Hathor is the reason Egyptian religion cannot be tidied up. She is a cow, a woman with horns, a sycamore tree, a lioness, a snake and a face on a column capital. She is the mother of the sun god, the daughter of the sun god and the wife of the sky god, in texts of the same period and occasionally in the same building. She presides over drunkenness, sexual love, music, dance, childbirth, turquoise mining, foreign lands and the reception of the dead in the west. Any attempt to reduce that to a job title fails, and the failure is the information: Egyptian deities are bundles of function, not personalities with a résumé.
Her name, Hwt-Hor, means "house of Horus" or "enclosure of Horus", written as a falcon inside a rectangle. She is the space the sky god occupies — which is to say she is the sky itself, imagined as a vast cow whose four legs stand at the corners of the world and whose belly is spangled with stars.
What a sistrum sounds like
Her instrument is the sistrum, a metal rattle with a handle, a loop and loose crossbars that produce a dry metallic shimmer when shaken. Temple musicians shook them in processions; the handle is frequently carved as Hathor's own face with cow's ears. The related menat — a heavy beaded counterpoise necklace — was also shaken, and both were held out towards a person as a gesture of blessing.
This is worth pausing on because Egyptian religion is usually encountered in silence, as objects in cases. Hathor's cult was loud. Her festivals involved percussion, dancing, and quantities of beer that the texts do not treat as a lapse.
The night the goddess nearly ended the world
The Book of the Heavenly Cow, inscribed in the shrines of Tutankhamun's tomb and in several later royal tombs, tells it. Ra has grown old on earth and humanity plots against him. He takes counsel and sends out his Eye as a goddess to punish them. She goes as Hathor, becomes Sekhmet in the killing, and slaughters so thoroughly that Ra decides to stop her — and cannot. So he has seven thousand jars of beer brewed and dyed red with ochre, or with mandrake in some readings, and poured over the fields at night. She finds the flooded ground at dawn, takes the red flood for blood, drinks it, becomes too drunk to continue, and humanity survives on a trick.
Then Ra, disgusted with the world, withdraws to the sky on the back of Nut as a cow, and the age of gods ruling on earth ends. It is a myth about the origin of divine remoteness as much as about a massacre.
An annual Festival of Drunkenness is attested at several sites and best documented at the Mut precinct at Karnak, where excavation of a porch of drunkenness has produced texts and imagery for a rite of deliberate intoxication, sleep and awakening to the goddess. Public drunkenness as a sacrament is not something the popular image of Egypt prepares anyone for.
Sekhmet, Bastet, Tefnut: one goddess or four?
The Eye of Ra is a role, and several goddesses hold it: Hathor, Sekhmet, Bastet, Tefnut, Wadjet, Mut. The Egyptian pattern is a single dangerous solar female who becomes destructive when enraged and beneficent when pacified — and different cities named that figure differently, then identified the names with each other without merging the cults.
So: is Hathor the same goddess as Sekhmet? In the Heavenly Cow, yes, sequentially — the gentle one turns into the fierce one. At Memphis, no: Sekhmet has her own temple, her own consort in Ptah and her own son in Nefertem, and no Egyptian would have said she was the Dendera goddess. Both statements are correct in their contexts, and this site refuses to pick one, because picking one would misrepresent the religion. The family tree marks Eye-of-Ra identifications as roles rather than as descent for the same reason.
Dendera
Her principal temple stands at Dendera in Upper Egypt, and it is one of the best-preserved in the country — Ptolemaic and Roman in its present form but on a site with far older foundations. Its hypostyle hall is roofed on twenty-four columns carved with her face on all four sides, so that the goddess looks at you from every direction as you walk in. The ceiling carries astronomical decoration, including the circular zodiac now in the Louvre, removed in 1821 and replaced with a plaster copy still in place; that zodiac is a genuinely Greco-Egyptian object, mixing Egyptian decans with Babylonian-derived zodiac signs that reached Egypt in the Ptolemaic period. The crypts beneath contain reliefs including the famous "Dendera light" panels, which show a lotus, a snake and a djed pillar in a standard mythological composition and are read as an electric lamp only by people committed to reading them that way.
Her other cult sites tell you about the breadth of her portfolio. At Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai she is Lady of Turquoise, patron of the mining expeditions, and the temple there was built by miners far from home; the same site produced some of the earliest Proto-Sinaitic alphabetic inscriptions, an alphabet's first traces in the shadow of her shrine. At Byblos in Lebanon she is Lady of Byblos, folded into a Levantine goddess. At Deir el-Bahari she receives the dead of Thebes, shown as a cow emerging from the western cliff. At Punt, the trading destination of Hatshepsut's famous expedition, she is Lady of Punt. She is the goddess of the outside, wherever the outside happened to be that century.
The one who meets you in the west
Theban tomb painting shows the Hathor cow stepping out of the mountain to receive the dead, and the goddess of the sycamore offering bread and water to the deceased from within the tree's foliage. The sycamore fig is a real tree with real shade and real fruit in a country with very little of either, and the image of the dead being given a drink by a goddess leaning out of a tree is one of the gentlest things Egyptian religion produced. Women in the New Kingdom were commonly said to become Hathor after death, as men became Osiris.
The Beautiful Reunion
Once a year her cult statue was loaded onto a river barge at Dendera and taken upstream to Edfu to stay with Horus for about two weeks, with the population lining the banks and a fleet accompanying her. The Edfu texts describe the arrival, the joint procession to the necropolis, and the return. Whatever the theology, this was also a fortnight-long river festival with music, drinking and crowds, and the temple calendars budgeted for it.
Where her cult went
The Greeks equated her with Aphrodite, which catches the love and music and misses the cow, the mining and the funerary work entirely. Her cult travelled with the Isis religion into the Roman world and then stopped. Modern reception is thin compared with Isis or Bastet — she surfaces in games and in a certain amount of contemporary goddess spirituality that emphasises the joy and quietly drops the seven thousand jars of blood-coloured beer.
Questions Dendera prompts
Why is a cow a compliment?
Because Egypt was a cattle country and cows meant milk, wealth and maternal care, with none of the derogatory freight the word carries in modern English. The comparison in the texts is to the animal's nurturing and to its large dark eyes, and calling a queen a cow was praise. The same iconography attaches to Nut and to Isis in some periods, and Hathor's headdress — horns with the sun disc between them — was later borrowed by Isis so completely that the two are hard to tell apart in Late Period art without reading the caption.
What was a "Hathoric column"?
A column whose capital is the goddess's face with cow's ears, usually on all four sides, sometimes topped by a small shrine-shaped block. They appear at Dendera, at Bubastis, in the Sinai temple and in a number of Nubian sites. The type is distinctive enough that a fragment of one identifies a building as hers with no other evidence.
Were her priests women?
Unusually often, yes. Non-royal women in the Old and Middle Kingdoms held the title of priestess of Hathor in large numbers — it is by far the commonest priestly title borne by women in those periods — and elite women served as chantresses and musicians in her cult. That drops off in the New Kingdom as professional male priesthoods consolidate, which is a broader trend in Egyptian temple administration rather than something specific to her.