Sekhmet

Sekhmet was born from fire. The Egyptians said she was the daughter of Ra, the sun god, and more than his daughter: she was his Eye, the burning power of the sun itself, which could be sent out from his brow as a lioness to punish his enemies. When she stood upon his forehead she was the uraeus, the rearing cobra that spat flame at all who approached, and when she descended to earth she was the lioness with the sun disk on her head, the heat of the noon desert in her breath. The Egyptians believed the scorching wind that blew in from the wastes was the breath of Sekhmet, and that the heat waves shimmering above the sand were the hem of her garment passing. At Memphis, the ancient capital at the mouth of the Delta, she was worshipped as the wife of Ptah, the calm craftsman god who had spoken the world into being, and their son was Nefertem, the beautiful youth of the blue lotus who rose from the waters of creation. Fire and craft, rage and perfume: the family of Memphis held the balance of the world.

Her most terrible story is the tale of how she nearly ended the human race. When Ra grew old upon the throne of the gods, humanity began to whisper against him, plotting rebellion in the night. Ra took counsel with Nun, the dark waters that existed before creation, and with the elder gods, and he decided to send down his Eye to punish the plotters. The Eye went out as Hathor, the golden goddess of love and joy, but the moment she tasted slaughter she transformed. She became Sekhmet, and she fell upon humanity like flame upon dry reeds. She hunted the rebels into the deserts and the mountains, and she waded through their blood until the fields were flooded with it, and her heart grew glad in the killing. Then Ra repented, for he had meant to chastise humanity, not to erase it, but Sekhmet was drunk on destruction and would not stop. So the sun god devised a trick. He ordered beer brewed in vast quantity, seven thousand jars of it, and had it coloured red with ochre from Elephantine, the island at the first cataract of the Nile, and poured out across the fields where she would come to kill at dawn. Sekhmet saw the flood and thought it blood. She drank, and drank, and her rage dissolved into dizziness, and she sank down into sleep. When she woke she was Hathor again, gentle and full of love, and humanity was saved. Every year afterwards the Egyptians held a feast of drunkenness, dancing and drinking red beer in memory of the day beer had saved the world.

Yet the pacified goddess never lost her danger, and the Egyptians spent their lives keeping her calm. Sekhmet was the mistress of plague, and her seven arrows were the diseases that struck without warning, loosed by her messengers, the slaughterers who roamed the land especially in the five unlucky days at the year's end. Against her there was only one defence: her own servants. The priests of Sekhmet were the physicians of Egypt, master surgeons and veterinarians who knew the spells that could turn her arrows aside, because the goddess who sent every sickness could also cure it. They wore her image and recited her litanies, and they called her Mistress of Life even as they feared her as the Lady of Slaughter. The Egyptians also believed that Sekhmet and Bastet, the mild cat goddess of the Delta, were two moods of a single power: the angry eye was Sekhmet, the contented eye was Bastet, and the lioness could always become the cat if she was pleased. No king understood this better than Amenhotep III, the splendid ruler of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who filled his temples with her statues. In the precinct of Mut at Karnak, the consort of Amun with whom Sekhmet was often joined, and in his own mortuary temple on the west bank of Thebes, he set up hundreds of lioness figures in black granite, some seated, some standing, some say one for each day of the year and each night besides, so that every sunrise and every sunset would find the goddess already honoured, already calm.

In war, no god was more welcome. Pharaohs called upon Sekhmet before battle, and her flame was said to go before the king like a wall of fire. At the Battle of Kadesh in Syria, where Ramesses II, the great warrior king of the Nineteenth Dynasty, was cut off and surrounded by the Hittite chariots of the empire's northern rival, the poem carved on his temple walls boasts that he fought his way out alone, raging like Seth, great of strength, and like Sekhmet in the moment of her wrath. The goddess who had once drunk the blood of mankind was the perfect emblem of the warrior king: beautiful, pitiless, and unstoppable once unleashed. Through the New Kingdom and long after, her temples at Memphis and Thebes received the prayers of soldiers and surgeons alike, and her cult endured into the age of the Greeks and Romans, who saw in her the sister of their own fierce goddesses.

Sekhmet has outlasted her temples. The hundreds of granite statues commissioned by Amenhotep III now stand in the great museums of the world, from Cairo to London, Turin to New York, more surviving images of her than of almost any other Egyptian god, an unintended monument of black stone. Travellers who meet her gaze in a gallery still feel what the Egyptians felt: this is not a goddess to be trifled with. She remains the desert wind and the fever, the surgeon's knife and the lioness in the grass, the reminder that the same power which destroys can be turned, by skill and reverence, to heal.