Hathor

Hathor is one of the oldest and most venerated goddesses of Egypt. Her name, Hut-Hor, means abode of Horus: it is the sky itself inside which the falcon god flies, and hence she is also called his mother or his wife. The Pyramid Texts name her daughter of Ra and Eye of the Sun, the force that the creator sends ahead of himself. She is attributed the title of Lady of the West, the one who receives the setting sun and with it the deceased in the necropolis. As a celestial cow she nurses the pharaoh with her divine milk, a gesture that makes him son of the gods and legitimizes his reign.

Lady of music, dance, love and intoxication, Hathor shakes the sistrum, ritual rattle whose tinkling wards off evil, and the menat collar. She is represented as a cow, as a woman with horns framing the solar disk, or as a frontal face with bovine ears on the capitals of her temples. The other face of that sweetness is fierce: the Book of the Celestial Cow narrates how Ra, weary of human rebellion, sends his Eye against men, and Hathor transforms into the lioness Sekhmet and reaps so many lives that she threatens to extinguish humanity. Only dyeing the beer red and making her drink it, deceiving her with blood, stops the slaughter.

Her major temple rises in Dendera, where each year the goddess's barque sailed up the Nile to Edfu for the Festival of the Beautiful Encounter with Horus. The festivals of intoxication commemorated with music, beer and dance the night when Sekhmet was appeased. Her cult was transversal like few others: it was served by priestesses and musicians, and women who asked for a child, miners from Sinai, sailors and foreigners came to it. In the Theban necropolis she emerges from the mountain as a cow to welcome the dead. The Greeks identified her with Aphrodite, and her face with bovine ears remains one of the visual emblems of Egypt.