drunkenness fell out of favour after the reign of Hatshepsut, but was later resumed.
The story of the quarrel between the solar Eye and her father, and her later return, is sometimes called the ‘Return of the Distant One’. The Eye was considered the female active force, the daughter of Re. In myths, this goddess goes to Libya or Nubia, though reasons for her departure are not always given. The goddess is then brought back to Egypt, usually by a male god who is Shu, Thoth, or Onuris. Sometimes the goddess is named as Mut, Bastet, Hathor, Wadjet, Tefnut or Sekhmet. The celebration of the return of the goddess usually coincided with the annual inundation of the Nile, the source of the Nile being in Nubia. One version of the story in which the goddess goes to Nubia was particularly poignant in the Late Period, when the kings from the South had conquered Egypt and renewed many of Egypt’s earlier traditions.
An early version of this myth is extant in the Book of the Heavenly Cow, which first appears, though in incomplete form, on the outermost of the four gilded shrines of Tutankhamun. The story, called ‘The Destruction of Humanity’, goes that, in times past, a golden age existed when humans and gods existed under Re, and night and death did not exist. Humanity plots against Re and the god sends his daughter, the Eye in the form of Hathor, to kill them all. ‘Hathor, the Eye of the Sun, went into the desert transformed into the raging lioness Sekhmet, the powerful one. There she began slaying humanity for the evil they had done’. She goes on the rampage wading in their blood. Re changes his mind, but no one knows how to stop the furious goddess, so he orders 7,000 jars of beer to be made and coloured with ochre. Thinking that this is blood, the goddess drinks, and then in a drunken stupor, becomes happy and pacified, with all thought of killing forgotten. Once again, she is the beautiful and gentle Hathor. Her return to Egypt is celebrated by song and dance and drinking. Re returns to the sky on the back of the heavenly cow and institutes the netherworld as a dwelling for the dead.
There are several variations to this myth: in one version Hathor becomes cross with Re and that is why she storms off to Nubia. Thoth has to coax her back by telling her stories. She bathes in the Nile, which becomes red with her anger, and then she becomes peaceful and happy. In other variations, it is Tefnut who goes to Nubia and Shu who brings her back.
All versions demonstrate that the Egyptians saw a double nature to the feminine, which encompassed both extreme passions of fury and love. This aspect of the female is reflected in texts describing mortal Egyptian women, as we have seen.