Hathor, the Golden One: Egyptian goddess of love, music and joy

The Egyptians called her the Golden One and invoked her in their love songs. Hathor was one of the most beloved deities of the Nile valley for almost three thousand years: protector of women and motherhood, mistress of music and dance, of festive intoxication and of distant lands. The Greeks identified her with Aphrodite, but her profile was broader, since it also included cosmic and funerary aspects.

The house of Horus

The name Hathor is the Greek rendering of the Egyptian Hut-Hor, house of Horus, perhaps an allusion to the sky as the home of the falcon god. The goddess is shown as a cow, as a woman with cow's ears, or with a headdress of horns enclosing the sun disc. Images of a bovine deity appear at a very early date, but whether these first testimonies represent Hathor is debated.

In Egyptian theology Hathor was also the Eye of Ra, the daughter of the sun who can turn into a destructive force. The story known as the Book of the Heavenly Cow, carved in the tombs of some New Kingdom rulers, tells that Ra sent her to punish rebellious mankind. Having become the lioness Sekhmet, the goddess began a massacre, until the god had beer dyed red poured over the fields: she drank it believing it to be blood, became drunk and was appeased.

Music, intoxication and love songs

Her instrument was the sistrum, a metal rattle shaken during rites, often decorated with the goddess's face. Priestesses and female singers also carried the menat, a heavy bead necklace shaken as a percussion instrument. The memory of the myth of the Heavenly Cow lived on in the festivals of drunkenness, during which people drank in honour of the goddess to celebrate the return of order and joy.

The love songs of the New Kingdom, preserved for example in Papyrus Chester Beatty I, often name the Golden One as the deity who brings lovers together. The girl who longs for her beloved prays to her, and the young man thanks the goddess for granting him the woman he desired. In these texts, written between the thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC, Hathor seems close to everyday life, far from the solemnity of the temples.

Dendera, Deir el-Bahari and the Sinai

The main centre of her cult was Dendera, in Upper Egypt. The temple visited there today, one of the best preserved in the country, was built in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, from the first century BC, over far older sacred sites. From a chapel on its roof comes the famous Dendera zodiac, removed and taken to France in 1821 and now in the Louvre. Every year the goddess's statue travelled by boat to Edfu for a ritual meeting with Horus.

Other sanctuaries were spread throughout Egypt and beyond its borders. At Deir el-Bahari, in the mortuary temple of Queen Hatshepsut, a chapel is dedicated to Hathor, with columns bearing the goddess's face. In the Sinai, near the mines of Serabit el-Khadim, she was worshipped as Lady of Turquoise, while at Byblos, on the Phoenician coast, the Egyptians recognised her in the local goddess called the Lady of Byblos.

The Lady of the West

Finally, Hathor was a goddess of the afterlife. In the Theban region she welcomed the dead as Lady of the West, and in some images she emerges in the form of a cow from the mountain of the necropolis. In others she is the Lady of the Sycamore, who offers water and food to the deceased from the tree. Many Egyptians hoped to be united with her after death, and in later periods deceased women could be called by her name, as men were by that of Osiris.

For the Egyptians love, music, motherhood and death were not separate spheres but moments of a single cycle of life. Hathor was its smiling guardian, and her cow-eared face, carved on the capitals of Dendera, still welcomes, with the same serenity, all those who cross the threshold of her temple today.