Horus

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Horus is the falcon god of ancient Egypt — lord of the sky and patron of kingship, whose two eyes were the sun and the moon, and whose name the living pharaoh bore as the first of his titles. He is one of the oldest figures in the Egyptian pantheon, worshipped from before the unification of the country around 3100 BCE down to the close of pagan religion more than three thousand years later.

There was never a single Horus. The name covers a family of falcon deities worshipped in different places and ages, gradually drawn together. The earliest was Horus the Elder, a sky god whose body was the heavens and whose eyes were the two great lights — when one eye dimmed and recovered, it was the waning and waxing moon. To this very old god the developing myth of Osiris attached a second, more famous Horus: the posthumous son conceived by the goddess Isis from her murdered husband Osiris, hidden as an infant in the marshes of the Delta and raised to avenge his father. This is Horus the Child — the Greeks called him Harpocrates — and in him the two strands, sky god and divine heir, fused into the figure most often meant.

The myth that carries him is the contendings with Seth. Osiris, the rightful king, is killed by his brother Seth; Horus, grown to manhood, contests Seth for the throne in a long sequence of trials and combats before the assembled gods, and is at last awarded the kingship of Egypt while Osiris reigns over the dead. The story is, among other things, a charter for monarchy: every reigning pharaoh was understood as the living Horus, the legitimate son taking up his father’s seat, and at death became an Osiris in turn. Egyptian texts state this not as metaphor but as the order of things.

From the same myth comes the Eye of Horus — the wedjat, the eye said to have been torn out by Seth in their struggle and made whole again, which became Egypt’s most common amulet, a sign of healing, protection, and wholeness restored. His great temple at Edfu in Upper Egypt, raised under the Ptolemies, preserves on its walls a full account of his triumph over Seth; from there his consort Hathor of Dendera was carried upriver each year for a festival of their union.

When Greeks and Romans encountered Egyptian religion they read Horus through their own gods, identifying him with Apollo. Later esoteric writers, drawn to Egypt as a wellspring of hidden wisdom, returned often to the Isis–Osiris–Horus triad and to the imagery of the solar falcon; how much of genuine Egyptian doctrine those readings preserved, and how much they supplied, remains a matter the sources rarely settle cleanly. What the temple inscriptions themselves hold to is plain enough: the son recovers the father’s throne, and the wounded eye is made whole.

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