Wadjet

Wadjet was born of the marshes. Her home was Buto, the city the Egyptians called Per-Wadjet, the House of Wadjet, a town of the northern Delta where the Nile broke into a hundred channels and the land was a wilderness of papyrus, water, and birds. There she was worshipped as a cobra, the deadly serpent that reared from the reeds with its hood flared, and her name, the Green One, bound her to the papyrus thickets that were her kingdom. From the most ancient times she was the protector of Lower Egypt, the northern half of the land, and the Red Crown that its kings wore was believed to be her gift, kept in her sanctuary when it was not upon the royal head. She could also take the form of a lioness when she hunted, and of a woman with a cobra's head when she walked among the gods.

When the two lands of Egypt were joined into one kingdom, around 3100 BCE, Wadjet did not lose her place. She was joined to Nekhbet, the vulture goddess of Nekheb in Upper Egypt, the southern half of the land, and together they became the Two Ladies, the divine patrons of the united kingdom. Every pharaoh thereafter carried their names in his own: the Nebty name, the second of the five great royal titles, proclaimed that the king ruled by the grace of both goddesses, cobra and vulture, Delta and valley. On the pharaoh's brow the two powers sat side by side, the rearing cobra and the hovering vulture, and no king of Egypt was complete without them. For three thousand years, through every dynasty and every invasion, the Two Ladies held their place at the very front of the crown.

The cobra on the brow was no ornament. She was a weapon. As the uraeus, Wadjet was the Fiery Eye of Ra, the sun god's own blazing power in serpent form, and from the forehead of the king she spat flame and venom at every enemy who dared approach. The Egyptians said she burned the foes of the pharaoh as a cooking fire burns dry reeds, and her titles were Lady of the Devouring Flame and Lady of the Spells, for her strike was both poison and magic. At night, when Ra sailed his barque through the underworld and the chaos serpent Apep rose from the dark waters to swallow the sun, it was the fiery cobra upon the sun god's brow who reared and spat her burning venom into the monster's eyes. She was coiled around the sun disk itself, and her hiss was the sound that chaos feared.

The most tender of Wadjet's duties was the protection of a baby. When Isis, the great enchantress, gave birth to Horus after the murder of her husband Osiris, she fled with the infant into the papyrus marshes of the Delta, to the floating island of Chemmis near Buto, to hide him from Seth, the red god of chaos who had killed his father and hunted the child to prevent his revenge. There, among the reeds and the biting flies, Wadjet became the boy's guardian and nurse. The cobra goddess wound herself through the papyrus around his hiding place, rearing at every shadow, striking at every danger, while Isis went out to beg for food. It was from the marshes of Wadjet's kingdom that Horus grew to manhood and went out to challenge Seth for the throne of Egypt, and it was because of her protection that the cobra thereafter guarded every king, for every pharaoh was Horus upon the throne.

Wadjet's fame outgrew Egypt. Her oracle at Buto was consulted from across the ancient world, and when the Greek traveller Herodotus came to Egypt in the fifth century BCE he wrote of her sanctuary and of the floating island where the goddess, whom the Greeks called Leto, had hidden the divine child. The Greeks called Wadjet herself Uto, and Buto remained a holy city into the Roman age, its temple thronged with pilgrims seeking the word of the cobra goddess. Long after the last pharaoh fell, the rearing serpent kept her place on the crowns of Ptolemies and emperors who ruled the Nile. Of all the gods of Egypt, none sat so close to power for so long. The cobra on the brow outlasted the pyramids, the temples, and the kingdom itself, and she is rearing still in every image of the pharaohs.