Horus the Elder

Plutarch tells in On Isis and Osiris (12) that Thoth added five days to the year so that Nut could bear the children Ra had forbidden her: Osiris was born on the first day, Haroeris on the second, Set on the third, Isis on the fourth and Nephthys on the fifth. Haroeris is therefore the brother of Osiris and of Set, not the son of either, and his Egyptian name, Hor-Wer, means «Horus the Great» or «the Elder». The Pyramid Texts already invoke him as a celestial falcon in the Old Kingdom, centuries before the genealogy Plutarch would record much later was organised.

His defining trait is cosmic: the two eyes of Haroeris are the sun and the moon, and as long as he keeps them in their orbits the two bodies do not cross. Hence he is depicted as a falcon, or as a man with a falcon's head crowned by the solar disc and the lunar crescent. In the fight against Set he loses the left eye, the lunar one, and for the Egyptians that loss explains the phases of the moon: the restored wedjat is the symbol of what breaks and becomes whole again, and for that reason it was worn as a protective amulet for three millennia.

In the tradition that the Ptolemaic temples set in stone it is Haroeris, not the son of Isis, who contests the throne with Set and defeats him. He then receives the epithet Hor Nubti, «Horus vanquisher of Set», and his cult is concentrated in Upper Egypt: at Edfu, whose temple preserves the reliefs of the combat, and at Kom Ombo, where he shares a sanctuary with Sobek in a double dedication unique in Egypt. The falcon worshipped there is not the child avenging his father, but the brother who faces Set as an equal.

The two figures merged early, and confusing them is the most widespread error about Horus. The son of Isis and Osiris, Harsiesis, «Horus son of Isis», avenges his murdered father and belongs to the following generation; Haroeris is that Horus's uncle, brother of the dead god. Egyptian theology, which never demanded coherence between local traditions, came to treat Haroeris as a form of Horus, and many popular works still present him that way. Here they are kept apart because their myths, their generation and their cult were apart: they are two falcons, not one with two names.