Horus

Horus is the posthumous son of Osiris and Isis, and his conception is the point where Egyptian myth bends its own rules. Set has killed and dismembered Osiris; Isis gathers the pieces, turns into a kite and settles on the corpse just long enough to conceive. The child is born and grows up hidden in the reed beds of Chemmis, in the Delta, raised far from his uncle.

Tradition calls that endangered childhood Harpocrates, «Horus the child», and out of it come the magical stelae that stood in Egyptian houses: if the child god survived the scorpion and the snake, whoever recites his story over water and drinks it will survive too. He is one of the few figures of the pantheon whose domestic usefulness can be documented object by object.

The Pyramid Texts, from the Old Kingdom, already invoke him as the heir who restores order after his father's death, and that is his whole role: he comes to found nothing, he comes to recover what was taken from him. The Egyptian calls him Harendotes, «Horus who protects his father», and on that idea (the son who claims a dead man's inheritance) the entire theology of royal succession is built.

The conflict between Horus and Set is settled not in a duel but in a trial, and that is its most remarkable feature. The New Kingdom papyrus known as The Contendings of Horus and Seth tells it as an eighty-year lawsuit before the Ennead: Horus claims his father's throne, Set argues that he is the stronger and that a minor cannot reign, and the gods divide and fail to rule.

There are trials, and they are deliberately comic: a race of stone boats that Horus wins by making his of plastered wood, while Set's sinks. There is a sexual trap by which Set means to dishonour him and which Isis turns inside out. There is a fit of rage in which Horus himself cuts off his mother's head for having pitied his uncle. And the case closes only when Osiris writes from the beyond, reminding the gods who gives them their barley.

In combat both are mutilated: Set tears out Horus's left eye and Horus tears off Set's testicles. No version makes this a clean victory. The eye is restored by Thoth, and restored it is called the wedjat, «the whole one». That is why the Eye of Horus means neither sight nor vigilance: it means that what is broken can be put back together, and that is why it was painted on coffins and worn round the neck.

Horus is depicted as a falcon, or as a man with a falcon's head, and the bird is no ornament. The falcon flies higher than anything an Egyptian could see, and the whole sky was understood as its body, with the sun and moon for eyes. Hence his fusion with the sun as Ra-Horakhty, «Ra-Horus of the horizon», one of the most widespread solar forms in the pantheon.

His great temple is at Edfu, and it should be dated: what one visits today is Ptolemaic, raised between 237 and 57 BC, more than two thousand years after the Pyramid Texts that already named him. It is also the best preserved Egyptian temple, and its walls carry the fight against Set turned into liturgy, performed there every year.

One trace of him is not religious, and must be told carefully. It has been proposed since the early twentieth century that the six strokes into which the wedjat can be broken served scribes as fractions of the heqat, the grain measure: a half, a quarter, an eighth, and so on to a sixty-fourth, which added come to 63/64, the missing part being the one Thoth restored. It is a lovely and much repeated idea, but recent palaeography disputes it: the hieratic signs for those fractions appear to have another origin, and the reading as the Eye of Horus would be a later rationalisation.

Confusing the Horuses is the commonest mistake in reading about him, and it is worth undoing here. The one in this entry is Har-si-Ese, «Horus son of Isis», the posthumous child who claims the throne. But there is also Haroeris, Hor-Wer, «Horus the Great» or «the Elder», who in the genealogy Plutarch records is born on the second of the five epagomenal days and is brother to Osiris and Set, son of neither. Both fight Set, and that is why their stories have been mixed since antiquity.

The underlying reason is that «Horus» was never one god but a sky falcon that each city held to be its own. There is Horus of Behdet, the winged disc of Edfu; Harsomtus, «who unites the Two Lands»; Harendotes, «who protects his father»; Harpocrates, the child with a finger to his lips; and Hor-em-akhet, «Horus on the horizon», which is the Egyptian name of the Great Sphinx of Giza.

Egyptian religion did not require these figures to be the same nor to be different, and treated them as interchangeable forms for three thousand years without any sense of contradiction. Telling them apart is our need, not theirs: whoever looks for a single coherent biography of the falcon god is asking the material for something it never had.