Sekhmet: The Lioness Goddess Who Was Sent to Destroy Humanity, Nearly Succeeded, and Had to Be Stopped With Seven Thousand Jars of Beer

Ra sent Sekhmet to punish humanity for their disobedience. He watched for a while as she killed, and then he changed his mind and told her to stop. She would not stop. She was in a blood lust that had moved beyond the original command, beyond Ra’s authority, beyond anything that direct divine instruction could arrest. She was going to kill every human being on earth and there was nothing the sun god could do about it.

His solution was to brew seven thousand jars of beer, dye it red with pomegranate juice or ochre to resemble blood, and flood the killing fields with it while she slept briefly. She woke and saw what looked like an ocean of blood and drank it all before she realised what had happened. She was drunk. She slept for three days. She woke up as Hathor.

Every year at the Festival of Hathor-Sekhmet, the Egyptians commemorated the saving of humanity by drinking copious amounts of red-dyed beer. The festival’s purpose, beyond celebration, was propitiatory: it was a reminder that Sekhmet’s bloodlust was not permanently satisfied, that the same situation could always recur, and that maintaining her good will required regular acknowledgment of what she was capable of doing.

The temple statues of Sekhmet erected by Amenhotep III at the Mut Temple at Karnak number approximately seven hundred, one for each day of the year in some interpretations. That is not the number of statues a civilisation erects to a goddess it is not worried about.

The Name and Its Meaning

Sekhmet’s name derives from the Egyptian sekhem, meaning power or might. She is the Powerful One, the Lady of Slaughter, She Before Whom Evil Trembles, the Mistress of Dread, the Mauler. The epithets accumulate in the tradition with the thoroughness of a civilisation that wanted to make absolutely sure the goddess understood she was being taken seriously.

She is depicted as a woman with the head of a lioness, wearing the solar disc and the uraeus cobra that mark her as a daughter of Ra and as a being of royal and divine status. Her skin is sometimes shown as red, associated in Egyptian iconography with blood, the desert, and dangerous heat. Her linen dress is red. In ritual contexts, statues of Sekhmet were dressed in red and oriented toward the west, the direction of death, while statues of Bastet were dressed in green and oriented toward the east, the direction of life: the two complementary aspects of the divine feminine, destruction and renewal, placed in deliberate contrast.

The hot desert wind that blows from the south was understood as her breath. The scorching heat of the summer sun was understood as her wrath in milder form. She was not simply a war goddess in the conventional sense. She was the dangerous aspect of the sun itself, the heat that kills rather than the warmth that nourishes, expressed in the form of a lioness because the lion was the animal most associated with the desert, with predatory power, and with the merciless efficiency of a killing machine that has no interest in showing mercy.

The Eye of Ra

Sekhmet is one of several goddesses who serve as the Eye of Ra, the destructive female aspect that the sun god detaches from himself and sends into the world as his enforcer. The other goddesses who hold this title at different points in the tradition include Hathor, Bastet, and Mut, and the theological relationship between them is one of the most interesting questions in Egyptian religious studies.

The Eye of Ra is not simply a weapon. It is a part of Ra himself, a female counterpart that embodies the destructive power he possesses but does not ordinarily express directly. When Ra needs something destroyed, he does not do it himself. He sends his Eye. The Eye goes out and does what it does, often exceeding the original mandate, and Ra then has to manage the consequences. In the Destruction of Mankind myth, he has to manage them with seven thousand jars of beer. In other myths, he has to send Thoth to retrieve the Eye when it has wandered too far from Egypt and gone beyond his reach.

The Eye of Ra that is Sekhmet is the most extreme version of this principle: divine wrath operating without restraint, the pure destructive aspect of solar power expressed through the most efficient killing animal in the Egyptian landscape. Ra creates her by looking at the situation and deciding it needs addressing, and in that moment of decision she comes into being as a fully formed force that immediately exceeds what he intended.

The Healer and the Destroyer

Sekhmet is simultaneously the goddess of plague and the goddess of medicine. This apparent paradox is actually one of the most consistent things about her: in Egyptian thought, the power to destroy and the power to heal are the same power applied in different directions. The force that can kill can also cure, because both killing and curing require knowledge of the body’s vulnerabilities and the ability to act on them with precision.

Her priests were the most important medical practitioners in ancient Egypt. The Sekhmet priesthood maintained medical knowledge and healing traditions alongside their ritual roles, and the training of Egyptian physicians was connected to her temples. The rationale was theological: to heal, you needed Sekhmet’s knowledge and Sekhmet’s favour. The goddess who sent plagues could also withdraw them. The same lioness who killed with her claws could heal with her attention.

This connection between Sekhmet and healing is not simply a theological abstraction. Archaeological evidence from her temple complexes includes what appear to be spaces used for medical treatment alongside the purely religious facilities, suggesting that the temples functioned as something approaching medical centres as well as places of worship. The Sekhmet priesthood’s monopoly on healing knowledge gave them practical importance well beyond the theological.

Sekhmet and the Pharaoh

The pharaoh’s relationship with Sekhmet was one of the most important in royal theology. She was the divine force of destruction that the pharaoh could claim as his own in battle: to fight under Sekhmet’s protection was to fight with the full destructive power of the divine at your disposal. Military campaigns invoked her explicitly. Battle was her natural domain, and the ferocity attributed to Egyptian armies in their own texts was understood as an expression of Sekhmet’s presence in the fighting rather than simply the soldiers’ individual courage.

The Ramesside pharaohs of the 19th and 20th dynasties were particularly devoted to Sekhmet, and the records of their military campaigns invoke her with specific imagery: the pharaoh as Sekhmet in battle, the pharaoh’s onslaught as Sekhmet’s breath, the enemies destroyed as Sekhmet’s prey. The ruler of the most militarily active period of Egyptian history aligned himself with the goddess who nearly destroyed all of humanity and had to be stopped with beer.

Amenhotep III’s seven hundred statues of Sekhmet at Karnak, mentioned above, are generally interpreted by Egyptologists as apotropaic: they were placed there not to celebrate her but to keep her calm. Seven hundred manifestations of the goddess’s presence, requiring daily ritual attention from priests who maintained a continuous programme of propitiation, each statue receiving offerings and prayers in rotation so that no day passed without Sekhmet being acknowledged. The scale of the commitment reflects the scale of what the Egyptians believed was at stake if she was not sufficiently honoured.

The Annual Festival

The annual Festival of Hathor-Sekhmet commemorated the saving of humanity with red beer and was one of the more extraordinary religious celebrations in the ancient world. Texts from the Ptolemaic period describe the festival’s observances, which included the drinking of red beer in quantities sufficient to produce the divine equivalent of Sekhmet’s experience: the participants drank themselves into something approaching the state Sekhmet had been in when she stopped killing, and in doing so they ritually re-enacted the moment of rescue.

The festival was not simply commemorative. It was understood as annually renewable protection: by repeating the act that stopped Sekhmet, the participants renewed the conditions under which humanity had been saved. The beer drunk at the festival was a ritual participation in the mechanism of survival, and the hangover the next morning was presumably understood as a small price for the continuation of the human race.

For more on the Egyptian tradition, the Hathor article covers the gentle goddess whose alter-ego Sekhmet is and whose wine-and-joy aspect is the form Sekhmet returns to after the red beer stops her. The Ra article covers the sun god who creates her, deploys her, and then has to outsmart her to prevent the complete destruction of humanity. The Ptah article covers her husband, the creator god of Memphis, whose still and contained nature is the direct complement of her explosive and uncontainable one.