Domain: Love, joy, music, motherhood, beauty, the sky Symbol: The cow, the horned sun-disk headdress, the sistrum, the mirror, turquoise
Overview
Hathor is the goddess of love, joy, and music — the sky-cow whose body is the heavens and between whose horns the sun is cradled. She is beauty and pleasure, dance and drunkenness, the sistrum's rattle and the warmth of desire; she is also the great mother and nurse, the cow-goddess whose milk sustains kings and gods alike. Where other deities govern by law or force, Hathor governs by delight — she is the abundance that makes life not merely endure but flourish. Mistress of turquoise and of foreign lands, patroness of women and lovers and musicians, she is the generous, sensual heart of the pantheon.
She is the tarot's The Empress: fertility, nurture, sensual abundance, the creative mother from whom life and beauty overflow. Yet her joy has a fierce underside — when Ra sent her out as his burning eye to punish humankind, she became the lioness of slaughter, and the world was nearly destroyed by the same goddess who fills it with love. The pleasure-giver and the destroyer are one, and the myth of her pacification is the tale of turning wrath back into joy.
Key Myths
The eye of Ra. When humankind plotted against the aging Ra, he sent forth his eye as Hathor, who fell upon the earth as a raging lioness and slaughtered so fiercely she threatened to end all life. To stop her, the gods flooded the fields with beer dyed red like blood; she drank it, grew drunk and gentle, and her rage subsided back into joy. Love and destruction proved to be the same power, calmed.
The nurse of kings. As the celestial cow, Hathor suckled the pharaoh and the young gods, her milk conferring life and legitimacy. She is the mother at the root of kingship, the nourishment behind the throne.
The lady of the west. Hathor welcomed the dead at the threshold of the afterlife, greeting the setting sun and the souls that followed it into the western horizon. Even in death her domain is comfort — the joy that meets the traveler at the end of the road.
Related
- The Empress — The Major Arcana card whose archetype she embodies: fertility, nurture, sensual abundance
- Ra — Whose burning eye she became, and between whose myths she moves as daughter and defender
- Horus — With whom she was closely associated as consort and mother-figure in the cult of kingship
- Tarot
- Mythology