Egypt's goddess of love and music also had a vengeful side
Hathor's name means House of Horus. She presided over joy, dance, beauty and motherhood, yet as the Eye of Ra she could turn fierce against the sun god's enemies. More temples were built for her than for any other Egyptian goddess, and foreign peoples in Nubia and Canaan took up her worship too.
Egyptians gave Hathor an unusually wide job description. As a sky goddess she was mother or consort of both Horus, the falcon sky god, and Ra, the sun god. Since both were tied to kingship, she became the symbolic mother of every pharaoh. Alongside several other goddesses she served as the Eye of Ra, his female counterpart, and in that role she guarded him with violence. Her gentler face stood for music, love, sexuality and maternal care. The two faces together captured how Egyptians thought about femininity. She also helped the dead pass across into the afterlife.
She appeared in many guises. A cow expressed her motherly and heavenly nature, but more often she was drawn as a woman whose headdress combined cow horns with a sun disk. Lioness, cobra and sycomore tree forms turn up as well.
Her origins are murky. Cattle goddesses resembling her show up in art of the fourth millennium BC, but Hathor herself may date only from the Old Kingdom, around 2686 to 2181 BC, when royal patronage lifted her into the top rank of deities. Her greatest sanctuary stood at Dendera in Upper Egypt, and she shared the temples of her male partners. Egyptians linked her with distant lands and their prized imports, such as incense and semiprecious stones. At home she was a favourite in private prayers and votive gifts, especially from women hoping to conceive.
Her standing slowly eroded. In the New Kingdom, about 1550 to 1070 BC, Mut and Isis took over parts of her place in royal ideology, though ordinary worship of Hathor stayed strong. After that era Isis increasingly eclipsed her, but Hathor kept her devotees until Egyptian religion faded away in the early centuries AD.
Source: Hathor
