Hathor Egyptian Goddess of love Facts Part 2/2

Hathor Egyptian Goddess of love | Facts and Secrets Part 2
Unknown to  Hathor Goddess , then, Ra asked for his swiftest messengers and sent them to Elephantine Island at Aswan with instructions to bring him a large quantity of the fruit of the mandrake, a plant that caused great sleepiness. Its fruit is crimson and scarlet and its juice is blood-red. After the messengers brought it to Ra in Heliopolis with the swiftness of wind, the women there crushed barley to make beer, which they mixed with the mandrake coloring to give it the appearance of blood. Working all night while Hathor Goddess rested, they made seven thousand measures of red beer and finished their task just as dawn broke. Ra and the other gods surveyed the night’s work and felt pleased with them; Ra told the rest that he would use the brew to save human beings from total destruction, and sent his messengers out with orders to spread it over the earth.

Hathor Egyptian Goddess of Love

Shortly Hathor Goddess arose and set out to continue her enjoyable task. She passed through the land looking for more prey to satisfy her thirst for blood, but saw none. Instead she saw that the earth was already deep in what appeared to be blood and rejoiced in the thought that she had spilled so much of the liquid of life. She stooped to drink of it, and found that the more she drank, the more she wanted. Finally the combination of the beer and the mandrake caused her to sink into a peaceful slumber. Her brain no longer urged her to kill, and her father quietly called to her: “Come, come in peace, 0 fair and gracious goddess.” So ended her slaughter.

Ra went on to command that in future there would be celebrations of this event in the city of Amen, the place where the goddess was worshipped. Ra assured her and her followers that there would be three vases of beer for each of his handmaidens who participated in the festival of the New Year, and for generations the followers of Hathor Goddess were rewarded with an annual beer party. (One amusing scholarly explanation of this story is that it was devised to justify the excessive drinking that accompanied the yearly Feast of  Hathor Goddess .)

Ra, however, was not perfectly content with the outcome of events. He had found his revenge and had stopped it from being total so that human beings might survive, but he was still weary of mortals. He was also wary of the implications of what he had done, for he realized that for a time he, the greatest of the gods, had been unable to control his own daughter. He told Nun, “For the first time my limbs have lost their power, and I will never permit this thing to happen a second time.”

The oldest physical form given to Hathor Goddess was probably the cow sometimes she was depicted as the full animal; at other times as a woman with a cow’s head. Sometimes she had a woman’s body and face, but was provided with a pair of horns encircling the solar disk. In the latter form she can be confused with Isis who, as we have seen, was also given a cow’s horns or head at times. At the temples of Dendera and Philae, her most important shrines, she was shown on the pillars as a woman with cow’s ears. The face has an appealing smile and considerable beauty.

Her titles were many, but most of them reflected her connection with happiness and joy. In the broadest sense she represented what was good and true, and these traits were found in her characterization as a woman. She was the epitome of a wife, a daughter, a woman. She was the goddess of beauty, and in the Coffin Texts she said, “Come with my horns and display my beauty; come with my face and I will cause you to be exalted.” She was the goddess of love, music, dance, and singing. Artists revered her, as did drinkers of beer and wine.

In the Book of the Dead Hathor Goddess was also assigned a role in the underworld. At first, it seems the role was not a prominent one: she was just one of the companies of gods overseeing the soul’s trial to attest to its fairness. Then she was thought of as provider of food and drink to souls making their way through the underworld. She was depicted as sitting within her sacred sycamore tree dispensing nourishment to the dead, who then sat and ate in its shade. By the Twenty-first Dynasty, however, her duties to the dead had been greatly expanded. In papyri from this period she is shown as the cow who greets the dead at the entrance to the Western Mountains, the location of the underworld.

She is placed on the slope of the mountain with her pleasant head and horns protruding from the sand. In some of these papyri there is an interesting combination of myths: the cow as greeter of the dead was identified with the rising and setting sun. The ancient idea that Hathor Goddess represented the sky and was associated with the sun was here connected with her newer role in behalf of the dead at the entrance of the underworld. Her titles here were now “Lady of the West” and “Lady of the Holy Country.” She was shown wearing a menat necklace, a beaded necklace that hung from the rear of the collar and was intended to symbol- 1Zed regeneration and rebirth.

As one might expect, the goddess associated with love, beauty and music and renowned as the Great Mother was celebrated widely in some of the most vivid rites recorded in ancient Egypt Fairly early the murals showed her holding a sistrum, a musical rattle of metal and wood. It depicted a flattened face of Hathor Goddess with cow’s ears and was used both for festive occasions and to frighten demons. Later she was celebrated in the Sacred Marriage.

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