Sekhmet

← Encyclopedia

A granodiorite figure sits with its hands flat on its knees, the body of a tall woman, the head of a lion, a sun-disk set above the brow and a cobra rising at its front. There are more than thirty of them in one London gallery alone, and they were not carved one at a time. They were quarried, shaped, and erected by the hundred, an army of seated lionesses, and every one of them is the same goddess: Sekhmet, whose name is built from the word sekhem, power, and means, with no softening, “the Powerful.” She is the heat of the sun turned into a weapon. She is the goddess the other gods were afraid of.

The lioness of Memphis

In the theology of Memphis, the old capital at the apex of the Delta, the gods were arranged in a household. The craftsman-creator Ptah stood at its head; his consort was Sekhmet; their son was Nefertem, the god who rose as the blue lotus from the primal waters at the first dawn. This triad — father, lioness, lotus-child — was the divine family of Memphis, and it set Sekhmet beside the very god who had spoken the world into being. The pairing is exact in its logic. Ptah makes; Sekhmet unmakes; Nefertem is the fragile, beautiful thing that comes up out of the dark afterward. The power that fashions and the power that destroys were kept in the same house.

Her body is the standard hieroglyph of dangerous divinity: a woman’s frame, a lioness’s head, the solar disk and the uraeus serpent above her face. The lion was the right animal. Egyptians knew the lioness as the hunter of the pride, the one who actually killed, and they read into her the desert that pressed on the cultivated valley from both sides — the place of heat, lack, and death. To give a goddess that head was to say what she was before any myth was told about her.

Sekhmet, lion-headed and crowned with the solar disk and uraeus, after New Kingdom tomb painting. Drawing by Jeff Dahl, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Above all, she was one of the forms of the Eye of Ra. In the Egyptian frame the sun-god does not act on the world directly when he means to harm it; he sends out the Eye, the fierce feminine power that is at once his daughter, his weapon, and a goddess in her own right. The Eye can be many goddesses — Hathor, Bastet, Wadjet, Tefnut — and the difference between them is the difference between the moods of a single force. When the Eye is gentle, nourishing, the bringer of love and music, she is Hathor. When the Eye is loosed to kill, she is Sekhmet. They are not strangers to each other. They are the same power, turned two different ways, and the myth that defines Sekhmet is precisely the story of one becoming the other.

The Eye is also, in the older cosmology, the disk of the sun itself — the burning circle that the goddess wears above her brow is not a crown set on her but the thing she is. To stand under the noon sun in the Egyptian summer is to stand under Sekhmet, and the uraeus, the rearing cobra that spits fire at the king’s enemies, is one more face of the same feminine heat. The Egyptians who carved the disk and the serpent over her lion’s head were not decorating her. They were naming, in three signs, the single force that gives life from the sky and takes it from the sand.

The destruction of mankind

The story is preserved in the text Egyptologists call the Book of the Heavenly Cow, whose earliest fragment was found on a gilded shrine in the tomb of Tutankhamun and whose full versions cover the walls of side-chambers in the royal tombs of Seti I, Ramesses II, and Ramesses III. It is one of the very few extended myths the Egyptians wrote out as a continuous narrative, and it accounts for nothing less than the broken condition of the world.

Ra, the sun-god, has grown old. His bones have turned to silver, his flesh to gold, his hair to lapis lazuli, and humanity — whom he made — begins to plot against him, muttering that the king of the gods is past his strength. Ra summons the elder gods in secret council, the primordial waters of Nun among them, and asks what should be done. Their counsel is to send out his Eye against the rebels. So the Eye descends as the goddess — Hathor in the text, Sekhmet in her killing aspect — and she falls upon mankind in the desert and slaughters them, and wades in their blood. And here the story turns on a single, terrible detail: she finds that she likes it. When Ra, having made his point, decides that enough have died and that he will protect the remainder, the goddess will not stop. She has tasted blood and she means to drink the species dry. “I have overpowered mankind,” she says in the text, “and it was sweet to my heart.” The instrument has exceeded the intention. The Eye has become uncontrollable.

What stops her is a trick, not a command — for she is now beyond commanding. Ra sends messengers running to Elephantine in the far south for red ochre, and orders the High Priest of Ra at Heliopolis to grind it together with great quantities of barley beer. Seven thousand jars are brewed and dyed the deep red of blood, and in the night the gods pour the flood out across the fields where Sekhmet will pass at dawn. She comes, she sees the land drowned in what looks like gore, she is delighted; she bends to drink, and drinks, and drinks, until she is too drunk to recognize a single human face. The slaughter stops because the goddess passes out. Mankind survives by a hangover.

It is one of the oldest accounts in the world of why human beings are not all dead and not all good — a world spared by intoxication rather than by mercy, in which the goddess who would have finished the job is simply diverted from it. The Egyptians did not forget the lesson. The annual “festival of drunkenness,” at which celebrants drank to excess and then danced and made music before the goddess, re-enacted the pacifying of Sekhmet: the deliberate, ritual repetition of the one thing that had once turned the killer aside. Excavations at the temple of Mut have turned up the apparatus of these festivals, attended, the texts suggest, by great crowds.

Two statues of Sekhmet from the reign of Amenhotep III, originally from his Theban temple, later moved to the precinct of Mut at Karnak; now in the Louvre. Photo by Janmad, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

Plague, and its cure

Out of this myth comes the role that made Sekhmet matter to ordinary Egyptians every day: she was the goddess of pestilence. The same heat that had wasted humanity in the desert was loosed, year by year, as epidemic disease and the burning wind. Plague was understood as Sekhmet’s arrows, and the agents who carried it were her messengers — a host sometimes called the Slaughterers of Sekhmet, demonic emissaries who went out at the turning of the year, the dangerous days at the end of one cycle and the start of the next, to spread fever and death. The opening of the year was therefore a season of acute danger, when the goddess’s anger was nearest, and much of the magic of the calendar was aimed at getting through it.

And here the Egyptian logic completes its circle. If Sekhmet sends the plague, then Sekhmet, and no other, can call it back. The power that wounds is the power that heals; they are not opposites but the same force, faced toward the supplicant or away. So the goddess of pestilence was, by the same token, a goddess of medicine — invoked in incantations to drive out the very fevers her messengers had brought. Egyptian healing did not separate the physical from the magical: the heka, the operative word of power, worked alongside the drug and the splint, and over all of it stood the cosmic order, maat, which disease was understood to violate and the healer to restore.

This bound her priesthood to the practice of medicine. The Egyptian physician was the swnw; alongside him worked the magician-healer and, importantly, the wab or “pure” priest of Sekhmet, a class of temple-trained healers attached to her cult. The distinction was real but porous: a man could be swnw and wab-priest of Sekhmet at once, and the medical and the priestly readings of a body were not rival diagnoses but two registers of the same examination. Scholarship that has tracked the origins of the doctor in Egypt finds the priest of Sekhmet standing at the head of one of the oldest healing lineages in the world, a figure who was at once cleric and clinician, reading omens and binding wounds. Some of this learning was housed in the per ankh, the “House of Life” attached to the great temples, where the medical papyri were copied and consulted alongside the ritual texts.

The papyri themselves preserve the join. Recipes and spells stand side by side; a remedy is ground and applied, and an incantation is spoken over it, and one of the spells in the surgical and gynecological texts has the healer declare that he comes with the magic of Sekhmet herself in his hands. The swnw might invoke the goddess over a patient as readily as he set a fracture. To heal under her power was to ask the destroyer, directly, to turn her face away — to address the source of the disease as its only possible cure. The Egyptians called her, in the same breath, “lady of terror” and “lady of life,” and saw no contradiction in it. To hold the power of death is to hold the power to withhold it.

The seven hundred lionesses

The most extraordinary monument to this fear and this need was raised in the fourteenth century BCE by Amenhotep III, the king under whom Egypt reached the summit of its wealth — and whose son would become the heretic Akhenaten. At his vast mortuary temple on the west bank at Thebes, the site now called Kom el-Hettan, and at the temple of Mut at Karnak across the river, Amenhotep set up statues of Sekhmet on a scale never attempted before or since: by the usual count around seven hundred of them, and quite possibly more, of black granite and granodiorite, each a seated or standing lioness larger than life.

The number is not arbitrary. The standard reading is that there were two statues for every day of the year — one seated, one standing, a Sekhmet of the day and a Sekhmet of the night — so that the king’s craftsmen had built, in stone, a complete ritual calendar. A litany could be recited before a different pair of statues every day and every night of the year, an unbroken cycle of appeasement, so that the goddess’s anger should never accumulate, so that the dangerous turning of each day, like the dangerous turning of the year, should always find her already propitiated. It was an attempt to manage a goddess on an industrial scale — to outlast her fury by sheer, calendrical persistence. Scholars have connected the program to a particular crisis, perhaps an epidemic in the king’s later reign, when so vast a fence of lionesses against the plague would have answered a real terror.

Relief of Sekhmet at the temple of Kom Ombo. Photo by Rémih, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

After Amenhotep’s reign the statues were moved, dispersed, and reused. The priest-king Pinudjem I shifted many of them, centuries later, into the precinct of Mut at Karnak, where rows of seated lionesses still face the visitor today; others were usurped by later pharaohs who cut their own names into the thrones — the goddess herself untouched beneath the changed cartouche.

Afterlife

The statues that survived the millennia did not stay together. When European collectors and museums began carrying off the antiquities of Egypt in the nineteenth century, the seated lionesses of Amenhotep III were among the most portable of great sculptures — heavy, but single figures, and there were so many of them. They scattered. They sit now in London and Paris, in Turin and Berlin, in Boston and Cairo and a dozen cities besides, the largest single group outside Egypt held by the British Museum, where more than thirty of them, whole or broken, line the galleries. A goddess assembled as a single regiment of seven hundred has become a diaspora, one or two lionesses to a room, each one carrying, to a public that mostly cannot read it, the calm and frontal threat she was carved to carry.

Her magic outlasted her temples. The apotropaic spells against the messengers of Sekhmet, the amulets, the incantations of the swnw and the wab-priest, fed into the long stream of Egyptian healing-magic that the later world preserved — copied into Greek and demotic spellbooks, remembered in the magical papyri, the operative tradition that runs under so much of the Hellenistic and late-antique recourse to the names of the old gods. The lion-headed power kept its potency in the formula long after the priesthood that served her was gone.

What endured most clearly is the thing she was always built to say. The Egyptians did not split their world into a god of harm and a god of help and set them at war. They put the harm and the help in one body, gave it a lioness’s head, and understood that the heat which kills the harvest is the same sun that ripens it, that the breath which carries the plague is the breath that can be made to carry it away. Sekhmet is the most dangerous figure in the pantheon and the patroness of the people who saved lives, and these are not two facts about her. They are one fact, seen from the two sides a single power always has.

→ In the library: E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic (1899) · The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani), tr. Budge (1913)

→ Related: Ra · Hathor · Ptah · Memphis · Maat · Heka Egyptian Magic · The Egyptian Priesthood · Atum · Anubis · Duat · Thoth · Isis · Osiris · Horus · Amun · Heliopolis · Karnak Temple Complex · Luxor Temple · Pyramid Texts · Coffin Texts · The Ennead · Khnum · Thebes · Saqqara · Imhotep