SERPENT POWER: SOLAR EYE
Like her companion, the sun
god Re, Hathor is a fiery solar deity. As goddess of ‘many colours’ she
constantly shifts her shape, becoming now ‘Female Hawk’, now ‘Cow of Gold’, now
‘Lady of the Sycamore Tree’; again, as ‘Great Lady of Punt’, she is the
patroness of the fabulous land where the Egyptians went in quest of
sweet-smelling incense, myrrh, gold, spices, and exotic animals.
Again and again, however,
the texts return to the face of the sun god—and that of the Egyptian king—in order
to describe her. She is the venomous cobra coiled around his head, rearing up
on his brow as an irritable, dangerous presence in the realm, breathing flames
against his enemies. Only the sun god is able to tolerate her fearsome heat.
According to the Book of the Dead, a huge swelling develops on the head
of Osiris, after he places the cobra on his brow in order to appear like Re. He
is unable to endure such a sudden infusion of power and has to be healed by Re,
who lances the boil, causing a great lake of blood and pus to run out in the
city of Heracleopolis.
Hathor is also known as ‘Eye
of Re’. She can be the Wedjat-eye—the ‘whole eye’—meaning the eye as a
bodily organ. But as the Iret-eye, she also acts as the agent of the go’s
activity, since iret in Egyptian means ‘doer’. The solar gaze becomes an
activity as the eye—the instrument of divine energy and power—is projected out
into the world:
The Eye of Re
appears against you,
His force
is power against you,
His Eye
is powerful against you
She devours you,
She punishes you
In this her name
‘Devouring Flame’. (Papyrus Bremner-Rhind 25, 2-4) (Alison Roberts, Hathor Rising: The Power of the Goddess
in Ancient Egypt [Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions International, 1995,
1997], 8-9)
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