[28] Once pacified, the goddess returns to become the consort of the sun god or of the god who brings her back. Reliefs in Old Kingdom tombs show men and women performing a ritual called "shaking the papyrus". Queens were portrayed with the headdress of Hathor beginning in the late Eighteenth Dynasty. The link between Hathor and deceased women was maintained into the Roman Period, the last stage of ancient Egyptian religion before its extinction. [17] The falcon god Horus represented, among other things, the sun and sky. On the first day of the new year, the first day of the month of Thoth, the Hathor image was carried up to the roof to be bathed in genuine sunlight. [36], Hathor's joyful, ecstatic side indicates her feminine, procreative power. The noise of the celebration drives away hostile powers and ensures the goddess will remain in her joyful form as she awaits the male god of the temple, her mythological consort Montu, whose son she will bear. It took place over fourteen days in the month of Epiphi. [9] The theology surrounding the pharaoh in the Old Kingdom, unlike that of earlier times, focused heavily on the sun god Ra as king of the gods and father and patron of the earthly king. She was also called "Lady of Faience", a blue-green ceramic that Egyptians likened to turquoise. [8] Some depictions of the ram across North Africa belong to the lythic period which is situated between 9600 BC and 7500 BC. Small wooden statues of him are made and praised as personal altars. [81] She helped the spirits of deceased humans enter the Duat and was closely linked with tomb sites, where that transition began. Hathor crossed boundaries between worlds, helping deceased souls in the transition to the afterlife. [120] At that site she was described as the daughter of the city's main deity, Ptah. [124], Dendera, Hathor's oldest temple in Upper Egypt, dates to at least to the Fourth Dynasty. [5] When Hathor does clearly appear, her horns curve outward, rather than inward like those in Predynastic art. It was celebrated as early as the Middle Kingdom, but it is best known from Ptolemaic and Roman times. [99] She also commonly carried a sistrum or a menat necklace. Hathor had a complex relationship with Ra, in one myth she is his eye and considered his daughter but later, when Ra assumes the role of Horus with respect to Kingship, she is considered Ra's mother. For the neopagan Horned God, see, H. Basset, Les influences puniques chez les Berbères, pp 367-368. Osiris est alors devenu le souverain du royaume des morts . Nut most commonly filled this role, but the tree goddess was sometimes called Hathor instead. An image of the sed festival of Amenhotep III, meant to celebrate and renew his rule, shows the king together with Hathor and his queen Tiye, which could mean that the king symbolically married the goddess in the course of the festival. Ka in Egyptian is both a religious concept of life-force/power and the word for bull. [100], Amulet of Hathor as a uraeus wearing a naos headdress, early to mid-first millennium BC, Naos sistrum with Hathor's face, 305–282 BC, Mirror with a face of Hathor on the handle, fifteenth century BC, Head of Hathor with cats on her headdress, from a clapper, late second to early first millennium BC, The Malqata Menat necklace, fourteenth century BC, Hathoric capital from the Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut, fifteenth century BC, During the Early Dynastic Period, Neith was the preeminent goddess at the royal court,[104] while in the Fourth Dynasty, Hathor became the goddess most closely linked with the king. [172] Other Hathoric imagery in tombs included the cow emerging from the mountain of the necropolis[83] and the seated figure of the goddess presiding over a garden in the afterlife. "[34] A hymn to the goddess Raet-Tawy as a form of Hathor at the temple of Medamud describes the Festival of Drunkenness as part of her mythic return to Egypt. For many years scholars have interpreted the Gundestrup Cauldron's images in terms of the Celtic pantheon. She destined my mistress [loved one] for me. Revelers at these festivals may have aimed to reach a state of religious ecstasy, which was otherwise rare or nonexistent in ancient Egyptian religion. The local Midianites, whom the Egyptians used as part of the mining workforce, may have given offerings to Hathor as their overseers did. Celles et ceux qui y participent en sont à jamais transformés. Islamabad Museum. Ra was sometimes portrayed inside the disk, which Troy interprets as meaning that the Eye goddess was thought of as a womb from which the sun god was born. [21] This "Pashupati" (Lord of animal-like beings â Sanskrit paÅupati)[22] seal shows a seated figure with horns, possibly ithyphallic, surrounded by animals. After the end of the New Kingdom, Hathor was increasingly overshadowed by Isis, but she continued to be venerated until the extinction of ancient Egyptian religion in the early centuries AD. [119], More temples were dedicated to Hathor than to any other Egyptian goddess. Peut-être venu du culte de Bat, il était utilisé lors des danses et des cérémonies religieuses, particulièrement celles dédiées à la déesse Hathor, la forme en U de la poignée et du bâti de l'instrument rappelant l'effigie de cette vache divinisée [3].C'était un instrument sacré uniquement joué par les prêtresses. [91] As early as the late Old Kingdom, women were sometimes said to join the worshippers of Hathor in the afterlife, just as men joined the following of Osiris. [136], In a local Theban festival known as the Beautiful Festival of the Valley, which began to be celebrated in the Middle Kingdom, the cult image of Amun from the Temple of Karnak visited the temples in the Theban Necropolis while members of the community went to the tombs of their deceased relatives to drink, eat, and celebrate. At Aphytis, Chalcidice, Ammon was worshipped, from the time of Lysander, as zealously as in Ammonium. 73, Hathor § Relationships, associations, images and symbols, Berber mythology § Before the battle of Irassa (570 BC), Berber mythology § Amun as a common deity, Berber mythology § Solar and lunar worship, Alexander the Great in the Qur'an § The two-horned one, Christian teaching about the Devil § New Testament, Beelzebub § Christian demonology and occult, "Coin: from the Persian Wars to Alexander the Great, 490â336 bc", The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought, "Of Beelzebub and His Plot by Cotton Mather", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Horned_deity&oldid=1014253145, Articles with unsourced statements from March 2012, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 26 March 2021, at 01:08. [102], Hathor was sometimes represented as a human face with bovine ears, seen from the front rather than in the profile-based perspective that was typical of Egyptian art. The Eye goddess drinks the beer, mistaking it for blood, and in her inebriated state reverts to being the benign and beautiful Hathor. Thus, non-royal women disappeared from the high ranks of Hathor's priesthood,[129] although women continued to serve as musicians and singers in temple cults across Egypt. The Gerzeh Palette, a stone palette from the Naqada II period of prehistory (c. 3500–3200 BC), shows the silhouette of a cow's head with inward-curving horns surrounded by stars. [51] Horns have ever been present in religious imagery as symbols of fertility and power. [55][56][57][58], This article is about depictions of deities with horns. [2] Cows are venerated in many cultures, including ancient Egypt, as symbols of motherhood and nourishment, because they care for their calves and provide humans with milk. A similar crown is worn by the two anthropomorphic figures in the fig deity seal. [144] Many Egyptologists regard this festival as a ritual marriage between Horus and Hathor, although Martin Stadler challenges this view, arguing that it instead represented the rejuvenation of the buried creator gods. Egyptian women squatted on bricks while giving birth, and the only known surviving birth brick from ancient Egypt is decorated with an image of a woman holding her child flanked by images of Hathor. The antlered figure in plate A has been commonly identified as Cernunnos. Deities such as Pan and Dionysus have had attributes of their worship imported into the Neopagan concept as have the Celtic Cernunnos and Gwynn ap Nudd, one of the mythological leaders of the Wild Hunt. Thus, texts from tombs often expressed a wish that the deceased would be able to participate in festivals, primarily those dedicated to Osiris. [111] The emphasis on the queen as Hathor continued through the New Kingdom. [92] Some burial goods that portray deceased women as goddesses may depict these women as followers of Hathor, although whether the imagery refers to Hathor or Isis is not known. Even during this occupation, Amun, identified by these Greeks as a form of Zeus,[4] continued to be the principal local deity of Thebes. [105] Old Kingdom rulers donated resources only to temples dedicated to particular kings or to deities closely connected with kingship. [23], 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. The child god represented the cyclical renewal of the cosmos and an archetypal heir to the kingship. [173] Festivals were thought to allow contact between the human and divine realms, and by extension, between the living and the dead. [159] At Jebel Barkal, a site sacred to Amun, the Kushite king Taharqa built a pair of temples, one dedicated to Hathor and one to Mut as consorts of Amun, replacing New Kingdom Egyptian temples that may have been dedicated to these same goddesses. [80], Just as she crossed the boundary between Egypt and foreign lands, Hathor passed through the boundary between the living and the Duat, the realm of the dead. Bat was the chief goddess of Seshesh, otherwise known as Hu or Diospolis Parva, the 7th nome of Upper Egypt. [106] Late Old Kingdom rulers especially promoted the cult of Hathor in the provinces, as a way of binding those regions to the royal court. [146] Barbara Richter argues that the festival represented all three things at once. [54] Other children of Hathor included a minor deity from the town of Hu, named Neferhotep,[53] and several child forms of Horus. In contrast, prayers to Hathor mention only the benefits she could grant, such as abundant food during life and a well-provisioned burial after death. [35]:15[36]:28, "I will cut off the horns of all the wicked, but the horns of the righteous will be lifted up.". He orders that beer be dyed red and poured out over the land. [86], Tomb art from the Eighteenth Dynasty often shows people drinking, dancing, and playing music, as well as holding menat necklaces and sistra—all imagery that alluded to Hathor. [140], The best-documented festival focused on Hathor is another Ptolemaic celebration, the Festival of the Beautiful Reunion. Columns of this style were used in many temples to Hathor and other goddesses. [169], As an afterlife deity, Hathor appeared frequently in funerary texts and art. In two New Kingdom works of fiction, the "Tale of Two Brothers" and the "Tale of the Doomed Prince", the Hathors appear at the births of major characters and foretell the manner of their deaths. [160] But Isis was the most prominent of the Egyptian goddesses worshipped in Nubia, and her status there increased over time. 54, The Language of God in the Universe by Helena Lehman pg. 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. Thomas Schneider interprets the text as implying that between his two encounters with the goddess the herdsman has done something to pacify her. [173], Hathor was said to supply offerings to deceased people as early as the Old Kingdom, and spells to enable both men and women to join her retinue in the afterlife appeared as early as the Coffin Texts in the Middle Kingdom. The Canaanite deity Moloch (according to the bible) was often depicted as a bull, and became a bull demon in Abrahamic traditions. The book of Revelation seems to have inspired many depictions of demons. [40] 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[41] and in different versions of the myth of the Distant Goddess, Hathor-Raettawy was the consort of Montu[42] and Hathor-Tefnut the consort of Shu. During the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, Mentuhotep II established a permanent cult center for her in the necropolis at Deir el-Bahari. [123] The nearby village of Deir el-Medina, home to the tomb workers of the necropolis during the New Kingdom, also contained temples of Hathor. [48], In 1933, the Egyptologist Margaret Murray published the book, The God of the Witches, in which she theorised that Pan was merely one form of a horned god who was worshipped across many European cultures. She absorbed this role from another cow goddess 'Mht wrt' ("Great flood") who was the mother of Ra in a creation myth and carried him between her horns. [50] Hathor's relationship with Horus gave a healing aspect to her character, as she was said to have restored Horus's missing eye or eyes after Set attacked him. They later identified their supreme god Zeus with the Libyan Amon. [158] The independent Kingdom of Kush, which emerged in Nubia after the collapse of the New Kingdom, based its beliefs about Kushite kings on the royal ideology of Egypt. The Egyptians connected her with foreign lands such as Nubia and Canaan and their valuable goods, such as incense and semiprecious stones, and some of the peoples in those lands adopted her worship. As suggested by her name, she was often thought of as both Horus's mother and consort. The uraeus was a common motif in Egyptian art and could represent a variety of goddesses who were identified with the Eye of Ra. [107], Many female royals, though not reigning queens, held positions in the cult during the Old Kingdom. Encyclopædia Britannica, Alexander III, 1971, Witches: true encounters with wicca, wizards, covens, cults, and magick by Hans Holzer Page 125, ""An anthropomorphic figure has knelt in front of a fig tree, with hands raised in respectful salutation, prayer or worship. [122] In the First Intermediate Period (c. 2181–2055) her cult statue from Dendera was periodically carried to the Theban necropolis. [20], The Pashupati seal, a seal discovered during the excavation of Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan has drawn attention as a possible representation of a "proto-Shiva" figure. Il sera à la suite de ce combat le premier pharaon légendaire d'Égypte. Alexander was depicted with the horns of Ammon as a result of his conquest of ancient Egypt in 332 BC, where the priesthood received him as the son of the god Ammon, who was identified by the ancient Greeks with Zeus, the King of the Gods. 133, The Oxford companion to world mythology by David Adams Leeming pg. This mask-like face was placed on the capitals of columns beginning in the late Old Kingdom. [152], A pendant found in a Mycenaean tomb at Pylos, from the 16th century BC, bears Hathor's face. And she came of her own free will to see me. Alexander thereafter considered himself divine. Birth was hazardous for both mother and child in ancient Egypt, yet children were much desired. Calf-idols are referred to later in the Tanakh, such as in the Book of Hosea, which would seem accurate as they were a fixture of near-eastern cultures. They perfumed the air with flowers and incense. [88] Images of Nut were often painted or incised inside coffins, indicating the coffin was her womb, from which the occupant would be reborn in the afterlife. Hathor (Ancient Egyptian: ḥwt-ḥr "House of Horus", Greek: Ἁθώρ Hathōr) was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion who played a wide variety of roles. Beelzebub is the most recognized demon in the Bible, whose name has become analogous to Satan. [33] A text from the Temple of Edfu says of Hathor, "the gods play the sistrum for her, the goddesses dance for her to dispel her bad temper. [43], There is an implied connection between Satan and Beelzebub (lit. The actual image of a goat in a downward-pointing pentagram first appeared in the 1897 book La Clef de la Magie Noire by Stanislas de Guaita, later adopted as the official symbolâcalled the Sigil of Baphometâof the Church of Satan, and continues to be used among Satanists. She was often depicted as a beautiful, slim woman wearing a sheath dress and either the hieroglyphic sign of a throne or Hathor’s headdress of a sun disk between cow’s horns on her head. [27], Egyptian religion celebrated the sensory pleasures of life, believed to be among the gods' gifts to humanity. When in the role of Imentet, Hathor wore the emblem of the west upon her head instead of the horned headdress. The texts say the divine couple performed offering rites for these entombed gods. Her most common form, however, was a woman wearing a headdress of the horns and sun disk, often with a red or turquoise sheath dress, or a dress combining both colors. 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. This reverence suggests the divinity of its object, another anthropomorphic figure standing inside the fig tree. [121], As the rulers of the Old Kingdom made an effort to develop towns in Upper and Middle Egypt, several cult centers of Hathor were founded across the region, at sites such as Cusae, Akhmim, and Naga ed-Der. Horned deities are a standard Mesopotamian theme. These gods usually reflect mythological figures such as Cernunnos or Pan, and any similarity they may have to the Christian Devil seems to date back only to the 19th century, when a Christian reaction to Pan's growing importance in literature and art resulted in his image being translated to that of the Devil. In the series of love poems from Papyrus Chester Beatty I, from the Twentieth Dynasty (c. 1189–1077 BC), men and women ask Hathor to bring their lovers to them: "I prayed to her [Hathor] and she heard my prayer. [71], Hathor was closely connected with the Sinai Peninsula,[72] which was not considered part of Egypt proper but was the site of Egyptian mines for copper, turquoise, and malachite during the Middle and New Kingdoms. Hathor and Mehet-Weret were both thought of as the cow who birthed the sun god and placed him between her horns. Rams were considered a symbol of virility due to their rutting behavior. A few artifacts from the early first millennium BC suggest that the Egyptians began equating Baalat with Isis at that time. [10] The Egyptologist Robyn Gillam suggests that these diverse forms emerged when the royal goddess promoted by the Old Kingdom court subsumed many local goddesses worshipped by the general populace, who were then treated as manifestations of her. Many of Hathor's epithets link her to celebration; she is called the mistress of music, dance, garlands, myrrh, and drunkenness. [103] These columns have two or four faces, which may represent the duality between different aspects of the goddess or the watchfulness of Hathor of the Four Faces. Images of cattle appear frequently in the artwork of Predynastic Egypt (before c. 3100 BC), as do images of women with upraised, curved arms reminiscent of the shape of bovine horns. During the New Kingdom era, the temple of Hathor of the Southern Sycamore was her main temple in Memphis. The ram was revered in ancient Egypt in matters of fertility and war. [59], Like Meskhenet, another goddess who presided over birth, Hathor was connected with shai, the Egyptian concept of fate, particularly when she took the form of the Seven Hathors. Different types of offerings may have symbolized different goals on the part of the donor, but their meaning is usually unknown. 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. Over time they increasingly associated the deceased with both male and female divine powers. At sunset the god entered the body of the 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. On another day he encounters her as a nude, alluring woman. The designs of Hathoric columns have a complex relationship with those of sistra. [53] At Kom Ombo, Hathor's local form, Tasenetnofret, was mother to Horus's son Panebtawy. [8], Hathor took many forms and appeared in a wide variety of roles. [137] Hathor was not involved in this festival until the early New Kingdom,[138] after which Amun's overnight stay in the temples at Deir el-Bahari came to be seen as his sexual union with her. Thus, in the Meroitic period of Nubian history (c. 300 BC – AD 400), Hathor appeared in temples mainly as a companion to Isis. This idea has also been associated with the depiction of certain ancient gods like Moloch and the shedu, etc., which were portrayed as bulls, as men with the head of a bull, or wearing bull horns as a crown. Festivals during the inundation therefore incorporated drink, music, and dance as a way to appease the returning goddess. [151] A myth about Isis's presence in Byblos, related by the Greek author Plutarch in his work On Isis and Osiris in the 2nd century AD, suggests that by his time Isis had entirely supplanted Hathor in the city. In Egypt, the bull was worshiped as Apis, the embodiment of Ptah and later of Osiris. After the Egyptians abandoned the site in the Twentieth Dynasty, however, the Midianites converted the shrine to a tent shrine devoted to their own deities. [83] Her role as a sky goddess was also linked to the afterlife. [1] Banebdjedet may also be linked to the first four gods to rule over Egypt, Osiris, Geb, Shu and Ra-Atum, with large granite shrines devoted to each in the Mendes sanctuary. Aidée par Horus et Anubis, Isis a reconstitué le corps d'Osiris, l'a momifié et l'a ressuscité. [17], Eliphas Levi, the 18th century French occultist, believed that the pseudohistorical god Baphomet (that the Roman Catholic Church had claimed was worshipped by the heretical Knights Templar), was actually the horned Libyan oracle god (Ammon), or, the Goat of Mendes.[18]. It is possible that this could be based in the different breeds of cattle herded at different times. [93] The Seven Hathors were sometimes portrayed as a set of seven cows, accompanied by a minor sky and afterlife deity called the Bull of the West. [74][75] Hathor was also worshipped at various quarries and mining sites in Egypt's Eastern Desert, such as the amethyst mines of Wadi el-Hudi, where she was sometimes called "Lady of Amethyst". The Eye was pacified by beer in the story of the Destruction of Mankind. [153], Egyptians in the Sinai built a few temples in the region. The significant difference in their depiction is that Bat's horns curve inward and Hathor's curve outward slightly. The Eye goddess, sometimes in the form of Hathor, rebels against Ra's control and rampages freely in a foreign land: Libya west of Egypt or Nubia to the south. 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. [112], Hatshepsut, a woman who ruled as a pharaoh in the early New Kingdom, emphasized her relationship to Hathor in a different way. [78] Amenhotep III and Ramesses II both built temples in Nubia that celebrated their respective queens as manifestations of female deities, including Hathor: Amenhotep's wife Tiye at Sedeinga[157] and Ramesses's wife Nefertari at the Small Temple of Abu Simbel. In Wicca, the archetype of the Horned God is highly important, and is thought by believers to be represented by such deities as the Celtic Cernunnos, Indian Pashupati and Greek Pan. Images of the Hathor-cow with a child in a papyrus thicket represented his mythological upbringing in a secluded marsh. [6], A bovine deity with inward-curving horns appears on the Narmer Palette from near the start of Egyptian history, both atop the palette and on the belt or apron of the king, Narmer. A willow and a sycamore tree stood near the sanctuary and may have been worshipped as manifestations of the goddess. The imagery of Bat as a divine cow was remarkably similar to that of Hathor the parallel goddess from Lower Egypt. [170] In that period she often appeared as the goddess welcoming the dead into the afterlife. The priest shall then put some of the blood on the horns of the (Yahweh's) altar of fragrant incense that is before the LORD in the tent of meeting.
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