Hathor

“ There she sat in the shadow, clad in white and purple, and with the red gold of the snake of royalty in the blackness of her hair. There she sat as beautiful as the Hathor, the Queen of Love; or as the Lady Isis when she played at pieces in Amenti with the ancient King. Nay, an old man may say it, there never was but one woman more fair than Meriamun, if a woman she be, she whom our people call the Strange Hathor.”
Now the Wanderer bethought him of the tale of the pilot, but he said nothing, and Rei went on. ”

“ Hathor, like the mother of the Aeneadae, is "sole mistress of the nature of things, and without her nothing rises up into the divine borders of light, nothing grows to be glad or lovely;" "through her every kind of living thing is conceived, rises up and beholds the light of the sun." ”

“ And Ra looked forth upon the earth and cried to his daughter, the apple of his eye, "Come in peace, O Hathor! Hast thou done that which I gave thee to do?"
And Hathor laughed as she answered, and her laugh was the terrible voice of the lioness as she tears her prey. "By thy life, O Ra," she cried, "I work my will upon men, and my heart rejoices."
For many nights the river ran red, and the goddess waded in the blood of men, and her feet were red as she strode through the land of Egypt as far as Henen-seten. ”

“ Hathor (or more correctly Hat-hor, i. e. the abode of Horus) , is not merely the Aphrodite of ancient Egypt; she is the pupil of the eye of the sun; she is goddess of that beneficent planet whose rising heralds the waters of the inundation; she represents the eternal youth of nature, and is the direct personification of the beautiful. She is also goddess of truth. “I offer the truth to thee, O Goddess of Denderah!” says the king, in one of the inscriptions of the sanctuary of the sistrum; “for truth is thy work, and thou thyself art truth.” ”

“ Listen, the might of the Nine-bow barbarians rolls up the eastern branch of Sihor. But one day’s march from On the mountains run down to the edge of the river, and those mountains are pierced by a rocky pass through which the foe will surely come. Set thou thy ambush there, Wanderer, there at Prosopis—so shalt thou smite them. Farewell. I will seek out the Hathor if in any way I can come at her, and tell her all. But of this I warn thee, the hour is big with Fate, and soon will spawn a monstrous birth. Strange visions of doom and death passed before mine eyes as I slept last night. ”

“ Let the soul of that priest who first violated the tomb of the royal Ma-Mee be hunted down and given to the jaws of the Destroyer, that he may know the last depths of Death, if so the gods declare. But let this man go from among us unharmed, since what he did he did in reverent ignorance and because Hathor, Goddess of Love, guided him from of old. Love rules this world wherein we meet to-night, with all the worlds whence we have gathered or whither we still must go. Who can defy its power? ”

“ The apparently hopeless tangle of contradictions involved in these conceptions of Hathor will have to be unravelled. For "no eye is to be feared more than thine (Re's) when it attacketh in the form of Hathor" (Maspero, op. cit. p. 165) . If it was the beneficent life-giving aspect of the eye which led to its identification with Hathor, in course of time, when the reason for this connexion was lost sight of, it became associated with the malevolent, death-dealing avatar of the goddess, and became the expression of the god's anger and hatred toward his enemies. ”

“ When this great goddess is pictured with a human head, she wears an impressive headdress. This is composed of the spreading horns of a cow, between which are seen the bonnet of Mut, the divine wife of Amon-Ra, the king of the gods. Above this is seen the solar disk, as Hathor was of “The Great Company” and was associated with all the beneficence of the glorious and life-giving sun. The Book of the Dead teaches that Hathor provides nourishment for the soul in the other-world, and as such a provider she excels all the minor gods. ”

“ The Archaic Egyptian slate palette of Narmer showing, perhaps, the earliest design of Hathor (at the upper corners of the palette) as a woman with cow's horns and ears (compare Flinders Petrie, "The Royal Tombs of the First Dynasty," Part I, 1900, Plate XXVII, Fig. 71) . The pharaoh is wearing a belt from which are suspended four cow-headed Hathor figures in place of the cowry-amulets of more primitive peoples. This affords corroboration of the view that Hathor assumed the functions originally attributed to the cowry-shell. ”

“ It is not Pharaoh, it is not I, who have brought this death upon you. For we too have death here!” and she held up the body of her dead son. “It is that False Hathor whom ye worship, that Witch of many a voice and many a face who turns your hearts faint with love. For her sake ye endure these woes, on her head is all this death. Go, tear her temple stone from stone, and rend her beauty limb from limb and be avenged and free the land from curses.” ”

“ Here were temples to her where she was worshipped as ‘the sublime Hathor, queen of heaven and earth and the dark depths below’; and here she was also associated with the sparrow-hawk of Supt, ‘the lord of the East.’ This association with Sinai, and also with Arabia and Punt, which is attached to the goddess Hathor, and her connection with the [xx] mines in Egypt, seems to me to be most important in connection with the emblem of the hawk in the mines at Zimbabwe. ”

“ Then we hear a sound of the clashing of weapons and the men fall dead without a word, while the song of the Hathor swells from within.”
“And who are her swordsmen?” said the Wanderer.
“That we know not, Stranger; no man has lived to tell. Come, draw near to the door of the shrine and hearken, maybe thou wilt hear the Hathor singing. Have no fear; thou needst not approach the guarded space.”
Then the Wanderer drew near with a doubting heart, but Rei the Priest stood afar off, though the temple priests came close enough. ”

“ As a babe at the breast, he is nursed in the lap of Hathor, the divine foster-mother. As a young child, he stands at his mother’s knee and listens to the playing of a female harpist (we saw a bare-footed boy the other day in Cairo thrumming upon a harp of just the same shape and with precisely as many strings) ; as a youth, he sows grain in honor of Isis and offers a jeweled collar to Hathor. This Isis, with her long aquiline nose, thin lips, and haughty aspect, looks like one of the complimentary portraits so often introduced among the temple-{191}sculptures of Egypt. ”

“ Great woes are fallen upon Khem because of the Apura. O Pharaoh, let the people go!”
Now Pharaoh’s heart was softened and he was minded to let them go, but Meriamun turned to him and said:
“Thou shalt not let the people go. It is not these slaves, nor the God of these slaves, who bring the plagues on Khem, but it is that strange Goddess, the False Hathor, who dwells here in the city of Tanis. Be not so fearful—ever hadst thou a coward heart. Drive the False Hathor thence if thou wilt, but hold these slaves to their bondage. ”

“ Neither is it astonishing that a goddess of moisture and vegetation should be found in the underworld dispensing water to the souls of the dead from the branches of a palm or a sycamore.
Hathor as Love-Goddess
On the same hypothesis we may explain the somewhat paradoxical statement that Hathor is 'mother of her father, daughter of her son'—that she is mother, wife, and daughter to Ra. The moon, when she appears in the heavens before the sun, may be regarded as his mother; when she reigns together with him she is his wife; when she rises after he has set she is his daughter. ”

“ Hathor extends her wings as a protection over the victorious Horus, or, as one form of the legend expresses it, "she protects him with her body as a divine cow;" yet Hathor in her turn needs protection, and even the sun-god Rā, though invested with the predicates of supreme divinity, requires the aid of the goddess Isis. All the gods are liable to be forced to grant the prayers of men, through fear of threats which it is inconceivable to us that any intelligence but that of idiots should have believed. There are many aspects of this religion, and some of them are extremely ridiculous. ”

“ Gathered there were Seti the Prince, clothed in a priest’s white robe, and wearing a linen headdress, but no ornaments, and Userti the Princess, high-priestess of Hathor, Lady of the West, Goddess of Love and Nature. She wore Hathor’s vulture headdress, and on it the disc of the moon fashioned of silver. Also were present Roi the head-priest, clad in his sacerdotal robes, an old and wizened man with a strong, fierce face, Ki the Sacrificer and Magician, Bakenkhonsu the ancient, myself, and a company of the priests of Amon-Ra, Mut, and Khonsu. ”

“ This capital is one of the most singular achievements of Egyptian art. Why, out of all the multitude of Egyptian gods and goddesses,107 was Hathor alone selected for such a distinction? What is the meaning of the small naos or shrine upon her head? The explanation is still uncertain. Perhaps it is to be found in the simple fact that the word Hathor means the dwelling of Horus. This capital is found in the tombs as well as in the temples. We reproduce (Fig. 88) a hathoric pier from the tomb of a certain Nefer-Hotep who lived under the eighteenth dynasty; it is now in the museum at Boulak. ”

“ To eyes fresh from the “Abode of Ra,” the “Abode of Hathor” looks less than its actual size; which is, in fact, but little inferior to that of the temple at Derr. A first hall, measuring some forty feet in length by twenty-one in width, leads to a transverse corridor, two side-chambers, and a sanctuary seven feet square, at the upper end of which are the shattered remains of a cow-headed statue of Hathor. Six square pillars, as at Derr, support what, for want of a better word, one must call the ceiling of the hall; though the ceiling is, in truth, the superincumbent mountain. ”

“ Hathor is then, I believe, the Istar of the Babylonians. She agrees with Istar both in name and in attributes. The form of the name can be traced back to that of [pg 148] Istar through the Atthar of South Arabia, that very land of Punt from which Hathor was said to have come. In Egypt as in Babylonia she was the goddess of love and joy, and her relation to the sun can be explained naturally if she were at the outset the morning star.123 Even her animal form connects her with Chaldæa. Dr. ”

“ Now every man has such a grave in his heart as that whence Hathor seems to rise in changeful beauty. Month by month she sings thus, one day in every month, and many a man has sought to win her and her favour, but in the doorways are they who meet him and press him back ”

“ Hathor is the goddess who in Egyptian mythology answers to Venus of the Greeks, in as far as she is the presiding deity of beauty and pleasure. In the Egyptian mythology, however, each God has many forms; and in some aspects Hathor has to do with the idea of resurrection. There are seven forms or variants of the Goddess; why should not these correspond in some way to the seven lamps! ”

“ Then suddenly the flame of the altar flared as flares the summer lightning. It flared full on the face of the dead, and lo! the lips of the dead moved, and from them came the sound of mortal speech. They spake in awful accents, and thus they spoke:
“She who was the curse of Achæans, she who was the doom of Ilios; she who sits in the Temple of Hathor, the Fate of man, who may not be harmed of Man, she calls down the wrath of the Gods on Khem. It is spoken!” ”

“ The Hathor of the greater temple of Denderah, and the Hathor of Dêr el-Bahari, 294 symbolised different celestial bodies, but their function was the same. On the other hand, the Hathor of Denderah and the Mut of Thebes were neither different divinities, nor did they personify different stars; they were simply local names of γ Draconis.
We are thus enabled to understand the doubling of the symbolism in the case of Hathor. The hippopotamus and the cow generically are dealt with as rising stars; specifically we deal with γ Draconis in one case, and Sirius in the other. ”

“ She is represented by Queen Nefertari, who appears on the façade as the mother of six children and adorned with the attributes of the goddess. A temple to Hathor would also be, from a religious point of view, the fitting pendant to a temple of Ra. M. Mariette, in his “Notice des Monuments à Boulak,” remarks of Hathor that her functions are still but imperfectly known to us. “Peutêtre était-elle à Ra ce que Maut est à Ammon, le récipient où le dieu s’engendre lui-même pour l’éternité.”
[114] It is not often that one can say of a female head in an Egyptian wall painting that it is beautiful ”

“ The inscriptions of the temple of Dendera give a long list of the names of the goddess Hathor. She is identified not only with Isis, but with Sechet at Memphis, Neith at Sais, Saosis at Heliopolis, Nehemauit at Hermopolis, Bast at Bubastis, Sothis at Elephantine, and many other goddesses. These authorities alone are sufficient, almost at a glance, to convince us that not only are some inferior deities mere aspects of the greater gods, but that several at least of the greater gods themselves are but different aspects of one and the same. ”

“ As he stood there a wicket in the gate opened, and there passed out a veiled figure of a woman upon whose breast burned a red jewel that shone in the night like a star. The woman waited awhile, looking down the moonlit road between the black rows of sphinxes, but the road lay white and empty, and she turned and hid herself in the shadow of the pylon, where Rei could see nothing of her except the red star that gleamed upon her breast.
Now a great fear came upon the old man, for he knew that he looked upon the strange and deadly Hathor. ”