Hathor: The Egyptian Goddess of Love and Music Who Is Also the Eye of Ra and Nearly Destroyed All of Humanity

Hathor is the goddess of love, beauty, music, dance, motherhood, and joy. She is the most widely worshipped goddess in Egyptian history: more temples were dedicated to her than to any other female deity, and her cult was practised not just in Egypt but in Nubia, the Sinai, and across the ancient Mediterranean world. She is depicted as a gentle cow, as a woman with cow horns and a sun disc, as a figure playing the sistrum rattle in temple ceremonies. She welcomes the dead into the next world from the branches of a sycamore tree, offering water and nourishment.

She is also the Eye of Ra. When the sun god sends his divine wrath into the world to punish humanity, he sends it as Hathor transformed into a lioness, and she kills with such relentless enthusiasm that Ra himself cannot stop her. Seven thousand jars of red-dyed beer must be poured across the killing fields and she must be tricked into drinking herself into a stupor before the slaughter ends. In her destructive aspect she is Sekhmet. In her gentle aspect she is Hathor. The tradition sometimes treats these as two separate goddesses and sometimes as two aspects of the same being. The truth is that the Egyptian tradition is comfortable with both readings simultaneously.

The love goddess who welcomed the dead and the destroyer who nearly wiped out humanity are the same deity. Understanding Hathor requires holding both of these things at once.

The Cow and the Sky

Hathor’s most fundamental form is the cow, and her name encodes this: Hat-Hor means house of Horus, and she is understood as the sky that contains and nourishes the falcon god. In the oldest iconography the sky was understood as a great celestial cow, and Hathor as the celestial cow was the sky itself: her belly the vault of heaven, her four legs the four pillars that hold the sky above the earth, her body the space through which Ra travels each day on his solar barque.

This cosmic role as the sky that contains the sun’s journey made Hathor one of the oldest and most theologically fundamental deities in the Egyptian tradition. She appears in contexts that predate many of the more famous gods, connected to the primordial order of the cosmos rather than to the dramatic mythological narratives that developed later. The gentleness of her most familiar persona, the cow goddess of love and music, sits alongside a cosmic scale that her domestic aspect can obscure.

The cow horns with the sun disc between them that form her headdress in human form are not simply attributes. They are a cosmological statement: the horns are the crescent moon that holds the full sun, the sky goddess cradling the sun god, the containment of the greatest power in the cosmos within a form associated with nurturing and abundance. The most dangerous thing in existence, the sun, is held by the most nurturing of goddesses, and the combination produces an image of total power expressed through total care.

Music, Joy, and the Sistrum

Hathor’s association with music is one of her most consistent characteristics across the tradition’s entire span. The sistrum, a rattle made of metal with loosely attached crossbars that produce a shaking sound when the instrument is moved, was her sacred instrument and the defining sound of her worship. Temple ceremonies in her honour involved sistrum playing, music, and dancing. Her priests and priestesses, unusually for Egypt, were both male and female.

The sistrum’s sound was understood as having the power to drive away evil and hostile forces, which connects the goddess of joy to a protective function through the medium of music. Joyful sound was not merely pleasant in Egyptian religious understanding. It was a force that maintained the order of things, that kept the hostile at bay, that participated in the cosmic balance that the tradition called maat. To celebrate Hathor through music was to contribute actively to the maintenance of the good order of the world.

Her role as goddess of beauty made her the patron of cosmetics and personal adornment. The traditional votive offering to Hathor was a mirror, which reflects both her domain of beauty and the idea of self-knowledge as a divine value. Being beautiful was an act of worship in her tradition, and the care taken with appearance was understood as participation in the divine aesthetic order she embodied. Egyptian cosmetic palettes, the objects on which eye makeup was ground and mixed, were often decorated with Hathor imagery, placing her presence in the most intimate domestic acts of daily life.

The Dendera Temple

Hathor’s principal cult centre was at Dendera in Upper Egypt, and the Temple of Hathor at Dendera is one of the best-preserved temple complexes in Egypt. It was built during the Ptolemaic period, roughly 50 BCE to 30 BCE, though it replaced much earlier structures and preserves traditions of great antiquity. The hypostyle hall’s columns have Hathor-headed capitals, the goddess’s face looking out from the top of every pillar in the space. The effect is of a forest of divine faces, the goddess present in every structural element of her own house.

The temple contains a zodiac on its ceiling, the famous Dendera Zodiac now in the Louvre in Paris, which represents the earliest complete horoscope chart known from Egypt and demonstrates the syncretic absorption of Babylonian and Greek astronomical knowledge into the Egyptian tradition during the Ptolemaic period. The goddess of joy presides over a ceiling that maps the cosmos in mathematical terms borrowed from the traditions that had absorbed her across the Mediterranean.

Each year a great festival at Dendera involved the statue of Hathor being carried by boat down the Nile to Edfu, where the temple of Horus stood, for a reunion ceremony between the two gods. The Beautiful Festival of the Reunion lasted fourteen days and was one of the most important religious celebrations in the Egyptian calendar, bringing together the goddess of love and the god of the sky in a ceremonial union that re-enacted and renewed the divine marriage that the tradition encoded in the cosmos itself.

The Mistress of the West and the Afterlife

Hathor’s role in the afterlife is as gentle as her role in the Destruction of Mankind is violent. The West in Egyptian geography was the direction of death: the sun set in the west, the dead were buried on the west bank of the Nile, and the afterlife was located in the western horizon. Hathor was the Mistress of the West, the goddess who greeted the dead as they arrived and welcomed them into the next world.

In tomb paintings and funerary papyri, Hathor appears emerging from a sycamore tree on the edge of the desert, offering bread and water to the deceased as they make their way toward the afterlife. The sycamore was a tree associated with life in the Egyptian landscape, a source of shade and food at the desert’s edge, and Hathor appearing from within it offered the dead exactly what they needed at the threshold: nourishment, kindness, welcome. The fiercest aspect of the most powerful divine force in the cosmos welcomed the dead with bread and water from a tree.

For more on the Egyptian tradition, the Ra article covers the sun god whose Eye Hathor serves as in her destructive aspect. The Sekhmet article covers the destructive lioness form that Hathor takes when she is sent to punish humanity. The Destruction of Mankind article covers the myth in which Hathor nearly wipes out humanity and Ra has to get her drunk to stop her.