The Eye That Went Out and Came Back Gentle: Hathor and the Destruction of Mankind

Hathor is goddess of love, joy and music, closely bound to Ra as his Eye and his consort. That same title, the Eye of Ra, carries a darker episode not often told alongside it. In the New Kingdom text known as the Book of the Heavenly Cow, Ra, grown old and hearing that humanity plots against him, sends his Eye down to earth to punish them. She goes out gladly and comes back reporting the slaughter with pleasure, but Ra, dismayed at what she has done, decides to spare the rest of humanity and needs a way to stop her rampage before she finishes what he set her to do. His solution is not force but wine. He orders a great quantity of beer dyed red with ochre poured across the field where she means to continue her killing, so that it looks to her like the blood she is already drinking. She drinks it, becomes drunk, falls asleep, and wakes gentle, no longer able to recognize the humans she had been hunting. The text names the pacified goddess Hathor, restoring the same figure known elsewhere as patron of music, dance and festival, so that her gentleness in that role is not a separate temperament from her fury as the Eye but its aftermath, deliberately induced.