Hathor, Egyptian goddess of love, music and the sky

Who is Hathor?

Hathor is one of the greatest and oldest goddesses of Egypt, and at the same time one of the most complex. Goddess of love, beauty, music and joy, she is also a celestial and solar power. Her name, Ḥwt-Ḥr, means ‘the House of Horus’: Hathor is the sky, the space in which the falcon Horus flies. This manifold identity — maternal and sensual, solar and funerary, gentle and terrible — makes her a deity who overflows any single definition.

Role, nature and domains

Hathor governs everything that makes life desirable: love, music, dance, festive intoxication, beauty. Her instrument is the sistrum, whose rustling drives off hostile forces; her emblem is the menat necklace, a symbol of rebirth and pleasure. She is invoked for fertility, happy births and the flourishing of desire.

But this goddess of joy is also a celestial goddess. Depicted as a cosmic cow, she bears the solar disk between her horns — the attribute that the goddess Isis would later borrow from her. As the great cow of the sky, Hathor gives birth to the sun each morning and swallows it each evening: she is the womb of solar renewal.

The Eye of Ra and the Destruction of Mankind

The most powerful myth attached to Hathor reveals her in her fearsome aspect. As daughter and defender of Ra, she embodies the Eye of Ra, the punishing solar power.

In the Book of the Heavenly Cow, humans rebel against the ageing Ra. The god sends his Eye to punish humanity: the goddess is then unleashed in the bloody form of Sekhmet, the lioness, and slaughters the rebels with such fury that she threatens to exterminate the whole human race. To stop her, Ra has thousands of jars of beer dyed red like blood poured out over the fields. The goddess, believing she is drinking the blood of men, becomes drunk, is soothed, and returns to being the gentle Hathor. This tale condenses the goddess’s duality: the same power that gives joy can, unleashed, annihilate the world.

Genealogy and divine relations

Daughter of Ra, Hathor is closely bound to Horus, whose mother or wife she is according to the tradition. At the great temple of Dendera (Iunet), her chief sanctuary, she is the wife of Horus of Edfu; from their union is born Ihy, the young god of music and the sistrum. Each year, Hathor’s statue would sail up the Nile from Dendera to Edfu for the festival of the ‘Beautiful Reunion’, a celebration of this sacred union.

Alongside the great goddess exist the Seven Hathors, multiple forms who appear at the birth of every child to fix its destiny — figures close to the fairy godmothers of folk tales.

The Lady of the West

The goddess of joy is also, paradoxically, a goddess of the dead. Under the title ‘Lady of the West’ (Imentet), Hathor welcomes the setting sun and the deceased who enter the afterlife. In the Theban necropolis she appears as a cow emerging from the western mountain to receive the dead and suckle them, offering them rebirth. Far from a contradiction, this double function expresses Egyptian logic: she who presides over birth and pleasure is also she who guarantees the second birth, beyond death.

Cult, reach and syncretisms

The cult of Hathor was among the most popular in Egypt, served by priestesses who were musicians and dancers. Her sanctuary at Dendera, whose present state dates from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, remains one of the best-preserved temples in the country. As goddess of far-off lands, Hathor was venerated as ‘Lady of Turquoise’ in the mines of Sinai and honoured as far as Byblos, in Lebanon.

In the later periods, her attributes merge with those of Isis (Isis-Hathor). The Greeks, finally, identified her with Aphrodite, recognising in her the great Mediterranean goddess of love.

What the ancient sources say

Hathor is attested as early as the Pyramid Texts (c. 2400 BC), which name her among the deities who protect the dead king. The Book of the Heavenly Cow, inscribed in several royal tombs of the New Kingdom (including that of Tutankhamun), preserves the myth of the Destruction of Mankind. The walls of the temple of Dendera yield the hymns, rituals and festival calendar of her cult. Inscriptions from Sinai and Byblos attest her reach beyond Egypt’s borders. Herodotus and other Greek authors link her with Aphrodite in their descriptions of Egyptian religion.

Further reading

For the solar god whose daughter and avenging Eye Hathor is, read the page on Ra. For the divine falcon whose celestial ‘house’ she is and whose wife she is at Dendera, see the page on Horus. For the goddess who inherits her horns and solar disk in the late syncretism, consult the page on Isis.