#hes a 3000 yr old dead pharaoh

[somecunttookmyurl]

I finally get a chance to ask my Egyptian mythology question. My 9 yr old daughter and I are reading through a book on Goddesses. In the section on Hathor, it claims that She was also Nut, Sekhmet, and Lady of the Sycamores. Then under Isis, it claims that at some point, Isis and Hathor were combined since they both had sons named Horus. Under Sekhmet it claims she was another face of Isis and Hathor to form a triple Goddess. There are a lot of details between all those things, isn't there?

Egyptian Mythology aka ‘everybody is also everybody else and nobody cares’So it’s important to preface this with two things:Firstly, despite the centralised role of the king (uhhhhhhhhhhhh most of the time) there was never any standardised religion. At all. It never all got sorted out into any sort of neat consistent dogma so gods and goddesses could be/do different things in different parts of the country, get conflated with each other, overlap in myths. All sorts. Nobody cares. Do whatever. As long as the sun comes up in the morning it doesn’t matter.Secondly pharaonic Egypt lasted for about 3000 years. Think how much Christianity has changed since its inception 2000 years ago and that HAS some level of consistency in it anyway.Which is to say that gods/goddesses changing forms, doing different things, being each other sometimes, or getting smooshed together might vary by place but also by time.

So, yes, Hathor was also Sekhmet and got combined with Isis (and sometimes Bastet!) and Hathor-Sekhmet-Isis (or Hathor-Bastet-Isis take your pick) was one of the ‘let’s just smoosh these together sure they all do more or less the same thing’ gods.As to ‘they both had sons called Horus’ it was the same Horus. Hathor means ‘the mansion of Horus’ and as far back as very earliest Dynastic egypt there’s reference to that relationship (that Horus is ‘housed’ within Hathor)Hathor is also mother, daughter, and wife of Ra although not necessarily at the same time and she got associated with Bast partly because they both, loosely, dealt with fertility (same hat! same hat!) and because they were both (and Sekhmet) daughters of Ra. Bastet at one point was the wife of Amun who became conflated with Ra to form Amun-Ra. Really do not try to draw any sort of family tree of Egyptian gods. Just don’t.One of the other reasons for continued associations and sometimes outright composite forms of Hathor with Bastet and Sekhmet is they were all (and sometimes Tefnut? But not Isis) forms of ‘The Eye of Ra’. The title is exactly what it is - Ra’s eye held considerable power and used to wreak vengeance on people who offended the gods but when this power was sent out it was in the form of… well pick a goddess really! So depending on a) which Eye of Ra myth you’re reading and also b) which version the Eye will be a different goddess.My absolute favourite myth is ‘The Destruction of Mankind’ in which a portion of the population decides to rebel against Ra (when he still lives on Earth and rules personally) so he sends out the Eye to deal with it. The Eye goes a bit far with this and won’t stop killing so Ra gets her drunk (no really) so that she stops. There are versions of this exact myth naming the Eye as Hathor, Sekhmet, and Bastet.Hathor was lady of the Sycamore and so was Isis (who in at LEAST one hilarious picture is depicted in the form of a tree suckling the king. Tits out for pharaoh, and all that)

I warned you.Egyptians even had more than one creation myth depending on where in the country you were and also the core ‘important’ deities were different. Heliopolis had the Ennead (probably the most well-known now) but there were different groups of nine across time and space. Again nobody is particularly bothered by this.Gods/goddesses would also fall in and out of favour depending on where the capital city was/where the pharaoh was from. Because different things applied in different places, a shift in locale would mean more importance on whatever the local system at that time was, but people over the country would by and large just carry on with whatever they were doing before.The only time there was an attempt to enforce any sort of standard religious practice nationwide was the Amarna period with Akhenaten introducing monotheism which did not catch on. At all. All of this is a really long winded way of saying1) Egyptian mythology is really confusing if you try to approach it with any expectation of consistency or standardisation. You gotta just let it be, man. Else you’ll go mad (says the person who just wrote almost 50 pages solely on what happened with Bastet over the years and even that was basically a summary)2) I absolutely should not be a teacherNow if you want some actual Egypt-focused books on mythology I can recommend the following:The Egyptian Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends - Garry J. Shaw. Goes through creation myths, the time of the gods themselves ruling over Egypt, mythic environments and impact on daily life, and then the afterlife. Gods and Myths of Ancient Egypt - Robert A. Armour - goes into detail on the Ennead of Heliopolis and also the Triads of Memphis and Thebes and some good renditions of myths. Has a whole section on Hathor, and also a look at the adventures of Osiris and Isis.Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt - Geraldine Pinch - this one is laid out a little differently and is also longer than the other two. There’s an overview of mythology over time but then it moves on to discussing Mythical Time Lines (chaos, creation, rule by gods, rule by kings, a return to chaos) and a discussion of how the egyptian year worked and the afterlife. Then you get a section of further detail on various deities themes, and concepts which will link you back to other relevant places in the book. Probably the most detailed of the three but also probably slightly above the level of a 9 year old Although I have no idea what the kids are up to these days.

Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt - Emily Teeter - less focussed on the myths themselves and more, as the title suggests, how religion worked on a practical level. So talking about communication with the gods, the use of ‘magic’ spells, communicating with the dead, funeral rites all that sort of thing.@thatlittleegyptologist @rudjedet @ikchen i know mythology isn’t really y’alls areas but if you have anything to tack on feel free. DON’T MENTION THE LETTUCE.