Ancient Egypt

Egyptian Gods and Goddesses

Hathor, Isis, and the Divine Feminine in Ancient Egypt

Hathor, Isis, Mut, Nephthys, and the divine feminine, the great goddesses of ancient Egypt and their roles as mothers, wives, queens, and protectors.

Hathor, Isis, and the Divine Feminine in Ancient Egypt

The Egyptian pantheon included an extraordinary number of powerful goddesses. They were queens, mothers, magicians, warriors, and protectors, and the surviving evidence suggests the Egyptians were less anxious about feminine divine power than almost any other ancient Mediterranean culture. The standard reference remains Richard H. Wilkinson’s The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (2003), and the best treatment of the political side of goddess worship is still Gay Robins’s Women in Ancient Egypt (1993). They were worshipped at the state level in the great temples of Thebes and Dendera, and at the household level in small shrines in the homes of ordinary Egyptians. They were the patrons of queens and the protectors of children. They were the divine counterparts of the king, and in some cases, they were the king, for several pharaohs of the New Kingdom were women who ruled as goddesses incarnate.

This page introduces the divine feminine of ancient Egypt. For a broader view, see the cluster page on Isis, Hathor, and the Family and Protector Gods.

Hathor: The Great Goddess of Love, Joy, and Motherhood

Hathor was one of the oldest and most beloved of the Egyptian goddesses. Her cult dates back to the Predynastic Period, and her image is found in tombs and temples across the country. She was the goddess of love, music, dancing, joy, fertility, and motherhood, and she was said to be present wherever women gathered, wherever children were born, and wherever the dead were welcomed into the afterlife.

Hathor was usually shown as:

  • A woman with the horns of a cow on her head, often with a sun disk between the horns
  • A cow, lying on a standard, or standing in a papyrus thicket
  • A woman with cow horns and a headdress of feathers

Her most common headdress, the cow horns and sun disk, became a kind of divine crown, and was borrowed by several other goddesses, including Isis and Nut.

Hathor at Dendera

The main cult center of Hathor was at Dendera, in Upper Egypt, where the great Temple of Hathor still stands. The temple was built in the late Ptolemaic and Roman periods, on the site of an older temple that had existed for thousands of years. The temple is famous for:

  • Its astronomical ceiling, decorated with the sky goddess Nut and the constellations
  • Its crypts, where the most sacred cult objects were kept
  • The Birth House at the back of the temple, decorated with scenes of the divine birth of Isis
  • The famous Dendera light relief, which some have interpreted as an image of an electric lightbulb

The temple was in use until the fifth century CE, making it one of the last great temples of Egypt.

Isis: The Queen of Heaven

Isis was the wife of Osiris, the mother of Horus, and the most powerful magician in the Egyptian pantheon. To read the full story of her life, see The Myth of Osiris, Isis, and Set.

As a goddess of the divine feminine, Isis was the model for the queen. She was the mother, the wife, the supporter of the king, and the protector of the household. Her image, the mother holding her child on her lap, became the most enduring image of Egyptian goddess worship, and it was later borrowed by early Christian art to depict the Virgin Mary and Jesus.

Isis was also the goddess of magic. She knew the secret name of Ra, and she used it to perform miracles. She taught the people the arts of civilization: healing, weaving, agriculture, and the proper form of the gods’ names. She was the patron of healers, midwives, and the sick.

The Cult of Isis in the Mediterranean

The cult of Isis spread across the ancient world. By the Ptolemaic period, temples to Isis stood in Athens, Delos, Rome, and Gaul. In Rome, the Temple of Isis on the Campus Martius was one of the most important religious buildings in the city. Her image, the mother holding her child, was carried by travelers and soldiers across the empire.

In the early Christian period, the cult of Isis was one of the last great pagan religions to be suppressed. Her temple on the island of Philae, in southern Egypt, was closed by imperial decree in 537 CE, the last major Egyptian temple to be active. To see how the cult of Isis spread to the Mediterranean, see the Persian and Greek Influence page.

Mut: The Mother of Thebes

Mut was the wife of Amun and the mother of Khonsu in the Theban triad. Her name means “mother,” and she was the great mother goddess of Thebes during the New Kingdom.

Mut was shown as:

  • A woman wearing the Double Crown of Upper and Lower Egypt
  • A vulture, the symbol of motherhood in Egypt
  • A woman with the head of a vulture

Her temple at Karnak was the second-largest temple at Karnak, after the great temple of Amun. It was built by Amenhotep III in the 18th Dynasty and added to by several later kings. The sacred lake at the temple was home to a sacred goose, which the Egyptians believed was a manifestation of the goddess.

Nephthys: The Silent Sister

Nephthys was the sister of Isis and the wife of Set. In the myth of Osiris, she plays a small but poignant role: she stands beside Isis as they mourn Osiris, and in some versions she helps Isis find the scattered pieces of his body.

In the divine feminine, Nephthys represents the edges, the night, the boundaries, the mourning at the limits of life. She is the goddess of death and of the household, of the marriage bed and the funerary rites. She is sometimes credited as the mother of Anubis, conceived in a brief union with Osiris during the search for his body.

Nephthys is often shown as a hawk or as a woman with the hieroglyph of her name on her head. In the Book of the Dead, she is present at the judgement of the dead, standing beside Isis to support the deceased.

The Queens of Egypt and the Divine Feminine

The royal women of Egypt were the earthly counterparts of the divine feminine. From the early dynastic period onward, the queen was associated with Isis, and the queen mother was associated with Mut or Hathor. The king’s chief wife held the title Great Royal Wife, and her image was often shown beside the king’s in temples and tombs.

Several Egyptian queens took this identification further. The most famous of them was Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt in the early 15th century BCE as a full pharaoh, and who built the great Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari. In her temple, she is shown being suckled by Hathor, identifying her with the divine child of the cow-goddess. To learn more, see our guide to the woman who became pharaoh.

Other royal women who embodied the divine feminine include:

  • Nefertiti, the queen of Akhenaten, who was identified with the Aten
  • Nefertari, the queen of Ramesses II, whose tomb in the Valley of the Queens is one of the most beautiful in Egypt
  • Cleopatra VII, the last queen of Egypt, who identified herself with Isis and ruled Egypt as a goddess incarnate

To learn more about the queens of the New Kingdom, see the Queens of the New Kingdom page.

Goddess Triads

The divine feminine was often organized in triads, three gods who were a family and a group. The most important of these were:

  • The Theban triad, Amun, Mut, and Khonsu
  • The Osiris triad, Osiris, Isis, and Horus
  • The Heliopolitan triad, Atum, Shu, and Tefnut
  • The Memphis triad, Ptah, Sekhmet, and Nefertem

Each triad had a father, a mother, and a child, mirroring the structure of the human family. The divine feminine was the center of each family, and her role was both practical and mystical.

The Divine Feminine in Daily Life

The goddesses were not only state deities, they were also the gods of the household. The Egyptians had small shrines in their homes dedicated to Bes and Taweret, and women wore amulets of Isis, Hathor, and Bastet for protection. Mothers called on the divine feminine in moments of danger, and they sang lullabies in which Isis and Hathor were asked to guard their children.

In the Westcar Papyrus, a Middle Kingdom story collection, the divine feminine plays a central role. The stories tell of magicians and gods who intervene in human affairs, and several of the stories feature goddesses who help women in labor or who warn the king of danger.

The Egyptians believed that the divine feminine was not a separate realm but a part of the whole. The goddesses were the counterparts of the gods, the queens of the kings, the mothers of the children, and the protectors of the dead.

The Survival of the Divine Feminine

After the rise of Christianity, the cult of the Egyptian goddesses was suppressed, but the image of the divine feminine did not disappear. The image of Isis holding her child was absorbed into Christian iconography as the image of the Virgin Mary holding Jesus. The cult of the Egyptian goddesses may also have influenced the cult of the Catholic saints, especially the Virgin Mary.

To see how the cult of Isis merged with the cult of Mary, see the Late Period and the Persian and Greek Influence page. The iconographic transfer from Isis to Mary is one of the most striking examples of religious continuity between pharaonic Egypt and the Christian Mediterranean, and the case for substantial influence is much stronger than the case for symbolic coincidence.