Distant Goddess

About Distant Goddess

The Distant Goddess (Egyptian concept reconstructed from the phrase describing the goddess who is 'far' in Nubia) is a mythological pattern in which a fierce solar goddess — variously Hathor, Tefnut, Sekhmet, Mehit, or Wadjet — quarrels with her father the sun-god, departs Egypt in a rage, and withdraws to the deserts of Nubia far to the south. There, in her wild and dangerous form, she ranges as a lioness, and the land she has left suffers her absence. The sun-god, diminished without his Eye, sends a divine emissary — Thoth in most versions, sometimes Shu — to find her, pacify her fury through flattery, fables, and persuasion, and coax her back. Her return restores the goddess to her benign form and brings with it the renewal of Egypt, associated with the rising of the Nile inundation and the festivals of the new year.

The cycle is closely bound to the theology of the Eye of Ra. The goddess who departs is the Eye — the solar disk's active, feminine power, projected as a separate being who can act independently of the god and even turn against him. Because the Eye is at once the sun's protective ferocity and its capacity for destruction, the myth of her departure and return models the central problem of solar religion: the same power that defends the cosmos can rage out of control, and order depends on its being soothed and reintegrated. The Distant Goddess is therefore not a single story but a flexible mythic structure, attached to several goddesses and elaborated differently across more than two thousand years of Egyptian religion.

The fullest surviving narrative is the Demotic Myth of the Sun's Eye, preserved on Papyrus Leiden I 384 (second century CE) and known from other late copies. In it Thoth, often in the form of a small monkey or baboon, accompanies the goddess on her journey home from Nubia, telling her a sequence of animal fables to calm her temper and persuade her of the value of return. The text is late and shows Hellenistic influence, but its core — the pacification of the raging goddess through Thoth's words — reflects a tradition attested far earlier. The Book of the Heavenly Cow (in the tomb of Seti I, c. 1290 BCE) preserves the related Destruction of Mankind, in which the sun-god's Eye as Hathor-Sekhmet slaughters rebellious humanity and is stopped only by a ruse, and Ptolemaic temple inscriptions, especially at Philae and Edfu, celebrate the goddess's return with elaborate festival liturgy.

The motif overlaps substantially with the Eye of Ra cycle and the Destruction of Mankind, and scholars sometimes treat the three as facets of a single complex. The definitive modern study, Danielle Inconnu-Bocquillon's Le mythe de la déesse lointaine à Philae (2001), traces the cult of the returning goddess at Philae through the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, where the annual celebration of her homecoming was a central event of the temple calendar.

The goddess at the center of the cycle is the Eye of Ra in her feminine, autonomous aspect, and her many identities reflect the way the Eye could be assigned to different goddesses by different cults. As Tefnut she is the daughter of the creator in the Heliopolitan genealogy; as Hathor and Sekhmet she is the gentle and ferocious faces of a single solar power; as Mehit she belongs to the cult of This and Abydos; as Wadjet she is the cobra on the sun-god's brow. This multiplicity is not confusion but flexibility, the same mythic pattern realized through whichever goddess a temple honored, so that the Distant Goddess could be celebrated across Egypt under many names while retaining the constant structure of departure, raging exile, persuasion, and triumphant, fertilizing return.

The Story

The cycle begins with a rupture between the sun-god and his Eye. In the versions where the goddess is Tefnut, daughter of the creator Atum or of Ra, a quarrel drives her from Egypt; in others the departing goddess is Hathor or Sekhmet, the solar Eye in her own right. Angered, she travels south into Nubia — the deserts beyond the first cataract — and there assumes her most dangerous form, a lioness or a wild feline goddess who hunts and rages, untamed and lethal. Her wildness is the sun's own ferocity unbound from the order that normally directs it.

Egypt suffers in her absence. As the Eye, the goddess is the sun's protective power; without her the god is vulnerable and the land is deprived of the force that should defend and renew it. The myth makes her departure a cosmic emergency: the sun-god cannot simply command her back, for she has become autonomous and dangerous, and a direct approach risks her violence. He therefore dispatches an emissary skilled in persuasion rather than force.

In the dominant tradition the emissary is Thoth, god of wisdom, writing, and reckoning, who travels to Nubia to find the goddess. To approach her safely he disguises himself, often taking the shape of a small monkey or a baboon, animals associated with him. He greets her with deference and begins the long work of soothing her temper. In the Demotic Myth of the Sun's Eye, this pacification is conducted through storytelling: as they journey northward together, Thoth tells the goddess a series of animal fables — tales of the lion and the mouse, of the two jackals, of gratitude and danger — each carrying a lesson meant to flatter her, calm her, and persuade her that home is preferable to exile. The fables are interleaved with praise of Egypt, descriptions of the festivals that await her, and arguments about the rewards of return. The narrative thus dramatizes the triumph of words over rage, of heka and persuasion over raw power.

As the goddess is pacified, her form changes. The savage lioness softens toward the benign cat-goddess or the gentle Hathor; her destructive heat cools into the life-giving warmth of the sun. In the Destruction of Mankind version preserved in the Book of the Heavenly Cow, the pacification is achieved by a different ruse: when the Eye, as Hathor-Sekhmet, has slaughtered humanity and means to finish them, Ra has the fields flooded overnight with beer dyed red like blood; the goddess, mistaking it for gore, drinks until she is drunk and her fury is spent, and humanity is spared. The motif is the same — the raging Eye stopped not by combat but by trickery and the satisfaction of her appetite — and the episode came to explain the drunken festivals associated with the goddess's return.

The climax of the cycle is the homecoming. The goddess crosses back into Egypt, often imagined entering at the southern frontier near Philae and the first cataract, and her return is celebrated as the restoration of order and the renewal of the land. At Philae and Edfu the event was tied to the calendar: the goddess's return coincided with the rising of the Nile flood and with new-year festivals, so that her reintegration with the sun-god was experienced as the annual rebirth of Egypt's fertility. The cooled, pacified goddess takes her proper place again as the protective Eye on the sun-god's brow, the uraeus-cobra or the appeased lioness, her ferocity now turned outward against the enemies of order rather than against Egypt itself.

The narrative is cyclical rather than singular. Because the goddess embodies a power that is always liable to rage and withdraw, the myth could be re-enacted each year in festival, and its episodes — departure, raging in Nubia, the emissary's persuasion, the pacification, the triumphant return — were celebrated as a recurring renewal rather than a one-time event. The Distant Goddess is thus a myth of the perpetual management of a dangerous divine force, the story a solar civilization told about why the sun's power must be continually soothed and brought home.

The cycle's geography and seasonality gave it a calendrical life. Because the goddess was imagined to re-enter Egypt at the southern frontier near the first cataract, her homecoming was localized at Philae and the temples of the deep south, and because her return was tied to the rising of the Nile flood, it fell at the turn of the year, when the inundation began and the land was renewed. The festivals of the returning goddess thus marked the new year and the coming of the flood, and they were celebrated with music, dancing, and ritual drunkenness, the worshippers reenacting the cooling of the goddess's fury and the joy of her arrival. The myth was therefore not only narrated but lived, performed each year as the river rose, so that the management of the dangerous solar power and the agricultural rebirth of Egypt were experienced together as a single recurring event, the goddess brought home and the land made fertile in the same season.

Symbolism

The cycle dramatizes the dual nature of solar power as feminine ferocity. The Eye of Ra is the sun's active, protective force, and in the Distant Goddess it is personified as a goddess who can either defend the cosmos or, turned against it, destroy. The symbolism rests on the lioness — Sekhmet's animal, the embodiment of lethal heat, of plague, of the desert's danger — set against the domestic cat and the nurturing Hathor. The transformation from raging lioness to benign cat or cow-goddess, the central symbolic movement of the myth, expresses the conviction that the same divine energy is both deadly and life-giving, and that civilization depends on directing it toward protection rather than havoc.

Nubia, the place of the goddess's exile, carries its own symbolic weight. Lying to the south beyond the first cataract, it was for Egyptians the hot, wild land of the sun's extreme power, a frontier of danger and otherness. The goddess's withdrawal there figures the sun's retreat into untamed ferocity, removed from the ordered world of Egypt; her return northward across the cataract figures the recovery of that power for civilization. The geography is theological: south is wildness and raw heat, the Egyptian Nile valley is order, and the myth maps the goddess's psychological movement from rage to calm onto a journey from the deserts of Nubia to the temples of Egypt.

Thoth's role encodes the Egyptian valuation of wisdom and persuasion over force. The raging Eye cannot be defeated in combat — she is the sun's own power — so she must be won back by words, by fables, by flattery and reasoned argument. That the god of writing and reckoning is the one who tames the goddess of destructive heat asserts the primacy of speech and intelligence in the management of cosmic forces, the same conviction that underlies Egyptian magic, in which correctly spoken words alter reality.

The beer-dyed-red episode of the Destruction of Mankind supplies a related symbolism: the goddess's bloodlust is satisfied and neutralized by an offering that imitates its object. Drunkenness becomes the symbol of the goddess's pacification, and the festivals of her return featured ritual intoxication, the worshippers reenacting the cooling of her fury. The annual tie of the homecoming to the Nile inundation completes the symbolic structure: the returning goddess brings the flood, and her reintegration with the sun is the renewal of fertility, so that the management of divine rage and the agricultural rebirth of Egypt are figured as the same event.

Cultural Context

The Distant Goddess cycle developed within the solar theology of Heliopolis and the cult of the Eye of Ra, but it drew its distinctive shape from the relationship between Egypt and Nubia. For most of Egyptian history Nubia was the southern land beyond the first cataract — sometimes conquered and administered, sometimes independent and threatening, always associated in the Egyptian imagination with the intense heat and wild power of the deep south. Locating the goddess's exile in Nubia made theological sense of this geography: the sun's most dangerous aspect belonged to the burning lands upriver, and its recovery for the ordered world meant bringing it north into Egypt.

The myth attached itself to several goddesses because the Eye of Ra was not a fixed identity but a role that different deities could fill. Tefnut, the daughter of the creator and the moisture-goddess, is the departing goddess in the Heliopolitan strand; Hathor and Sekhmet, the gentle and the ferocious faces of the solar Eye, are the goddesses of the Destruction of Mankind; Mehit and Wadjet appear in regional versions. This flexibility allowed local cults to claim the cycle for their own patron goddess, and the returning goddess was honored under many names at temples across Egypt.

The cult of the returning goddess was most fully elaborated in the south, at Philae and Edfu, in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. At Philae, the island temple near the first cataract dedicated to Isis but housing chapels to the returning goddess, the homecoming was a major calendrical festival, celebrated with music, dancing, drunkenness, and the offering of the goddess back to the sun-god. The southern location was apt: Philae stood at the very frontier where the goddess was imagined to re-enter Egypt from Nubia. Inconnu-Bocquillon's study of the Philae material (2001) shows how thoroughly the myth was woven into the temple's ritual life over centuries.

The festivals of the returning goddess featured ritual intoxication, music, and celebration — the worshippers reenacting the cooling of the goddess's fury and the joy of her homecoming. These elements connect the cycle to the wider Egyptian association of Hathor and the Eye-goddesses with music, drink, sexuality, and festal joy, the benign counterpart to their destructive heat. The Demotic Myth of the Sun's Eye, with its long sequence of animal fables, also belongs to a Hellenistic-period literary culture in which Egyptian and Greek fable traditions interpenetrated; some of its tales have analogues in the Aesopic corpus, evidence of the cultural exchange of Roman Egypt. The cycle thus spans the full range of Egyptian religious culture, from the archaic solar theology of the Pyramid Texts to the cosmopolitan literature and temple festivals of the Greco-Roman period. The persistence of the cycle into the Roman period, attested by the late Demotic narrative and the continued festivals of the southern temples, shows how the myth of the raging and returning goddess remained a living part of Egyptian religion to the end of the pharaonic tradition.

Cross-Tradition Parallels

The Distant Goddess belongs to a mythological pattern found across cultures: the divine power that sustains the world withdraws in rage or grief, the world suffers, and an emissary or ruse lures it back. The pattern tests a single structural question — what does it cost to recover a force that cannot be defeated? — and each tradition's answer illuminates what it most feared losing.

Japanese — Amaterasu in the Rock Cave (Kojiki, c. 712 CE)

The closest parallel in world mythology is the Japanese myth preserved in the Kojiki (712 CE), in which the sun-goddess Amaterasu retreats into a cave after her brother Susanoo's violent rampage. The world goes dark; crops fail; evil spirits proliferate. The eight million gods assemble and devise a plan: the goddess Ame-no-Uzume performs a bawdy, ecstatic dance before the cave, the gods erupt in laughter, and Amaterasu's curiosity draws her to the entrance, where she is seized and pulled out. The structural parallel with the Distant Goddess is exact: a solar power withdraws, the world suffers, and recovery is achieved through deception and performance rather than force. The key difference is the trigger. The Egyptian goddess departs from anger — a quarrel with the sun-god, ferocity turning inward. Amaterasu departs from trauma, withdrawing after Susanoo's violation. Egypt stages a management problem; Japan stages a trauma response. Both agree that the same divine energy that sustains the world can be turned against it, and that it cannot be commanded home.

Greek — Demeter and the Withdrawal of Fertility (Homeric Hymn to Demeter, c. 7th century BCE)

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter describes how Demeter, grieving the abduction of Persephone, withdraws from the gods and lets the earth go barren. Zeus must send Hermes to Hades and arrange Persephone's partial return, and Demeter must be mollified before the crops grow again. The parallel with the Distant Goddess is structural: a goddess's grief deprives the world of fertility, a divine emissary negotiates her return. The divergence is in what the goddess must receive. The Egyptian goddess is soothed by persuasion, flattery, and Thoth's fables; she must be talked back into a benign mood. Demeter requires her daughter — an actual restitution, not a persuasion. Egypt's version makes the management of divine emotion into an art of words; Greece makes it contingent on a cosmic legal settlement.

Mesopotamian — Inanna's Descent and the World's Suspension (Descent of Inanna, c. 1800 BCE)

In the Sumerian Descent of Inanna (Old Babylonian copies c. 1800 BCE), Inanna enters the underworld and the world above loses fertility: no bull mounts a cow, no man impregnates a woman. The gods must negotiate her release. The parallel is the absence of a goddess as cosmic emergency. But the Distant Goddess is distinguished by what happens to the goddess during her absence. Inanna's absence from the upper world is a spatial withdrawal into the underworld, against her will in the sense that she cannot return alone. The Egyptian goddess chooses her withdrawal, goes feral in exile, and must be reshaped — the lioness must become a cat again. Egypt centers the inner transformation of the dangerous power; Mesopotamia centers the structural mechanics of divine release.

Hindu — Parvati's Withdrawal and Shiva's Distraction (Shiva Purana, c. 7th-12th century CE)

The Shiva Purana contains episodes in which Parvati, angered by Shiva's teasing, withdraws from him and undertakes ascetic practice, during which his generative power is suspended and the gods suffer. The comedy of divine reconciliation — the god who must persuade the goddess back — mirrors the Egyptian structure. What distinguishes the Hindu version is that Parvati's withdrawal is not ferocity but dignity: she withdraws to prove her own worth through tapas (austerity) rather than because she has turned destructive. The Egyptian goddess in exile is dangerous; Parvati in withdrawal is self-purifying. Same structural pattern — male divine principle diminished without the female — opposite characterization of the feminine power during its absence.

Modern Influence

The Distant Goddess cycle has become central to scholarly understanding of Egyptian solar religion, valued for the way it exposes the logic of a theology built around a power that is simultaneously protective and destructive. Egyptologists treat the myth as the key to the Eye of Ra complex and to the paired iconography of Hathor and Sekhmet, the gentle and ferocious faces of a single goddess. Danielle Inconnu-Bocquillon's Le mythe de la déesse lointaine à Philae (2001) established the cycle as a major subject of study and demonstrated its deep integration into the temple cult of the Greco-Roman period.

The Demotic Myth of the Sun's Eye has attracted particular attention for its embedded animal fables, several of which have analogues in the Aesopic tradition. Scholars of folklore and of the fable as a genre cite the text as evidence of the circulation of animal tales between Egyptian and Greek cultures in the Roman period, and the lion-and-mouse story it contains is among the earliest attested versions of a fable later associated with Aesop. The myth thus figures in the history of the fable as well as in Egyptology.

The cycle has informed modern comparative work on the myth of the withdrawn or abducted deity whose absence brings barrenness and whose return restores fertility — a pattern found across the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. The seasonal logic of the Distant Goddess, with the homecoming tied to the Nile flood and the new year, places it alongside other myths in which the fate of the land follows the movements of a god, and it is regularly discussed in surveys of fertility and seasonal myth.

The figure of the raging goddess pacified and brought home has resonated with modern interest in the divine feminine and in goddesses who embody both nurture and destruction. Popular and esoteric writing on Egyptian religion frequently invokes the Hathor-Sekhmet duality and the myth of the returning goddess, sometimes with more enthusiasm than precision, as an image of feminine power in its full ambivalence. The cycle also appears in modern retellings of Egyptian myth aimed at general readers, where the story of Thoth taming the lioness through stories offers a self-conscious image of the power of narrative itself.

In the study of Philae and the southern temples, the Distant Goddess remains essential to interpreting the ritual calendar and the relationship between Egyptian and Nubian religion in the final centuries of pharaonic culture. As the last temples to practice the old religion stood at the Nubian frontier, the myth of the goddess who returns from Nubia took on a particular poignancy in the twilight of Egyptian paganism, and its festivals were among the last to be celebrated before the temples closed.

Primary Sources

The earliest textual evidence for the Distant Goddess appears in the Pyramid Texts (Old Kingdom, c. 2400-2300 BCE; ed. R.O. Faulkner, Oxford University Press, 1969; James P. Allen, SBL Writings from the Ancient World 23, 2005), which invoke the Eye of Ra and describe the sun-god's dependent relationship with his active, projectable power. The Pyramid Texts do not narrate the departure cycle at length but establish the theological foundation: the Eye is a separable force that can be sent out and recalled, and its return to the sun-god is integral to solar order.

The Book of the Heavenly Cow, preserved in the tomb of Seti I (c. 1290 BCE), the tomb of Ramesses II, and several other royal tombs of the New Kingdom, contains the Destruction of Mankind episode: the Eye as Hathor-Sekhmet is sent to punish rebellious humanity, slaughters without restraint, and is stopped only by a ruse — fields flooded with beer dyed red like blood, which the goddess drinks until intoxicated and her fury spent. Published in Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife (Cornell University Press, 1999) and in full edition by Hornung and Alexandra von Lieven. This text is the most explicit early version of the raging Eye's pacification and directly prefigures the Distant Goddess pattern.

Ptolematic temple inscriptions at Philae and Edfu provide extended liturgical treatments of the returning goddess. The inscriptions at Philae — dedicated primarily to Isis but containing significant chapels and hymns to the returning goddess — celebrate her homecoming with elaborate festival texts. The Edfu temple, consecrated under Ptolemy VIII (142 BCE) and completed under Ptolemy XII (57 BCE), contains hymns and ritual texts that describe the goddess's return from Nubia and her reintegration with the sun-god; these were published by Émile Chassinat, Le temple d'Edfou (Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale, 14 vols, 1897-1934). Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride (Moralia V, c. 100 CE; trans. F.C. Babbitt, Loeb Classical Library, 1936; or J. Gwyn Griffiths ed., University of Wales Press, 1970), treats the mythology of the solar eye in the context of the Osiris cycle and preserves Greek-period theological interpretations of the Eye's separability.

The fullest surviving narrative is the Demotic Myth of the Sun's Eye, preserved principally on Papyrus Leiden I 384 (second century CE, Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden), first edited by Wilhelm Spiegelberg, Der ägyptische Mythus vom Sonnenauge nach dem Leidener demotischen Papyrus I 384 (Strasburg, 1917), and subsequently by F. de Cenival, Le mythe de l'oeil du soleil: translittération et traduction avec commentaire philologique (Sommerhausen, 1988). The text recounts how Thoth, often in the form of a small monkey, travels to Nubia and leads the raging goddess home by telling her a long sequence of animal fables — including a lion-and-mouse story with parallels in the Aesopic tradition — interspersed with praise of Egypt and the festivals awaiting her return. The definitive study of the cycle in its Ptolemaic and Roman cult context is Danielle Inconnu-Bocquillon, Le mythe de la déesse lointaine à Philae (Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale, Cairo, 2001), which traces the returning goddess's integration into the Philae temple calendar over several centuries of Greco-Roman rule.

Significance

The Distant Goddess cycle is the clearest expression of the central problem of Egyptian solar religion: that the power which defends the cosmos is the same power that can destroy it, and that order depends on continually soothing and reintegrating a dangerous divine force. By personifying the sun's ferocity as a goddess who can rage, withdraw, and turn against her own father, the myth gives narrative form to a theological insight that recurs throughout Egyptian thought — the precariousness of order, the nearness of chaos, the constant ritual labor required to keep destructive power directed outward against enemies rather than inward against Egypt.

The cycle is also a primary instrument for understanding the Eye of Ra and the paired goddesses Hathor and Sekhmet. The transformation of the raging lioness into the benign cat or cow-goddess, enacted in the myth and celebrated in festival, is the mythological charter for a pervasive structure in Egyptian religion: the single goddess with two faces, gentle and ferocious, whose worship requires both placation and rejoicing. Without the Distant Goddess, the Hathor-Sekhmet duality would be a mere iconographic curiosity; with it, that duality becomes a coherent theology of solar power.

The myth carries weight for the relationship between Egypt and Nubia. By locating the goddess's exile in the deserts of the deep south and her recovery in her return northward across the first cataract, the cycle encodes the Egyptian understanding of Nubia as the land of the sun's extreme and untamed power. The festivals at Philae and Edfu, where the homecoming was celebrated at the very frontier the goddess was imagined to cross, show how geography, theology, and ritual were fused in the cult of the returning goddess, and how the myth helped Egyptians make sense of their southern border.

Finally, the cycle illuminates the Egyptian conviction that words and intelligence govern cosmic forces. Thoth tames the goddess not by combat but by fables and persuasion, asserting that the management of divine power belongs to wisdom rather than strength. This valuation of speech, shared with the wider Egyptian theory of magic, runs through the entire culture, and the Distant Goddess gives it one of its most vivid mythological demonstrations: the god of writing soothing the goddess of destruction with stories, on the long road home from Nubia to Egypt. The cycle is significant, finally, for the window it opens onto the religion of the Egyptian-Nubian frontier in the last centuries of pharaonic culture. The southern temples where the goddess's return was celebrated stood at the very border the myth concerned, and they were among the last sanctuaries to practice the old religion, so that the myth of the goddess who comes home from Nubia took on a special resonance in the twilight of Egyptian paganism, its festivals among the last to be kept before the temples closed.

Connections

Hathor — The benign returning goddess of love, music, and joy, the pacified face of the solar Eye into which the raging goddess transforms upon her homecoming.

Sekhmet — The lioness-goddess of destruction and plague, the raging face of the Eye who slaughters and must be soothed; the Destruction of Mankind is her episode.

Thoth — The sun-god's emissary who travels to Nubia and pacifies the goddess through fables and persuasion, asserting the power of wisdom over force.

Ra — The sun-god whose Eye the goddess is, diminished by her departure and renewed by her return.

Atum — The Heliopolitan creator and father of Tefnut, whose Eye departs and whose order the goddess's return restores.

Eye of Ra cycle — The closely related complex of myths concerning the solar Eye as an independent feminine power, of which the Distant Goddess is a central component.

Destruction of Mankind — The episode in the Book of the Heavenly Cow in which the Eye as Hathor-Sekhmet slaughters humanity and is pacified by beer dyed red as blood, a version of the raging-goddess pattern.

Heka — The magical power of words through which Thoth tames the goddess, the same force that underlies the persuasion at the heart of the cycle.

Isis and the Secret Name of Ra — A related myth of a goddess and the sun-god in which words and cunning, rather than force, transfer cosmic power, sharing the Distant Goddess's theme of the management of solar power through intelligence.

Sekhmet — The lioness-goddess of destruction, the raging face of the Eye whose pacification the cycle enacts.

Contendings of Horus and Set — Another myth in which the resolution of conflict among the gods turns on persuasion, cunning, and divine arbitration rather than on force alone.

Heliopolis — The cult center of the sun-god and of the Eye theology in which the Distant Goddess is rooted.

Duat — The underworld through which the sun-god travels, the cosmic order the returning Eye protects on his brow.

Destruction of Mankind — The episode of the Book of the Heavenly Cow in which the Eye as Hathor-Sekhmet slaughters humanity and is pacified by red-dyed beer, a version of the raging-goddess pattern.

Isis and the Secret Name of Ra — A related solar myth in which cunning and words, not force, transfer power between a goddess and the sun-god.

Eye of Ra — The solar Eye as goddess and object, the active feminine power whose departure and return the cycle dramatizes.

Further Reading