Ra made a mistake. He had ruled Egypt and all the earth for longer than anyone could remember, and as he grew old his body weakened, his bones becoming silver, his flesh gold, his hair lapis lazuli. His people noticed the weakness and began to plot. Whispers reached him that some humans intended to seize his power while he was diminished enough to be vulnerable.
He called a council of the elder gods: Shu the air, Tefnut the moisture, Geb the earth, Nut the sky, and Nun the primordial water from whom creation had emerged. He told them what he had heard. He asked for their advice. They told him to destroy the conspirators before the conspiracy could succeed, and they suggested the mechanism: send his Eye.
The Eye of Ra is the divine female aspect of his power that he detaches from himself and sends into the world as his enforcer. He sent Hathor, the goddess of love and music and joy, and when Hathor was sent as the Eye of Ra to punish, she became Sekhmet, the lioness, the destroyer. She went into the desert to find the humans who had plotted against the sun god, and she found them, and she killed them.
Then she kept killing.
The destruction that Ra had intended as a targeted punishment became a general massacre. Sekhmet killed not just the conspirators but anyone she encountered. She waded through the blood of the slain. She killed with such enthusiasm and such efficiency that Ra, watching from above, realised that if she was not stopped there would be no humans left at all.
He told her to stop. She did not stop.
The Source
The Destruction of Mankind is preserved in a text called the Book of the Heavenly Cow, found inscribed in the tombs of several New Kingdom pharaohs including Tutankhamun, Seti I, and Ramesses II, and also on the outer shrine of Tutankhamun’s burial equipment. Its presence in these royal tombs connects it to the royal funerary tradition and suggests it was considered a text of particular importance for kings rather than for general use.
The text is accompanied by an illustration of a great celestial cow, her belly studded with stars, supported by the god Shu and by eight Heh gods who hold up her legs. This cosmic cow is Nut the sky goddess, who Ra ascends to during the myth’s final section, and the illustration visualises the new cosmic arrangement that results from the events of the story: Ra governing from the heavens rather than walking among his creation.
The story it tells is one of the most theologically rich in Egyptian mythology, dealing with the nature of divine authority, the relationship between gods and humans, the question of what happens when divine power exceeds divine intention, and the cosmic consequences of a decision that the decision-maker immediately regrets.
The Beer Solution
Ra’s council of gods was consulted again. They could not restrain Sekhmet by force. She was the Eye of Ra, the destructive aspect of the most powerful force in the cosmos: the other gods were not in a position to fight her. What was needed was something that would redirect the mechanism of her hunger rather than confront it directly.
Ra ordered his messengers to travel to the island of Elephantine at the first cataract of the Nile, the southernmost boundary of Egypt, and bring back red ochre, didi in Egyptian, a naturally occurring iron oxide that produced a red pigment when ground. He ordered his servants to grind barley and brew beer, seven thousand jars of it, and to mix the red ochre into the beer until the liquid ran the colour of blood.
Seven thousand jars of red beer were poured across the killing fields before dawn, flooding them to a depth described as four hands, approximately 30 centimetres, across the area where Sekhmet was expected to return. When she arrived at dawn and saw the red flood across the landscape she thought it was blood: the blood of her victims, extended across the world for her to drink. She drank. She drank all seven thousand jars of red beer and became so drunk that the bloodlust cooled and when she woke she was Hathor again: the gentle goddess, the lover of music, the woman who played the sistrum at festivals.
The annual Festival of Hathor-Sekhmet commemorated this moment by having participants drink red beer in considerable quantities, re-enacting the moment of rescue and thereby annually renewing the conditions under which humanity had been saved from extermination.
The Theology of the Trick
The solution Ra devised is worth examining carefully because it is not simply a clever deception. It is a precise application of theological knowledge about how divine forces work.
Ra did not lie to Sekhmet about what she was drinking in the conventional sense. He created something that functioned like blood, that looked like blood, that Sekhmet’s nature responded to as if it were blood. He fed her destructive drive just enough to exhaust it, redirecting the mechanism of her hunger against itself rather than trying to confront it with an opposing force. He understood Sekhmet’s nature well enough to know that she could not be stopped by force or instruction, but that her drive had a limit, and that the limit could be reached by providing the thing it sought in sufficient quantity.
This approach reflects a broader principle in Egyptian religious thought: the maintenance of maat, the cosmic order, through precise understanding of how divine forces operate rather than through direct confrontation. The most dangerous forces in the cosmos are not defeated but redirected, not destroyed but managed. Set’s chaos drives fight Apep’s chaos rather than being eliminated. Sekhmet’s destruction is exhausted rather than overpowered. The tradition understood that the most dangerous forces were also the most useful, and that destroying them would remove something necessary as well as something threatening.
Ra’s Withdrawal and What It Explains
After the beer solution saves humanity, the story does not end. Ra is exhausted and disillusioned. He has seen what his creation does when it believes he is weakened, and he has seen what his own divine power does when it is unleashed without restraint. He calls Nut the sky goddess and asks her to carry him above the earth. She takes the form of the great celestial cow, he climbs onto her back, and she rises, carrying him away from the world of human beings into the sky.
From the sky, Ra continues to govern, but differently: through the cycle of day and night, through the passage of the seasons, through the divine order he maintains from a distance rather than walking among his creation as he once did. The direct divine presence on earth, the golden age when Ra was present in human form among his people, is over. What replaced it is the world as the Egyptians knew it: a world ordered by divine power but not directly inhabited by divine physical presence, where the gods governed through the mechanisms of nature and through the priesthood rather than through personal appearance.
The myth therefore explains three things simultaneously. It explains why humans are mortal, subject to death by illness, age, and violence: these are the consequences of the rebellion that provoked Ra’s punishment in the first place. It explains why the sun moves across the sky on its daily cycle rather than remaining stationary: Ra now governs from the celestial cow’s back rather than from a fixed throne on earth. And it explains why the direct divine presence that characterised the mythological golden age is absent from the current world: Ra withdrew because of what he saw, and the world that remains is managed from a distance.
The Implications for Egyptian Religion
The Destruction of Mankind presents Egyptian theology with several challenges that the tradition addresses in interesting ways.
It shows Ra making an error of judgment. The god who created the world and established its order decides to punish human beings and the punishment immediately spirals beyond his control. He regrets his decision before it is complete. He has to outwit his own creation to undo what he set in motion. The most powerful being in the Egyptian cosmos is capable of mistakes, of regret, of being in a situation where direct authority is insufficient and cleverness is required.
It shows Hathor and Sekhmet as aspects of the same divine force rather than as separate beings. Hathor sent as punishment becomes Sekhmet. Sekhmet drunk on beer becomes Hathor again. The love goddess and the destroyer are the same entity in different states, and the myth dramatises the transition between them twice: once when destruction is needed and Hathor transforms, and once when the destruction must stop and Sekhmet transforms back. The dual nature of the most important Egyptian goddesses, gentle and destructive, nurturing and annihilating, is not a paradox but a statement about the nature of divine power: it contains all of these aspects simultaneously.
And it shows that the relationship between gods and humans is not simply one of authority and obedience. Humans plotted against Ra. Ra made a bad decision in response. The consequence nearly destroyed everyone. The final arrangement, Ra governing from the sky, humans living mortal lives on earth, is not presented as ideal but as what resulted from a specific sequence of events that both parties participated in creating. The world as it is exists because of what happened, and what happened was complicated in ways that simple authority-and-obedience relationships do not capture.
The Red Beer Today
A detail worth noting in conclusion: the text’s specific identification of red ochre as the colouring agent used to dye the beer, with the Egyptian name didi provided for it, is the kind of specificity that suggests the myth was connected to an actual practice. The Festival of Hathor-Sekhmet with its red beer drinking was a real festival, not just a mythological reference, and the ochre dye that made the beer red was a substance the Egyptians actually used. The boundary between the mythological and the practical in Egyptian religion was consistently permeable: the myth provided the authority for the ritual, and the ritual re-enacted and renewed the conditions the myth established.
Every jar of red beer drunk at the Festival of Hathor-Sekhmet was a jar of the seven thousand that had saved the human race. Every festival participant was Sekhmet drinking the false blood. Every morning after the festival was the morning when she woke as Hathor and humanity survived another year.
For more on the figures central to this myth, the Ra article covers the sun god who makes the mistake and devises the solution. The Hathor article covers the gentle goddess whose alter-ego is sent to destroy humanity. The Sekhmet article covers the lioness destroyer who cannot be stopped by divine command and has to be tricked with beer.
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