The Myth of the Eye of Ra

At a Glance

• Central figures: Ra, the sun god; Sekhmet, lioness goddess of destruction and his Eye’s embodiment; and Hathor, the benevolent form Sekhmet becomes after pacification.
• Setting: Ancient Egypt, in the time when Ra ruled over gods and humans alike; the myth draws on the interplay between solar theology centered at Heliopolis and the cult of Sekhmet at Memphis.
• The turn: Ra, grown old and defied by rebellious humans, unleashes his Eye in the form of Sekhmet - but her slaughter grows uncontrollable and threatens to exterminate all of humanity.
• The outcome: Ra’s priests flood the fields with red-dyed beer; Sekhmet drinks it believing it is blood, falls into a stupor, and wakes as Hathor, calm and transformed.
• The legacy: The Eye of Ra was worshipped as both destroyer and protector, rendered in the uraeus cobra on the pharaoh’s crown as a mark of divine authority and the power to strike down enemies of ma’at.

Ra had grown old. Not diminished - gods do not diminish the way men do - but old in the way that long rule makes a king old: slower to move, heavier in his throne, and watched. The humans who had lived under his order began to whisper, then to conspire. They believed his age had made him weak enough to challenge. They were wrong, but by the time they learned this, the fields were already running red.

The Eye of Ra was not a thing Ra held in his hand. It was a part of him - his feminine aspect, his agent and weapon, the force he could send out from himself to act where he would not go. It moved through several goddesses, taking whatever form the moment required: the cobra uraeus coiled at the brow of the pharaoh’s crown, ready to spit fire at any who approached; Mut, the mother-vulture, watching from above; and Sekhmet, the lioness, who was fire and blood and the hot wind of the desert, and who knew nothing of restraint once she was set loose.

Ra Calls the Eye

When the news of the rebellion reached Ra, he did not move at once. He summoned the council of the gods first - the great neteru who had existed since before the world took its present shape - and put the matter before them. What was to be done with humans who had turned against the order of ma’at?

The gods did not tell Ra to show mercy. They told him to send the Eye.

And so Sekhmet descended. She came as heat comes - preceding herself, the air warming before she arrived, the horizon trembling. She was the daughter of Ra in his aspect of destroyer, and she took the rebellion of humanity as a personal wound. She did not punish selectively. She moved through the land and she killed, and the blood she spilled in the killing only sharpened her appetite. The more she drank, the more she wanted. The rebellion that had prompted Ra’s anger was over within hours. Sekhmet continued for days.

The Slaughter Without End

There was a logic to what Sekhmet was doing, from her own perspective. She was the Eye of Ra. Her function was to defend the cosmic order against anything that threatened it. Every human who had conspired against Ra was a breach of ma’at, and a breach of ma’at was an enemy of the sun, and enemies of the sun were hers to destroy. She followed the logic to its conclusion: humanity itself had become the enemy.

Ra watched from his solar barque as the Two Lands grew quiet in a way that had nothing to do with peace. The rebellion was long over. No one was left to rebel. And still Sekhmet moved, and still the bodies accumulated at the edges of the river, and still she showed no sign of slowing.

He had called her out to preserve humanity. She was going to end it. The Eye had slipped its purpose, as it sometimes did when given too much to feed on, and now Ra had to decide how to bring it back without being consumed himself. He had no weapon against her - she was his own power, wearing a face he had given her. He could not fight her. He had to outwit her.

Beer Dyed the Color of Blood

Ra sent word to his priests at Heliopolis: brew beer. An enormous quantity of it - seven thousand jugs, by some accounts. Then grind red ochre into the vats until the liquid runs the deep red-brown of blood, the color Sekhmet had been drinking for days.

The priests worked through the night. By dawn the jars were filled, and Ra’s servants went out ahead of Sekhmet’s path and poured the liquid across the fields until the ground was soaked and the low-lying places pooled with it. Then they withdrew and waited.

Sekhmet came at sunrise, following the scent she had been following for days. She found the fields flooded with what looked like her victory spread wide before her. She drank. She drank deeply, compulsively, the way she had been drinking since the beginning of the slaughter. The beer did what beer does - it moved through her, warm and heavy, and the killing-heat in her skull began to loosen and dissolve. She drank more. The horizon tilted. The rage that had driven her since Ra first called her up began to soften at its edges, then at its center, and then it was gone.

The Goddess Who Woke as Hathor

Sekhmet did not wake as Sekhmet. She woke as Hathor - the same power, the same divine energy, but turned toward a different face of the world: not the destroyer but the nurturer, not the burning wind but the warmth in it. Hathor was music and love and the pleasure of the body. She wore the sun disk between her cow horns, and her eyes held none of the red that had been in Sekhmet’s.

Ra looked at her and recognized what had been preserved. Not just humanity - there were far fewer humans now than there had been - but the possibility of humanity continuing. The Eye had been pulled back from the edge it had reached, and the world remained.

The uraeus on the pharaoh’s brow commemorated all of this: the Eye’s protective fury, its capacity for devastation, and the knowledge that even the fiercest power in creation required, sometimes, a steadying hand. The pharaoh who wore it claimed not only Ra’s authority but his responsibility - to know when to unleash what he carried, and when to pour the red beer out across the fields and let the fire drink itself to sleep.