Sekhmet

Sekhmet means the Powerful One, and she is the lioness-goddess of the burning heat of the sun, of war and of plague, the raging form of the Eye of Ra. Her defining story is the Destruction of Mankind: when humanity plots against the aging sun-god, Ra sends out his Eye as Sekhmet to punish them, but she slaughters with such joy that she threatens to wipe out the human race entirely, and Ra, to stop her, floods the fields with beer dyed red like blood, which she drinks in mistake for gore until she falls asleep and her rage passes. The myth explains both her terror and the festivals of drunkenness that pacified her, and it makes her the model of divine power that must be appeased rather than merely worshipped.

Archaeological excavation at the Precinct of Mut in Karnak, led in recent decades by the Egyptologist Betsy Bryan, has recovered direct physical evidence for the myth's ritual reenactment: a specially built porch structure associated with the Festival of Drunkenness, along with large quantities of broken ceramic wine vessels and residue, dating mainly to the reign of Hatshepsut in the fifteenth century BCE. The find confirms that the beer-soaked pacification of Sekhmet described in the Destruction of Mankind myth was acted out as an actual annual rite involving genuine mass intoxication meant to appease the goddess and to identify worshippers, however briefly, with the moment her rage was finally calmed.

The same goddess who sent pestilence could withhold and heal it, and Sekhmet was closely tied to medicine: her priests functioned as a recognised class of physicians, and medical and magical texts invoke her both as the sender of the messengers of disease, the demons thought to bring the yearly plagues, especially at the dangerous turn of the year, and as the power that could call them off. Pharaohs sought her protection, and Amenhotep III had hundreds of black granite statues of the seated goddess set up at Thebes, perhaps to appease her against plague; many survive in museums around the world. Worshipped at Memphis as the consort of Ptah and mother of Nefertem, she embodies the Egyptian conviction that the fiercest divine power was also the surest defence.

Sekhmet's name appears already in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, inscribed inside royal pyramids from the twenty-fourth century BCE, where the king is sometimes described as born of Sekhmet or nursed by her, a royal epithet asserting that Egypt's ruler shared in the fierce protective power of the goddess from birth. This Old Kingdom evidence makes Sekhmet's cult, in some form, as old as the pyramids themselves, predating by many centuries the New Kingdom sources, the Destruction of Mankind myth and the mass statue commissions of Amenhotep III, that now supply most of what is popularly known about her.