Sekhmet’s Rampage and Pacification

At a Glance

• Central figures: Sekhmet, the lion-headed goddess of war and Ra’s wrath; and Ra, the sun god, who unleashes her and then works to stop her.
• Setting: Ancient Egypt, in the age when Ra still ruled creation from his throne in the heavens and humans walked the earth.
• The turn: Ra’s priests brew vast quantities of beer dyed red with ochre and flood the fields where Sekhmet is rampaging; she mistakes it for blood and drinks until she collapses.
• The outcome: Sekhmet falls into a deep sleep, her bloodlust extinguished; humanity survives, and Sekhmet retains a dual nature as both destroyer and healer.
• The legacy: Sekhmet remained venerated as a goddess of both war and medicine - her priests were also physicians - and in some versions of the myth she is pacified into Hathor, goddess of love and joy.

Ra had grown old, and mankind had noticed. They spoke openly now of his weakness, whispered that he was no longer fit to rule. Ra heard it. He had made these creatures, nurtured them, given them the river and the black soil and the ordered sky - and they had turned on him. His response was not grief. It was fire.

He called his daughter Sekhmet.

Mankind’s Rebellion

The humans had not taken up weapons. There was no army marching on the heavens. The rebellion was subtler: ridicule, dismissal, the slow erosion of reverence. Ra sat on his throne and felt it as surely as if they had struck him. He had ruled all of creation since before the first dawn, and now the beings he had fashioned from his own tears were saying among themselves that he had run his course.

He summoned the gods in council. They agreed: this defiance could not go unanswered. Ra looked to his daughter - lioness-headed, burning-eyed - and gave her the command. Go down among them. Make them remember.

The Descent of Sekhmet

Sekhmet struck the earth and did not stop. She moved through the land like the desert wind moves through standing grain, and wherever she passed, the ground darkened. She was the blazing heat of Ra’s wrath made flesh, and she had been given no limit, no boundary, no instructions about where to stop. The rivers ran red. Thousands died in a single day. Then thousands more.

The gods watched from above and said nothing at first. Ra had wanted punishment, and punishment was being delivered. But Sekhmet did not tire. Each kill fed the next. She reveled in it - drank it in the way parched ground drinks water - and each morning she rose hungry again. The land was emptying. Not thinning, not chastened. Emptying.

Ra looked down and understood what he had set in motion.

Ra’s Change of Heart

He had not wanted this. Punishment, yes - a sharp correction, a reminder of his power. But not the end of every human life on earth. He tried to reason through it and found no clean path. Sekhmet was not angry in the way that can be reasoned with. She had passed beyond anger into something purer and more terrible: appetite. Calling her back with words would accomplish nothing.

The question was not how to overpower her. Nothing could overpower Sekhmet in the grip of bloodlust. The question was how to deceive her. Ra thought about what she wanted, what she could not resist, and he called his priests.

The Red Beer

The priests worked through the night. They brewed batch after batch of beer - enough to fill seven thousand jars - and into each batch they stirred red ochre until the liquid ran the color of fresh blood. When dawn came, they carried the jars out to the fields where Sekhmet was rampaging and poured them out across the ground. The liquid spread across the dirt and pooled in the low places. From any distance, it looked like a battlefield after the killing was done.

Sekhmet came upon it and did not hesitate. She dropped to her knees and drank.

She drank greedily, convinced she was consuming the blood of her victims, savoring what she thought was the taste of her own slaughter. She did not notice the sweetness beneath it, did not notice the heaviness creeping into her limbs. She kept drinking. The jars had been many and she was thorough in her appetite. By the time she had finished, she could not stand. She lay down in the red-stained field and slept.

The Waking

When Sekhmet opened her eyes, the rage had gone out of her. She was still the lioness. She still held every ounce of her power. But the bloodlust that had driven her across the land was absent, spent, as if it had burned through the beer and exhausted itself. She rose, and the world was still standing.

In some tellings, what emerged from that sleep was Hathor - gentle, golden, goddess of love and music and the pleasures of living. The destroyer had drunk herself into a different nature. In others, Sekhmet remained Sekhmet, but divided now into two functions she would carry together for the rest of time: she who devastates, and she who heals. Her priests served both offices. They treated the sick with remedies and incantations because sickness, too, was her domain - the lion who could strike you down was also the one who knew the way back.

Ra looked at the earth below. It was scarred and thinned, but it was there. Humanity had survived. Not by strength, not by prayer, but because a god had chosen to stop and because his priests had known the right measure of ochre to add to beer.