Hathor

Who they are

Hathor is the goddess of love, beauty, music, dance, joy, and motherhood, often shown as a cow, or as a woman crowned with cow horns and a sun disc. She is the "Golden Goddess," nurse of the sky, protector of women and childbirth, and the one who receives the dead into the afterlife. Her temples (above all at Dendera) are famous for festivals of music and revelry. But Hathor has a terrifying other side: when the sun god Ra sent her to punish a treacherous humankind, she became the bloodthirsty lion goddess Sekhmet and all but wiped out the human race, calmed only when the gods tricked her into drunkenness with beer dyed red. Love and destruction are the two faces of one goddess — the gentle nurse can turn in an instant into an unstoppable slayer, the Egyptian theology's deepest insight into feminine divine power.

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