Eye of Ra

About Eye of Ra

The Eye of Ra is the fiery feminine extension of the sun-god Ra — at once a part of the sun-god, his daughter, his protective weapon, and an autonomous goddess in her own right. It is both an object (the solar eye, the disk and heat of the sun as an instrument of divine power) and a quasi-person (a goddess who acts independently, who can rage, flee, destroy, and be pacified). The Eye of Ra is manifested variously as Hathor, Sekhmet, Tefnut, Wadjet, Bastet, Mehit, and other goddesses, who are understood not as separate deities but as forms or moods of the single solar Eye. It is to be distinguished from the Eye of Horus, a separate mythological complex centered on the eye gouged out by Set and healed by Thoth, used as the supreme protective amulet.

The theology of the Eye rests on a feature of the Egyptian language: the word for 'eye' (iret) is grammatically feminine, and the solar eye was personified as a goddess. As the daughter and extension of Ra, the Eye is the active, mobile, and dangerous aspect of solar power — the heat and light of the sun conceived as a goddess who goes forth from the sun-god to carry out his will. In her protective role she is the uraeus, the rearing cobra on the brow of the king and the gods, who spits fire against their enemies. In her destructive role she is the raging lioness Sekhmet, sent to slaughter rebellious humanity in the Book of the Heavenly Cow. In her wandering role she is the Distant Goddess who, angered, flees from Egypt into Nubia and must be sought, appeased, and brought home, her return bringing the inundation and the renewal of the land.

The Eye's defining characteristic is its dual and unstable nature. As the protective extension of the sun-god it defends order; but as an autonomous goddess it can turn its destructive power against the very cosmos it should protect, and its rage must be contained. The recurring mythological pattern is one of departure and return, anger and pacification: the Eye goes forth or flees, becomes dangerous, and must be soothed and brought back into harmony with the sun-god. This pattern underlies a major strand of Egyptian myth and ritual, including the Destruction of Mankind, the cycle of the Distant Goddess, and the festivals at which the dangerous goddess was propitiated with beer, music, and dance.

The Eye of Ra is attested across the whole span of Egyptian religious literature, from the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom through the Coffin Texts, the Book of the Dead, and the Book of the Heavenly Cow to the late Demotic Myth of the Sun's Eye and the Ptolemaic temple inscriptions of Edfu and Dendera. The standard study of the Distant Goddess complex is Danielle Inconnu-Bocquillon's Le mythe de la déesse lointaine à Philae (2001). The Eye of Ra is one of the richest and most theologically productive concepts in Egyptian religion, generating a network of goddesses, myths, and rituals organized around the management of the dangerous and protective power of the sun.

The Story

The Eye of Ra appears across several connected mythological episodes, all organized around the pattern of the Eye's going-forth, its dangerous or destructive action, and its pacification and return. These episodes are not a single continuous story but a family of myths that share the Eye as their central figure.

The Eye is present at creation. In the Heliopolitan cosmogony, the creator Atum-Ra, alone in the primordial waters, sends forth his Eye to search for his children Shu and Tefnut, who have become lost in the dark waters of Nun. The Eye finds them and brings them back. But on returning, the Eye discovers that the sun-god has grown a replacement eye in its absence, and it rages in jealousy. To appease it, Atum-Ra sets the Eye upon his brow as the uraeus-cobra, the rearing serpent of fire who henceforth guards the sun-god and the king and spits flame against their enemies. The tears that the sun-god sheds at the reunion, in a play on words, become the first humans. This episode establishes the Eye as the protective uraeus and accounts for its place on the brow of Ra and the king.

In the Destruction of Mankind, the opening episode of the Book of the Heavenly Cow, the Eye takes its most terrible form. When humanity plots rebellion against the aged Ra, the sun-god sends his Eye against them as the goddess Hathor, who descends as the raging lioness Sekhmet and slaughters the rebels in the desert, wading in their blood. So great is her fury that Ra, wishing to spare the remnant of humanity, cannot recall her by command. He floods the fields with seven thousand jars of beer dyed red as blood; the goddess drinks it, mistaking it for blood, becomes drunk, and ceases her killing. This episode shows the Eye's destructive power and the necessity of pacifying it to prevent the annihilation of the world.

In the cycle of the Distant Goddess, the Eye becomes the wandering goddess. Angered — in some versions by a quarrel with the sun-god, in others without stated cause — the Eye-goddess departs from Egypt and travels south into Nubia, where she rages as a wild lioness in the desert, far from the sun-god she should protect. Her absence is a cosmic and natural crisis: without the Eye, the sun-god is undefended and the land of Egypt languishes. Ra sends a god — most often Thoth, sometimes Shu — to find her and persuade her to return. The messenger uses cunning, flattery, fables, and entreaty to soothe the goddess's rage and to coax her back toward Egypt. As she returns, her fury cools; she bathes in the waters at the southern frontier, transforms from the raging lioness into the gentle Hathor, and re-enters Egypt as a benevolent goddess. Her return brings the inundation, the renewal of the land, and the restoration of cosmic order. This cycle, told most fully in the late Demotic Myth of the Sun's Eye, links the Eye to the natural rhythm of the Nile and to the southern geography of Egypt and Nubia.

In a further group of episodes the Eye figures in the protection of the sun-god during his nightly journey and in the daily defense of the cosmos. The uraeus on the prow of the solar bark, identified with the Eye, spits fire against Apep, the serpent of chaos who attacks the sun each night, and the fiery cobra on the brow of Ra burns the enemies of order. The Eye is thus not only the destroyer of rebellious humanity and the wandering goddess of the Distant Goddess cycle but the perpetual defender of the sun-god against the forces of chaos, the fiery extension of solar power that guards the cosmos in its nightly passage through danger.

Throughout these episodes the Eye is manifested in different goddesses according to its mood and role: as the gentle and benevolent Hathor when pacified, as the raging lioness Sekhmet when destructive, as the lioness Tefnut in the Distant Goddess cycle, as the protective cobra Wadjet in the uraeus, as the cat Bastet in her milder aspect. These are understood as forms of a single goddess — the Eye — passing through different states, dangerous and gentle, distant and present, raging and pacified. The constant pattern is the management of the Eye's power: its going-forth to protect or destroy, its dangerous autonomy, and its return to harmony with the sun-god, achieved through the soothing arts of music, dance, drink, and persuasion. The ritual life of Egypt, with its festivals of the dangerous goddess and its offerings of beer and music, re-enacted the pacification of the Eye and secured its benevolent presence for the land. In this way the mythology of the Eye was woven into the cult: the festivals of Hathor, Sekhmet, and Bastet, with their drinking, music, and dance, made the worshipper a participant in the soothing of the dangerous goddess, and the temple rituals of the dangerous deities re-enacted the perpetual task of turning destructive solar power toward protection. The myth and the cult of the Eye together expressed the central religious concern of managing the dual power of the sun, dangerous and life-giving, and securing its benevolence for Egypt.

Symbolism

The Eye of Ra is among the most symbolically dense concepts in Egyptian religion, organizing a network of meanings around solar power, divine femininity, protection, destruction, and the management of dangerous force.

The Eye symbolizes the active and mobile aspect of solar power. The sun-god is the source, but the Eye is the power that goes forth from him to act in the world — the heat and light of the sun conceived not as a passive radiance but as a goddess who carries out the sun-god's will. The Eye's mobility, its capacity to depart and return, distinguishes it from the static disk of the sun and makes it the instrument of solar agency. The grammatical femininity of the Egyptian word for 'eye' underlies the personification of this power as a goddess, the daughter and extension of the male sun-god.

The duality of the Eye is its central symbolic feature. The same solar power that nourishes and protects can scorch and destroy; the same goddess who is gentle Hathor is raging Sekhmet. The Eye thus symbolizes the inherent ambivalence of divine power, which must be managed and directed rather than simply unleashed. The recurring pattern of rage and pacification dramatizes the perpetual task of containing destructive force and turning it toward protection — a task central to Egyptian kingship and cult.

The uraeus — the rearing cobra on the brow of the sun-god and the king — is the principal iconographic embodiment of the protective Eye. The fire-spitting serpent who guards the wearer and destroys their enemies makes the Eye visible as the defensive power of solar kingship. The placement of the uraeus on the royal brow identifies the king with the sun-god and equips him with the Eye's protective force.

The lioness symbolizes the destructive and wandering Eye. Sekhmet, Tefnut, and the other lioness-goddesses embody the Eye's dangerous power — the raging desert predator whose fury must be cooled. The transformation of the lioness into the gentle cow-goddess Hathor or the cat Bastet, accomplished by pacification, symbolizes the conversion of destructive into benevolent power, the central movement of the Eye's mythology.

The Distant Goddess complex maps the Eye's mythology onto the geography and ecology of Egypt. The flight of the Eye into Nubia and her return bringing the inundation link the goddess to the southern source of the Nile flood and to the natural rhythm of the agricultural year. The Eye's departure is drought and disorder; her return is the life-giving flood. The myth thus encodes the dependence of Egypt on the inundation and the anxious management of the natural and divine forces on which life depended.

The arts of pacification — music, dance, drink, and persuasion — carry their own symbolism. The dangerous goddess is soothed not by force but by the instruments of festival joy: the sistrum and the menat sacred to Hathor, the offering of beer, the songs and dances of her cult. This symbolism makes the propitiation of the Eye a matter of celebration and pleasure, and it grounds the festivals of the dangerous goddess in the mythic necessity of cooling her rage. The cult of the Eye is thus the cult of turning danger into blessing through the arts of joy.

Cultural Context

The Eye of Ra developed within the solar theology that lay at the heart of Egyptian religion, and it integrated a wide range of goddesses, myths, and rituals into a single theological complex centered on the management of solar power.

The concept is attested from the earliest religious literature. The Pyramid Texts of the late Old Kingdom (c. 2400-2300 BCE) already invoke the Eye in connection with the sun-god and the uraeus. The Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead continue the theology, and the Book of the Heavenly Cow of the New Kingdom gives the Destruction of Mankind its fullest form. The Distant Goddess cycle, though drawing on older material, is preserved most completely in the late Demotic Myth of the Sun's Eye (Papyrus Leiden I 384, 2nd century CE) and in the Ptolemaic temple inscriptions of Edfu, Dendera, and Philae. The persistence and elaboration of the Eye-theology across nearly three millennia demonstrate its central place in Egyptian religion.

The Eye integrated a network of goddesses into a single theological structure. Hathor, Sekhmet, Tefnut, Wadjet, Bastet, Mehit, and others were all understood as forms or aspects of the Eye, related to one another as moods or states of a single solar goddess rather than as wholly separate deities. This integration reflects the characteristic Egyptian capacity to hold multiplicity and unity together — the many goddesses being aspects of the one Eye, just as the many gods could be aspects of the one sun-god. The Eye-theology thus provided a framework within which the lioness-goddesses, the cobra-goddesses, the cow-goddess, and the cat-goddess could be related and their cults coordinated.

The uraeus-theology connected the Eye to kingship. The rearing cobra on the royal brow, identified with the Eye, equipped the king with the protective solar power and identified him with the sun-god. The Two Ladies of the royal titulary — the cobra Wadjet of Lower Egypt and the vulture Nekhbet of Upper Egypt — and the broader iconography of royal protection drew on the Eye-theology, making the management of solar power a central concern of royal religion.

The Distant Goddess cycle linked the Eye to the natural and geographic order of Egypt. The flight of the goddess into Nubia and her return bringing the inundation connected the myth to the southern source of the Nile flood and to the agricultural year, and it gave theological expression to Egypt's dependence on the annual inundation. The cycle also reflected the cultural relationship between Egypt and Nubia, the southern land into which the goddess wandered and from which she was retrieved.

The ritual life of Egypt re-enacted the pacification of the Eye. The festivals of the dangerous goddesses — Hathor, Sekhmet, Bastet — featured the offering of beer, music, and dance, the very arts by which the raging goddess was soothed in myth. Herodotus's account of the boisterous festival of Bastet at Bubastis, with its enormous crowds and great consumption of wine, reflects the ritual propitiation of the dangerous goddess. The cult of the Eye, with its instruments of joy, secured the benevolent presence of the goddess and warded off her destructive aspect. The standard modern study of the Distant Goddess complex, Inconnu-Bocquillon's Le mythe de la déesse lointaine à Philae (2001), traces the integration of myth, ritual, and temple cult in the late period, when the Eye-theology reached its fullest elaboration.

Cross-Tradition Parallels

The Eye of Ra belongs to a structural archetype found across many traditions: divine power that goes forth from its source, becomes autonomous and dangerous, and must be soothed and recalled. The pattern of departure, rage, and pacification addresses a question every religion must answer: when divine power turns destructive, what restores it to benevolence? The Egyptian answer — music, beer, dance, and festival joy — is one response among many, and comparing it reveals what is particular to the Egyptian theology of dangerous power.

Hindu — Kali and the Battlefield Frenzy (Devi Mahatmya, c. 5th–7th century CE)

In the Devi Mahatmya, the goddess Kali springs from the forehead of Durga to destroy the demon armies but falls into a frenzy of destruction, devouring everything in sight. The gods cannot stop her until Shiva throws himself beneath her feet; stepping on her consort, she stops in shock and grief, her tongue extended in the gesture that has become her most famous iconographic form. The structural parallel with the Eye of Ra is close: a female divine power dispatched to destroy an enemy falls into autonomous destructive rage requiring a supplementary act to halt it. But the mechanisms differ. The Eye of Ra is pacified by intoxication — the dangerous goddess turned from destruction by flooding the fields with red beer. Kali is stopped by the physical intervention of Shiva. Egyptian theology trusts that the goddess can be soothed through festival arts; the Hindu tradition requires that the male divine absorb her force by offering his own body as a brake.

Japanese — Amaterasu's Withdrawal (Kojiki, 712 CE; Nihon Shoki, 720 CE)

The solar goddess Amaterasu withdrew into the heavenly cave after Susanoo defiled her weaving hall, plunging the world into darkness. The assembled gods restored her through communal spectacle — the dance of Amenouzume, raucous laughter, a mirror in which Amaterasu saw her own radiance. Like the Eye of Ra's cycle, this is a myth of dangerous solar absence and its cure through festival arts. But where the Eye of Ra is pacified through a specific ruse — the substitution of beer for blood — Amaterasu is drawn back by curiosity about collective joy. The Egyptian goddess is tricked; the Japanese goddess is seduced by spectacle. Both traditions understand that celebration can do what force cannot, but the Egyptian version relies on deception while the Japanese version relies on attraction.

Mesopotamian — Inanna's Descent and the Abandonment of the Upper World (Sumerian, c. 2000 BCE)

When Inanna descends to the underworld, she leaves her power at each of the seven gates, and in her absence the world above ceases to generate: animals stop mating, humans lose the desire to reproduce. Her absence is not rage but departure — a structural parallel to the Distant Goddess cycle, in which the Eye's flight to Nubia causes Egypt to languish. Both traditions encode the same insight: the dangerous goddess and the fertile goddess are the same power, and her absence is as catastrophic as her raging presence. But the Mesopotamian tradition frames the dangerous power as the goddess's full divine nature (she descends to confront her dark double Ereshkigal), while the Egyptian tradition frames it as the Eye's untethered extension from the sun-god, dangerous specifically because it has separated from its source.

Norse — Skadi and the Laughter Cure (Prose Edda, c. 1220 CE)

The giantess Skadi arrives at Asgard in full armor, demanding compensation for her father's death. The gods must make her laugh — a seemingly impossible condition for a figure armored for war and grief. Loki ties his beard to a goat's beard and pulls until Skadi laughs despite herself. The structural echo is clear: a dangerous female power in a state of rage or grief is returned to relationship with the divine community through absurdity and humor rather than force. Both traditions understand that a laughing goddess is a reconciled one, and that the arts of comedy are the appropriate tools for managing divine wrath. The Norse version uses physical comedy; the Egyptian uses intoxication and festival. Both place the burden of pacification on the arts of joy.

Modern Influence

The Eye of Ra has influenced the modern world through scholarship, through popular culture and esoteric traditions, and through its frequent confusion and conflation with the Eye of Horus, with which it shares the general status of an Egyptian protective solar symbol.

In the academic study of Egyptian religion, the Eye of Ra and the associated Distant Goddess complex became a major focus of research in the 20th and 21st centuries. The integration of multiple goddesses into a single solar Eye, the pattern of rage and pacification, and the connection of the myth to the inundation and to Egyptian-Nubian geography have been studied as central features of Egyptian theology. Inconnu-Bocquillon's Le mythe de la déesse lointaine à Philae (2001) is the standard study of the Distant Goddess cycle, and the Eye-theology is treated extensively in works on Egyptian goddesses, solar religion, and temple cult.

In popular culture, the Eye of Ra has become among the most widely recognized Egyptian symbols, though it is frequently confused with the Eye of Horus, and the two are often conflated under the general image of the 'Egyptian eye.' The Eye of Ra appears in jewelry, tattoos, film, video games, and fantasy literature as a symbol of solar power, protection, and ancient mystery. The distinction between the two eyes — the Eye of Ra as the fiery feminine extension of the sun-god, the Eye of Horus as the healed eye of the falcon-god — is generally lost in popular usage, where both function simply as Egyptian protective symbols.

In modern esoteric and occult traditions, the Eye of Ra has been adopted as a symbol of divine sight, hidden knowledge, and solar power, often combined with other ancient and pseudo-ancient imagery. The 'Eye of Providence' of Western iconography, the eye within a triangle, has sometimes been conflated with the Egyptian eye-symbols in popular and conspiratorial literature, though the two have no historical connection. The Eye of Ra has thus entered the broad modern vocabulary of esoteric symbolism, where its precise Egyptian meaning is generally subordinated to a vaguer sense of ancient mystical power.

The figure of the dangerous goddess — the raging lioness Sekhmet, the wandering Eye who must be pacified — has attracted attention in feminist and Jungian readings of mythology, where the Eye's combination of destructive and protective power, and the pattern of rage and reconciliation, have been read as expressions of feminine power and its management in a patriarchal cosmos. Sekhmet in particular has been adopted as a figure of fierce feminine strength in modern goddess-spirituality and neo-pagan traditions.

The Eye-theology has also informed the modern understanding of Egyptian festival religion. The recognition that the festivals of the dangerous goddesses, with their beer, music, and dance, re-enacted the mythic pacification of the Eye has shaped the interpretation of Egyptian ritual and of the archaeological evidence for festival drinking, and it has featured in popular accounts of ancient Egyptian celebration and the religious uses of intoxication. The Eye of Ra thus continues to influence the modern world both as a scholarly subject and as a living symbol, its ancient theology of solar power and dangerous femininity persisting in altered forms in contemporary culture.

Primary Sources

The Eye of Ra is attested from the earliest Egyptian religious literature through the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, and it appears in several distinct but related mythological clusters.

The Pyramid Texts of the late Old Kingdom (c. 2400–2300 BCE) provide the earliest sustained attestations of the Eye theology, including the episode of the Eye's return and placement on the brow of the creator as the uraeus (Utterance 301, 519, 524). The creator Atum's dispatching of the Eye to find Shu and Tefnut, and the subsequent rivalry between the returning Eye and its replacement, is attested in Coffin Texts sources and later mythological texts rather than in a single Pyramid Texts utterance; Utterance 600 concerns the Heliopolitan cosmogony of Atum on the benben creating Shu and Tefnut, but the Eye-dispatch narrative proper is elaborated in later corpora. The standard editions are: ed. R.O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Oxford University Press, 1969); James P. Allen, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (SBL Writings from the Ancient World 23, Society of Biblical Literature, 2005).

The Destruction of Mankind, the episode in which the Eye descends as Hathor-Sekhmet to slaughter rebellious humanity, appears in its fullest narrative form in the Book of the Heavenly Cow, attested in the tombs of Seti I (KV17, c. 1290 BCE), Ramesses II, Ramesses III, and Ramesses VI, and partially on the outermost shrine of Tutankhamun (c. 1325 BCE). Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, translated by David Lorton (Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 148–153, provides the standard English treatment. A translation of the Destruction of Mankind section appears in William Kelly Simpson (ed.), The Literature of Ancient Egypt (Yale University Press, 3rd ed., 2003).

The Coffin Texts (Middle Kingdom; ed. R.O. Faulkner, 3 vols., Aris & Phillips, 1973–78) contain multiple Eye-of-Ra spells, including material on the Eye's solar protective function and its identification with Hathor and Sekhmet. Spells addressing the Eye's solar protective function and its identification with various goddesses appear throughout the corpus. The Book of the Dead (New Kingdom onward; trans. R.O. Faulkner, British Museum Press, 1985, ed. Carol Andrews) continues this tradition; Spells 162–165 concern the solar Eye as a protective amulet.

The fullest narrative of the Distant Goddess cycle — in which the Eye-goddess flees to Nubia and is retrieved by Thoth or Shu — is preserved in the Demotic Myth of the Sun's Eye (Papyrus Leiden I 384, 2nd century CE), a text of the Roman period. The standard edition and translation is the study by Danielle Inconnu-Bocquillon, Le mythe de la déesse lointaine à Philae (Bibliothèque d'étude 132, Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale, Cairo, 2001), which covers the Leiden papyrus and the related Ptolemaic temple inscriptions at Philae, Edfu, and Dendera in detail, demonstrating the long development of the Distant Goddess complex. Herodotus, Histories Book II.59–60 (Loeb Classical Library; trans. A.D. Godley, 1920), describes the boisterous festival of Bastet at Bubastis, offering a classical witness to the popular cultic dimension of the Eye-goddess worship.

Significance

The Eye of Ra is one of the richest and most theologically productive concepts in Egyptian religion, generating a network of goddesses, myths, and rituals organized around the management of the dangerous and protective power of the sun. Its significance lies in what it reveals about Egyptian solar theology, about the conception of divine femininity, and about the central religious task of containing and directing dangerous power.

The Eye expresses the Egyptian understanding of solar power as active, mobile, and dual. The sun-god is the source, but the Eye is the power that goes forth to act in the world — and that power is inherently ambivalent, capable of nourishing and protecting or of scorching and destroying. The recurring mythological pattern of the Eye's rage and pacification dramatizes the perpetual task of managing this dual power, turning destruction into protection and danger into blessing. This task lies at the heart of Egyptian kingship and cult, and the Eye-theology gives it its fullest mythological expression.

The integration of multiple goddesses into a single Eye illuminates the characteristic Egyptian capacity to hold multiplicity and unity together. Hathor, Sekhmet, Tefnut, Wadjet, Bastet, and the others are forms or moods of the one Eye, related as states of a single solar goddess. This theological structure, parallel to the integration of the many gods as aspects of the one sun-god, is one of the distinctive features of Egyptian religion, and the Eye is its clearest instance in the realm of the goddesses.

The Distant Goddess cycle connects the Eye to the natural and geographic order of Egypt. The flight of the goddess into Nubia and her return bringing the inundation give theological expression to Egypt's dependence on the annual flood and to the relationship between Egypt and the southern lands. The myth grounds the cosmic theology of the Eye in the ecological reality of the Nile valley, making the management of the goddess a matter of the land's very survival.

The Eye-theology underlies a major strand of Egyptian ritual. The festivals of the dangerous goddesses, with their offerings of beer, music, and dance, re-enacted the mythic pacification of the Eye and secured the benevolent presence of the goddess for the land. The cult of the Eye, turning danger into blessing through the arts of joy, was a central feature of Egyptian festival religion, and its study illuminates the relationship between myth and ritual in Egyptian practice.

Finally, the Eye of Ra is essential for distinguishing the two great Egyptian eye-symbols. As the fiery feminine extension of the sun-god, the Eye of Ra belongs to a wholly different mythological complex from the Eye of Horus, the healed eye of the falcon-god used as a protective amulet. The confusion of the two in popular culture has obscured a fundamental distinction in Egyptian theology, and the recovery of the Eye of Ra as a distinct concept is necessary for an accurate understanding of Egyptian religion.

Connections

Ra in the deities section covers the sun-god whose Eye the goddess is — her source and the power from whom she goes forth. The Eye is the active extension of Ra, and the entire theology is organized around the relationship between the sun-god and his Eye.

Hathor and Sekhmet in the deities section cover the two principal forms of the Eye — the gentle cow-goddess and the raging lioness — whose identity as a single goddess in two moods is central to the Eye-theology. Tefnut in the deities section covers the lioness-goddess identified with the wandering Eye of the Distant Goddess cycle.

Wadjet in the deities section covers the cobra-goddess identified with the protective Eye in its form as the uraeus, the fire-spitting serpent on the brow of the sun-god and the king.

Thoth in the deities section covers the god most often sent to retrieve the wandering Eye in the Distant Goddess cycle, soothing her rage with cunning and persuasion.

The Destruction of Mankind in the mythology section covers the episode in which the Eye, as Hathor-Sekhmet, slaughters rebellious humanity and is pacified with red beer — the fullest narrative of the Eye's destructive power. The Book of the Heavenly Cow in the mythology section covers the New Kingdom royal composition in which this episode appears.

The Eye of Ra Cycle in the mythology section covers the group of myths in which the solar Eye flees to Nubia, is sought and retrieved, and returns to pacify and fertilize Egypt — the Distant Goddess complex of which the Eye is the central figure.

The Eye of Horus in the mythology section covers the separate and distinct eye-complex of the falcon-god Horus, the eye damaged by Set and healed by Thoth, used as the supreme protective amulet — distinguished from the Eye of Ra, which belongs to a different myth.

Atum in the deities section covers the creator who first sent forth the Eye to find his lost children and who set it on his brow as the uraeus, the episode that establishes the Eye as the protective serpent of the sun-god and the king.

The Book of the Heavenly Cow in the mythology section covers the New Kingdom royal composition in which the Eye, as Hathor-Sekhmet, slaughters rebellious humanity and is pacified with red beer, the fullest narrative of the Eye's destructive power and its pacification.

Apep, the serpent of chaos who attacks the solar bark each night, is the enemy against whom the Eye, as the fiery uraeus, defends the sun-god, the perpetual adversary whose nightly defeat the Eye helps to secure.

Further Reading