Eye of Horus (Wedjat)

The wedjat is not drawn as a natural eye. It is the eye of a god, a human eye combined with the markings of a falcon, for Horus was the falcon-headed sky god whose eyes were the sun and the moon. Beneath the brow line runs the long cosmetic stroke that Egyptians painted on their own eyes, below it curls a spiral copied from the feathers of the falcon's cheek, and behind it falls the dark teardrop marking of the bird. The Egyptians made this eye by the million: carved in carnelian, lapis lazuli, and turquoise faience, strung on necklaces, sewn into the wrappings of mummies, painted on coffins and stelae, and scratched on the walls of tombs. From the age of the pyramids to the age of Rome, no symbol in Egypt was more common, and none carried a richer story.

That story begins with murder. Osiris, the good king of Egypt, was killed by his brother Seth, the red god of chaos and the desert, and Osiris's son Horus grew up in hiding to claim his father's throne. The struggle between Horus and Seth shook the gods, and in one of their battles Seth seized his nephew and tore out his left eye, the moon eye, smashing it into pieces and burying them in the earth. Without his eye Horus was crippled, half-blind, his power broken. But Thoth, the ibis-headed god of wisdom, writing, and the moon, came to his aid. The wise god searched for the fragments, gathered them one by one, and by his magic he fitted them together and made the eye whole and sound again. This is why the amulet is called the wedjat, the Whole One: it is the eye after the healing, the proof that what is broken can be restored. And because the left eye of Horus was the moon, the myth explained the moon's behaviour: each month the eye is wounded and darkens, and each month Thoth heals it, and the light returns.

The healed eye then performed its greatest act. Horus did not keep it for himself. He carried it to the realm of the dead and gave it to his father Osiris, who lay wrapped in linen as lord of the underworld. The eye fed him, healed him, and raised him: its power was so great that it could revive the dead and make the slain god whole enough to rule eternity. From that gift grew one of the central ideas of Egyptian religion. Every offering ever presented to a god or to the dead, every loaf of bread, every jug of beer, every cone of incense set upon an altar, was understood to be the Eye of Horus, the thing that heals, feeds, and restores. When a son poured water for his dead father, he was re-enacting the gift of Horus to Osiris, and the priests spoke of the offerings by the eye's own name.

The Egyptians also turned the eye into a calculator. They divided the wedjat into its six parts, and each part stood for a fraction of the hekat, the standard measure of grain: the pupil for a half, the eyebrow for a quarter, the spiral for an eighth, and so on down to a sixty-fourth. Grain scribes, the accountants of a nation that paid its workers in bread and beer, used the parts of the god's eye to tally the harvest. But the six fractions add up to only sixty-three sixty-fourths, one piece short of a whole. The Egyptians had an answer for that too: the missing sixty-fourth was the part that Thoth supplied by magic, the piece no scribe could measure, the share that belongs to the god. Even their arithmetic confessed that the eye was more than a symbol.

Above all, the wedjat protected. Mothers hung it on their children, soldiers carried it into battle, and embalmers placed eye amulets inside the wrappings of every mummy, over the very incision where the body had been opened, so the wounded flesh would be made whole like the eye of the god. Sailors painted it on the bows of their boats so the vessel itself could see through the waves and turn aside from evil, and that habit never died: fishermen of the Mediterranean still paint eyes on their prows today, and many of them have never heard the name of Horus. In the modern world the wedjat has escaped its homeland entirely, staring from jewellery, tattoos, and book covers on every continent, still doing after four thousand years the only work it was ever given: to watch, to guard, and to make things whole.