2023

Goddess Hathor-The Personification Of Divinity As Joy, Love, And Transformation

In ancient Egypt, the goddess Hathor was considered one of the greatest deities; her worship and mythology were complex and comprised joy, beauty, love, and destruction. Often portrayed as a cow or as a woman with the head of a cow, the multifaceted Hathor is always revealed as fundamental in the religious and cultural practices and beliefs of the ancient Egyptians.

The Goddess of Joy, Beauty, and Music.

Hathor was widely known as the goddess of joy, music, dance, and love. She epitomized everything beautiful and stood for the glory of art in any form of expression. The ancient Egyptian percussion instrument-the sistrum-was sacred to her; in worship, music, and dance form part of her religious practices because she is the goddess of pleasure and merriment. She was also prayed to by women for love, fertility, and protection since she as a goddess of beauty was thought to nurture and safeguard people within their families and community as a whole.

The Duality: Love and Death

In common with many other ancient deities, Hathor governed, also, death, proving, in that aspect, the well known duality of her nature. In this darker aspect, she assumed the deadly form of the lioness Sekhmet; as in myt,h she destroys mankind. Under Amun Ra's command, Hathor turned into Sekhmet to punish mankind when they disobeyed her. The main difference is that Hathor cannot be worshiped as a favoring goddess of life and love; nor can she take the guise of a fierce, destructive power when the balance of the universe is threatened.

Anubis was known as the god of the underworld but later he became associated with the mummification process and the funeral processions. His name was changed and he was then known as "Imy-ut" (He Who is In the Place of Embalming), nub-ta-Djoser (lord of the sacred land). Preserving the body of the dead person was one of the ancient Egyptian beliefs that's why they mummified their dead, Anubis was the mummified god.

Anubis had a blackhead that represented him as the god of the dead. The full human form of Anubis could be seen at the Temple of Ramses II at Abydos. Anubis Also has a beautiful statue upon his name which is made in the form of a jackal that was found at the Tomb of Tutankhamen was discovered by the famous excavator Howard Carter at the new kingdom necropolis known as the Valley of the Kings in the West Bank of the Nile River, and now exhibited in the collection at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

God of the Necropolis

We can see a lot of prayers and rituals dedicated to Anubis carved on many ancient tombs in Egypt. He watched the process of mummification of the dead to ensure it was proper. He accompanied the souls of the underworld while examining their knowledge of the gods and their faith. He placed the heart of the dead on the scales of justice when the judging of the heart took place.