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. The name written in his hieroglyphs, Ḥr, carries the sense of the one who is far above, the distant and high — fitting for a god whose form is a falcon riding the upper air, the bird that climbs out of sight and sees the whole land at once.

There was never a single Horus

The name covers a family of falcon deities worshipped in different places and ages, gradually drawn together rather than descended from one another. The earliest was Horus the Elder — Haroeris to the Greeks — 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, the slain king of the Egyptian afterlife, hidden as an infant in the marshes of the Delta — at Chemmis, in the reed-thickets — and raised in secrecy to avenge his father. This is Horus the Child, Ḥr-pꜣ-ẖrd, Harsiese “Horus son of Isis”; the Greeks called the infant form Harpocrates, and in this fused figure the two strands — primeval sky god and divine heir — ran together into the Horus most often meant. Egyptian theology did not feel obliged to choose between them. A god could be the falcon whose eyes were sun and moon and also the vulnerable child stung by scorpions in the marsh, and the contradiction was no objection: it was the shape of a deity large enough to hold both the cosmos and a single threatened life.

The boy in the reeds is the older of the two ideas in narrative but the later in cult. The child-Horus appears already as a mythological figure in the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom and recurs in the medical papyri, where his exposure to snakebite and scorpion-sting in the Delta is the precedent for spells of healing. Yet Ḥr-pꜣ-ẖrd as an independent god with fixed iconography and an attested cult emerges only from the early Third Intermediate Period, around the eleventh to eighth centuries BCE, and reaches his height in the Ptolemaic and Roman ages, when he travels the Mediterranean with the cult of Isis and Serapis. The dedicated treatment of that child-god belongs under his Hellenized name.

The contendings as a charter for the throne

The myth that carries Horus is the contendings with Seth — the desert god, the red one, lord of storm and of the foreign lands, whom later piety made the murderer of his brother. (This Seth is the Egyptian deity; he is not the biblical patriarch who shares the spelling by accident.) Osiris, the rightful king, is killed by 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 fullest narrative survives in the Contendings of Horus and Seth, written on the first sixteen pages of Papyrus Chester Beatty I, a Twentieth-Dynasty manuscript from Thebes copied in the reign of Ramesses V (about 1149–1145 BCE) and now in Dublin. It reads, by turns, like a court transcript and a folktale: the eighty-year dispute is brought before the Ennead, presided over by Re-Horakhty, and the two claimants argue, scheme, and trade injuries while the tribunal wavers — Seth strong and favored by the sun god, Horus young and pressed by his tireless mother.

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; at death he became an Osiris in turn, and his successor the next living Horus. This was not poetry laid over politics but the order of things as the texts state it. The very first of the king’s five great names was the Horus name, written inside the serekh — a rectangle drawn as the niched façade of the royal palace, surmounted by the falcon. The convention reaches back to the dawn of the unified state: the serekh of Narmer, around 3100 BCE, already sets the falcon above the palace front, five hundred years before the cartouche. To write a king’s name that way was to say that Horus himself sat enthroned in the palace, and that the order won in the divine tribunal was renewed in every reign. When a king died, the rites that carried him into the next world drew on the funerary literature gathered in the Book of the Dead and its older strata; the dead king was an Osiris encircled, as the Pyramid Texts of Unas have it, by the protection of Horus’s own eye — and that protecting eye is itself a piece of the myth.

The eye torn out and made whole

From the same struggle comes the Eye of Horus — the wedjat, the eye said to have been seized or torn out by Seth and then restored, in most tellings by Thoth, the lunar god of reckoning and writing. The wounded and healed eye became Egypt’s commonest amulet, worn by the living and laid in their tombs, a sign of healing, protection, and wholeness given back after loss. Its very incompleteness is the point: the eye is shown not as a perfect circle but as a thing that was broken and made good, so that to wear it is to carry the assurance that what is damaged can be repaired. Later Egyptologists read the six elements of the drawn eye as a set of grain-measure fractions — a half, a quarter, and so down by halves to a sixty-fourth — which sum not quite to one; the missing part, on this reading, is supplied by Thoth, a tidy emblem of the idea that wholeness is never purely mechanical. The fractional decomposition is a modern proposal and is debated, but it sits well on a symbol whose whole meaning is restoration.

Healing was the eye’s domain on the ground as well. The child-Horus stung in the marsh and cured by Thoth was the mythic precedent for a class of protective stelae, the cippi of Horus, on which the naked child stands upon crocodiles, gripping snakes and scorpions — chaos mastered in the small body of the heir. Water poured over the inscribed spells took their power into itself and was drunk or laid on a wound. The largest and finest of these, the Metternich Stele, was carved in the reign of Nectanebo II in the fourth century BCE; in such objects the cosmic charter of kingship comes all the way down to the bedside of a stung child.

Edfu, and the falcon among the Greeks

His great temple stands at Edfu in Upper Egypt — Behdet, the seat of Horus the Behdetite, the falcon of the bright disk. The present building is the most complete temple to survive from pharaonic Egypt, and it is wholly a Ptolemaic work of the Hellenistic period: begun on 23 August 237 BCE under Ptolemy III Euergetes and finished only in 57 BCE under Ptolemy XII, the long labor interrupted by revolts in the south. Its walls carry, among much else, the “Triumph of Horus” — a dramatic cycle in which the god, harpoon in hand, hunts down Seth in the form of a hippopotamus and recovers his father’s kingdom. Buried for centuries under some twelve meters of drift sand and village rubble, which is why so much of it endured, Edfu was cleared by Auguste Mariette from 1860. Each year his consort Hathor of Dendera was carried upriver to him for the Festival of the Beautiful Reunion, her cult-image borne by barque for the fortnight’s journey so that the falcon of Edfu and the goddess of Dendera might be joined — a sacred marriage celebrated, unusually, in good part out of doors, where the people could see it.

When Greeks and Romans met Egyptian religion they read Horus through their own gods, and the falcon of the sun became Apollo. The equation is as old as Herodotus, who reports that the Egyptians’ Apollo is Horus, son of the god the Greeks called Dionysus and the goddess they called Demeter — Osiris and Isis; the last of Egypt’s divine kings, he writes, was this Apollo-Horus. The Greek name of Edfu, Apollonopolis Magna, fossilizes the identification in a city’s title. It was an honest reach across two pantheons rather than a mistranslation: a young, radiant, oracular son-god in each tradition, set against the unruly power his light overcomes.

§5b — Texts, editions, and the modern study of the god

The primary witnesses to Horus are spread across three thousand years of Egyptian writing and several languages of later commentary. The mythic narrative survives above all in the Contendings of Horus and Seth, edited by Alan Gardiner in The Library of A. Chester Beatty: The Chester Beatty Papyri, No. I (Oxford University Press, 1931); the standard study of the conflict cycle as a whole is J. Gwyn Griffiths, The Conflict of Horus and Seth (Liverpool University Press, 1960). The Greco-Roman framing of the Isis–Osiris–Horus triad turns on Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride (about 100 CE), whose modern critical edition is Griffiths again — Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride (University of Wales Press, 1970) — while the public-domain English of W. W. Goodwin (1870) and C. W. King (1882) remains the readily citable baseline. The standard reference portraits of the god stand in Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (Thames & Hudson, 2003), and the definitive monograph on the child-form is Annie Forgeau, Horus-fils-d’Isis: la jeunesse d’un dieu (Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, Bibliothèque d’étude 150, 2010), with Sandra Sandri’s Har-pa-chered (Harpokrates) (Peeters, 2006) the standard treatment of the cult’s genesis.

The royal and funerary frame in which Horus does his theological work is carried by the Egyptian mortuary corpus — the Pyramid Texts of the Old Kingdom, the Coffin Texts of the Middle, and the New Kingdom Book of Going Forth by Day. The Anglophone entry-point to that literature remains the corpus of E. A. Wallis Budge, whose translations are philologically superseded but historically load-bearing: his The Gods of the Egyptians (Methuen, 1904) and his translation of the Papyrus of Ani are public domain, and both his rendering of the Book of the Dead and his Egyptian Magic are held in the library here. They are best read against the modern critical editions — Kurt Sethe and James P. Allen for the Pyramid Texts, Adriaan de Buck for the Coffin Texts — which correct Budge’s diction and his comparative-religion frame at almost every turn.

The later return to the triad

Drawn to Egypt as a wellspring of hidden wisdom, later esoteric writers returned again and again to the Isis–Osiris–Horus triad and to the imagery of the solar falcon. The Hermetic literature that travels under the name of Hermes Trismegistus inherited an Egyptian temple-theology by way of the scribe-god Thoth, and the modern occult revival made the falcon and his child-form into ritual figures: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn paired a projective “Sign of the Enterer,” named for Horus, with a receptive “Sign of Silence,” named for Harpocrates, and Aleister Crowley set a falcon-headed Horus at the center of the new aeon he proclaimed in 1904. These later readings draw their Horus from the study of gnosis and its modern heirs as much as from any Nile sanctuary, and what they make of him answers to their own concerns; the falcon of the temples is a different and older thing.

What the temple inscriptions themselves hold to is plainer than any of its later echoes, and they end the matter where Horus’s own myth ends it. On the walls of Edfu the harpoon goes home, the usurper is driven from the land, and the falcon takes the seat that was his father’s. The eye that Seth tore out is brought back whole and offered up, and the order broken by a murder in the first generation is made good in the second: the son recovers the father’s throne, and the wounded eye is made whole.

→ In the library: Budge — The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani) · Budge — Egyptian Magic

→ Related: Dendera · Isis · Harpocrates · Serapis · Apollo · Ancient Egypt · Hermes Trismegistus · Book Of The Dead