Anat is the Canaanite goddess of war and of the hunt, the sister and staunch ally of the storm-god Baal, and the most physically violent figure in the mythological tablets recovered from Ugarit, the Bronze Age city on the Syrian coast whose library is our main source for Canaanite religion. One notorious passage describes her wading into battle and then, back in her own hall, wading knee-deep and hip-deep in the blood of the slain, hanging severed heads and hands upon herself, and exulting in the carnage, an image of ferocity with few parallels in ancient literature. Yet she is also fiercely loyal and generative.
When Baal is killed by Mot, the god of death, it is Anat who searches for her brother, who confronts Mot, seizes him, and, in language drawn from the harvest, splits, winnows, burns and grinds him like grain, so that Baal may live again and the fertility of the world be restored. She thus combines the roles of the raging warrior and the devoted sister whose action brings the dead god back. Anat was worshipped beyond Ugarit as well; she appears in Egypt, where she was taken up as a warrior goddess, and her name is preserved in place-names in the southern Levant. The tablets present her as a goddess of overwhelming passion, in both slaughter and loyalty, a reminder that the deities of the region were not the tame figures of later summary but powers of blood and life alike.