The Myth of Hathor and the Red Ochre

At a Glance

• Central figures: Hathor, goddess of love and motherhood, who becomes the lioness Sekhmet, weapon of Ra; and Ra, the sun god who both unleashes and works to restrain her fury.
• Setting: The time when Ra still ruled over gods and humans alike; ancient Egypt, during an age of divine kingship.
• The turn: Sekhmet’s slaughter of rebellious humanity grows so absolute that Ra fears the entire human race will be annihilated - so the gods mix red ochre into beer to resemble blood and pour it across the killing fields.
• The outcome: Sekhmet drinks the doctored beer, mistakes it for the blood she craves, falls into a stupor, and wakes as Hathor again; humanity survives.
• The legacy: The Egyptians celebrated the annual Feast of Hathor with the drinking of large quantities of beer, commemorating the drink that stopped the slaughter.

Ra grew old, and humanity grew insolent. The disrespect had been building for some time - a slow erosion of the fear that had once kept the human world in its proper place beneath the divine. Ra looked down on what had once been his obedient creation and saw rebellion staring back. The cosmic order, ma’at, the balance on which all creation depended, was being frayed by human defiance. Something would have to answer for it.

He called on Hathor. And from Hathor, he drew out the other thing she carried inside her: Sekhmet, the lioness, the Eye of Ra, the goddess whose name means “the powerful one.” That aspect of Hathor was always there, the way a flood is always waiting inside a river. Ra simply opened the channel.

The Eye Unleashed

Sekhmet came down on humanity with the full force of divine wrath. She was a lioness in form and a killing engine in purpose, and she moved through the human world leaving nothing useful behind. The Nile ran red. Thousands died. Sekhmet waded into the carnage and did not slow - she accelerated, her appetite for destruction feeding itself, each kill sharpening rather than dulling her desire for the next.

Ra had intended a punishment. What he was watching was an extinction.

The gods gathered to observe what their plan had produced. The fields and riverbanks were soaked. Sekhmet was not sated - she was more ravenous than when she had begun. Ra, who had called her forth to restore order, now understood that he had instead created a different kind of chaos. The humans had dishonored ma’at with their rebellion. Sekhmet was now doing the same with her unchecked slaughter. Neither extreme was order. Ra looked out at the carnage and made his decision: the killing had to stop.

Red Ochre and Beer

The gods needed something that would fool a goddess drunk on blood. The plan they settled on was straightforward and it required that Sekhmet never suspect it was a plan at all.

They ordered red ochre ground fine and mixed into enormous quantities of beer - enough to flood the fields. The red ochre turned the beer the color of the blood Sekhmet craved. Seven thousand jars, some versions say. Enough to fill the low ground ahead of where Sekhmet was hunting. Enough to look like the aftermath of a massacre.

The beer was poured out across the fields before Sekhmet reached them.

She came upon it at a run and stopped. The color was right. The smell was close. She dropped her head and drank.

She drank as she had killed - without restraint, without any capacity to stop once she had begun. The intoxication crept over her slowly at first, then all at once. Her legs slowed. The lioness energy that had carried her through the slaughter drained away. Sekhmet drank until she could not stand, and then she slept.

The Return of Hathor

When she woke, the rage was gone. The lioness hunger that had driven her for days, that had made her insatiable and unstoppable, had dissolved in the night. Sekhmet stirred and found she was Hathor again - not the Eye, not the weapon, but the goddess of love and music and the warmth of women in childbirth. The transformation had not been gradual. The fury was simply absent, as if it had never been.

Hathor looked out at what Sekhmet had done and did not continue it. She rose, and was herself, and the slaughter was over.

Ra received this with relief. The humanity that remained - reduced, frightened, humbled by what had descended on them - was allowed to continue. The rebellion had been broken without the species being erased. Ra’s reign resumed its proper shape. The gods had held the balance, though barely, and by the narrowest of tricks.

The Feast That Followed

The Egyptians did not forget what had saved them. Each year they observed the Feast of Hathor, and at its center was the drinking of beer - quantities of it, deliberately excessive, in deliberate memory of the drink that had stopped the end of humanity. The festival was loud and joyful, a celebration of mercy as much as survival. The red ochre that had colored the beer was its own kind of symbol: the color of blood, used to prevent blood. The thing that should have meant death had instead meant life.

The goddess herself remained, as she had always been, both things at once. Hathor at her shrines: gentle, maternal, the mistress of music and the west. Sekhmet sleeping inside her: the Eye that opens when the sun god calls. The Egyptians built temples to both, kept priests for both, knew that what nurtures and what destroys are not opposites but aspects of a single force. The red ochre trick had not eliminated Sekhmet. It had only given the sleeping lioness a reason to stay asleep.

Ma’at held. The Two Lands endured. And every year the beer was poured, red as the river had run, in thanks for the morning Sekhmet woke up and chose to stop.