Hathor was one of the most beloved and widely worshipped goddesses of ancient Egypt. She was the goddess of love, beauty, music, dance, and joy; of drunkenness and celebration; of motherhood and fertility; of foreign lands and precious stones; and of the dead, whom she welcomed into the afterlife. She was usually depicted as a woman wearing a headdress of cow’s horns with a sun disk between them, or as a woman with cow’s ears, or as a cow. Her name, Ḥwt-Ḥr, means “House of Horus” — she was the womb, the enclosure, from which the falcon god was born.
Yet Hathor had a terrifying side. In one myth, she became the raging Eye of Ra, who nearly destroyed humanity, and was pacified only by a trick involving seven thousand jars of beer dyed red.
The Celestial Cow
Hathor was one of the oldest goddesses of Egypt. Her cow form may go back to prehistoric cattle cults of the Nile valley and the surrounding deserts. The famous Narmer Palette (c. 3100 BCE), one of the earliest monuments of Egyptian kingship, is topped by two cow-headed faces that may represent Hathor or the related goddess Bat.
The cow was the most nurturing of animals, giving milk and sustenance. Hathor was imagined as a vast celestial cow whose body formed the sky, and whose legs were the four pillars that held up the heavens. The sun god rode on her back or was born from her each morning.
The Mother of the King
Hathor was the divine mother and nurse of the pharaoh. As the king was identified with Horus, Hathor was his mother. Statues and reliefs show the king drinking milk from the udder of the Hathor cow, receiving divine nourishment. At Deir el-Bahari, the queen-pharaoh Hatshepsut had herself depicted suckling from Hathor.
Goddess of Love and Music
Hathor was the goddess of love and sexuality, and the Greeks identified her with Aphrodite. Egyptian love poems call on her as “the Golden One,” and women prayed to her for help in love, marriage, and childbirth. She was also connected with cosmetics, mirrors, and beauty; many ancient Egyptian mirrors have handles shaped like the goddess.
Above all, she was the goddess of music and dance. Her sacred instruments were the sistrum, a rattle whose handle often bore her face, and the menat, a heavy necklace of beads that was shaken to make a rattling sound. Her priestesses sang, danced, and played these instruments in her rituals. Music was believed to drive away evil and to soothe the gods — including the dangerous side of Hathor herself.
Goddess of Drunkenness
Hathor was the “Lady of Drunkenness.” Her festivals involved drinking to the point of intoxication, which was seen as a sacred state of joy and closeness to the divine. The Festival of Drunkenness, celebrated at the beginning of the year at the time of the Nile flood, commemorated the myth of how drunkenness saved humankind.
The Eye of Ra
In the myth known as The Destruction of Mankind, the aging sun god Ra discovered that humans were plotting against him. He sent his Eye — his fierce daughter — to punish them. The Eye took the form of Hathor, who transformed into the lioness Sekhmet and began to slaughter humanity, wading in blood.
Ra relented, but Sekhmet could not be stopped. So Ra ordered seven thousand jars of beer to be brewed and dyed red with ochre, so that it looked like blood, and poured it over the fields. Sekhmet drank it, became drunk, and forgot her rage. She returned to Ra as the gentle Hathor. See The Eye of Ra and the Destruction of Mankind.
This myth shows the double nature of the goddess: loving and destructive, nurturing and wrathful. Hathor and Sekhmet were two sides of the same divine power.
The Distant Goddess
A related myth tells how the Eye of Ra, angry with her father, left Egypt and wandered in the deserts of Nubia as a raging lioness. Ra, missing her, sent Thoth (or the god Shu) to persuade her to return. Thoth, in the form of a baboon, told her stories and fables to calm her. At last she came back, and as she travelled north along the Nile she was welcomed with music, dancing, and wine, and transformed into a gentle goddess. The return of the Distant Goddess was linked to the annual rising of the Nile.
Lady of the West
Hathor was also a goddess of the dead. In the Theban necropolis, she was the Lady of the West, who received the setting sun and the souls of the dead into the mountain. Tomb paintings show her emerging from the western hills in the form of a cow among papyrus reeds. She offered the dead food and drink from the branches of a sycamore tree, as the Lady of the Sycamore.
In later periods, deceased women were identified with Hathor, as men were with Osiris, to help them achieve rebirth.
Mistress of Turquoise
Hathor was the patron of foreign lands and of mining. At Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai, where the Egyptians mined turquoise and copper, a temple to Hathor as “Mistress of Turquoise” was built and expanded over many centuries. At Timna in the Negev, she was worshipped by Egyptian copper miners. She was also associated with Byblos in Lebanon, the source of cedar wood, where she was called the “Lady of Byblos.”
The Temple of Dendera
Hathor’s greatest temple was at Dendera, in Upper Egypt. The present building dates mostly from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods (first century BCE), and it is one of the best-preserved temples in Egypt. Its columns are topped by faces of Hathor with cow’s ears. Its ceiling bears the famous Dendera Zodiac, a circular map of the heavens that combines Egyptian and Babylonian-Greek astronomy (the original is now in the Louvre).
Every year, in the festival of the Beautiful Reunion, the statue of Hathor was carried by boat from Dendera to Edfu, 170 km upstream, to visit her husband Horus. The festival lasted two weeks and involved feasting, drinking, and celebration by pilgrims.
The Seven Hathors
The Seven Hathors were a group of goddesses who appeared at the birth of a child and foretold its destiny, much like the fairy godmothers of European folklore or the Fates of Greek myth. In the Egyptian tale of the Doomed Prince, the Seven Hathors announce that a newborn prince will die by a crocodile, a snake, or a dog.
Hathor Today
Hathor’s face with its cow’s ears, her horned sun-disk headdress, and her sistrum are among the most recognizable images of Egyptian religion. She appears in modern paganism as a goddess of love and joy, in the popular Stargate series, and in many novels. Her double nature — the loving goddess who is also the raging lioness — remains one of the most striking ideas in Egyptian religion.
Last reviewed: September 2026.