Hathor - The Egyptian Goddess
Created | Updated Feb 19, 2003
Hathor - The Woman
Hathor dates back as far as the archaic or possibly even pre-dynastic times and holds quite an important position in Egypt. She was born in Nubia as ‘a blood thirsty lioness’ and is seen as the mother of her father, daughter of her son, the wife and daughter to Ra. If this makes little sense, Hathor was a woman of many guises.Hathor - The Goddess
As a goddess Hathor represented many things. The Greeks saw her as pleasure, love, and fertility (the Egyptian equivalent of the Aphrodite.) To the Egyptians she was the ideal mother, a woman of love and pleasure, lady of heaven, mistress of the underworld (where she dispensers water to the souls of the dead from the branches of a palm tree), a moon goddess, the sky Goddess, the Goddess of the East, the Goddess of the West, a cosmic deity, an agricultural goddess, and a solar deity.
The myth of Hathor
Hathor was represented graphically as a woman bearing the sun between two cow's horns. The original form under which she was worshipped was that of the cow, with a human head and a kind broad face (bovine in look).
As with many important gods there is a little story that is associated with Hathor --
The Sun God Ra was the creator of men and all things -- he ruled over men and the gods. As Ra grew old reverence gave way to mockery so Ra gathered his closest gods (including Hathor). Nuts suggestion as to how Ra could deal was those that offended him was to wipe them from the face of the earth. Men fled as soon as Ra appeared, so he sent Hathor to do his bidding. When she returned she confessed she had enjoyed killing the men and Ra became worried the Hathor may actually slay the rest of the human kind. To prevent this Ra ordered the making seven thousand jars of barley brew laced with poison to be left where Hathor would see it when she went too kill mankind. The brew was poured out onto the fields. When Hathor reached the place where the fields were flooded with the brew she was pleased. She drank so deeply that she became drunk and became too inebriated to kill.
