Eye of Ra

The Eye of Ra was not an organ but a being. When the Egyptians said the sun god looked upon the world, they meant that he sent out his Eye, his own radiance in female form, a goddess who was at once his daughter, his weapon, and his protector. She lived upon his forehead as the uraeus, the rearing cobra, and she could be dispatched like an arrow wherever his wrath or his longing directed. Because she was power rather than person, she flowed into many shapes: into Sekhmet, the lioness of plague and war; into Hathor, the golden cow of love; into Tefnut, the moisture of the first morning; into Wadjet, the cobra of the Delta; into Bastet, the cat of the hearth; and into Mut, the mother of Thebes. The Egyptians did not see contradiction in this. They saw one fire wearing many masks, and they treated every great goddess as the Eye in one of her moods.

Her first labour was a rescue. In the beginning, when the self-created god Atum-Ra stood alone in the dark waters of Nun, his first children, Shu the air and Tefnut the moisture, wandered away into the formless deep and were lost. The god tore out his own Eye, his burning radiance in female form, and sent her into the darkness to find them. She searched the void and brought the twins home, and when she returned, Ra wept with relief, and the tears that fell from him became the first human beings. But the Eye came back to an insult: in her absence, her father had grown another eye to take her place. She raged at the betrayal, and to pacify her Ra lifted her from his face and set her upon his brow as the uraeus, the crowned cobra, so that she would rule above all other powers. From that day the fiery cobra has sat at the front of every crown in Egypt.

Her most terrible hour came when mankind rebelled. In the great myth called the Destruction of Mankind, carved in the tomb of Seti I, the warrior pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty, Ra grew old, and humanity plotted against him. In council with the gods, Ra resolved to send down his Eye to punish them, and the Eye descended to earth as Sekhmet, the lioness, the Powerful One. She fell upon the rebels in the deserts and the marshes and slaughtered them, and the taste of blood unhinged her: she waded through gore, killing day and night, until the whole human race stood on the edge of extinction. Ra, who had meant a punishment and not an ending, acted in secret. He ordered beer brewed in seven thousand jars and coloured red with ochre, and he flooded the fields where the lioness would hunt. She came, she saw what she took for a lake of blood, and she drank it all. Drunk and gentle, she awoke as Hathor, the golden goddess of love, and mankind was spared. The Egyptians never forgot the lesson: every year they held the Festival of Drunkenness, drinking to celebrate the day beer saved the world.

Her other great tale is the story of her flight. The Eye quarrelled with her father and stormed away south beyond the borders of Egypt into Nubia, where she prowled the deserts as a lioness, savage and free, devouring everything she caught. Without its Eye, Egypt withered: the sun burned but nothing grew, for the goddess of moisture had gone. Ra longed for his daughter and sent Thoth, the ibis-headed god of wisdom and writing, to fetch her home. Thoth went disguised as a small baboon, tracked the lioness to her lair, and won her with stories, telling her fables about the folly of anger and the sweetness of her own country, promising music, dancing, and drunken festivals if she would return. Slowly her fury cooled. She followed the baboon north, and when she crossed the frontier at Elephantine she transformed from a raging lioness into a radiant goddess, and her father rushed out to meet her, and the Nile rose behind her. Her homecoming was the flood itself, and the Egyptians re-enacted it every year with festivals of music and wine.

Through all her transformations, one duty never changed. Every night, when Ra sailed his barque through the twelve caverns of the underworld, the chaos serpent Apep rose from the darkness to swallow the sun, and it was the Eye upon the god's brow who reared and spat her burning venom into the monster's face. She was the flame between creation and the abyss, and the Egyptians pacified her with everything gentle they knew: music, sistra, dancing, incense, and wine, for a calm Eye meant a fertile land and an angry Eye meant plague, drought, and war. When the Greeks came they marvelled at a religion that gave its fiercest power a woman's face. At Dendera, the great temple of Hathor, priests carried the goddess's statue to the roof at every New Year so that she could be regenerated by the rays of her father the sun, the Eye returning to the disk that sent her. To the end of Egyptian civilisation, the cobra on the crown kept her watch, the fire that guards by burning.