Hathor

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.

Hathor was venerated in antiquity, though the record shows no unbroken continuous cult, and the concrete form that standing took centers on Dendera, the temple Egyptians honored her above all others. Each year Hathor's cult statue left Dendera and traveled south by boat along the Nile to Edfu, where Horus's own temple awaited her for the Feast of the Beautiful Meeting, a festival central to Horus's cult at Edfu as well. The two cult images were brought together inside the temple, understood as the sacred marriage of the two gods, and the festival was marked with days of celebration before Hathor's statue made the return journey north. The route itself, roughly one hundred and thirty kilometers of river between two of Upper Egypt's best-preserved temple complexes, was not incidental theater; it was the mechanism by which two separate temple cults, each with its own priesthood and its own local identity, were bound into a single shared ritual calendar. Dendera's survival as one of Egypt's most intact Ptolemaic-era temples means the reliefs recording the goddess's departure and return can still be read on the temple's own walls today.