Ancient Egyptian myth gave the eye a story of injury and restoration rather than treating it only as a passive symbol of sight. In the conflict between Horus and his uncle Seth over the throne left by the murdered Osiris, Seth is said to have torn out or otherwise damaged Horus's eye during their struggle; the eye was later healed or restored, often credited to the god Thoth, and the restored eye, the wedjat or Eye of Horus, became one of the most widely used protective symbols in Egyptian religion, painted on coffins, worn as an amulet and invoked in healing and offering formulas as a token of wholeness recovered after injury.
A very different eye, unconnected in origin, entered Christian and later secular imagery centuries afterward: a single eye set inside a triangle, radiating light, used from around the eighteenth century as a symbol of divine providence watching over human affairs. Unlike the wedjat's narrative of damage and repair, the Eye of Providence carries no myth of its own, functioning purely as an emblem of oversight, and its adoption into secular civic imagery, most visibly on the reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, shows how readily a religious symbol of watchfulness could be repurposed to state authority once its specific theological content became optional to the viewer.