by Sally Miles
Hathor’s horns and sun disk face out toward us. Her eye, that familiar almond shape with elongated brow and eyeline – that faces out too, while her head is in complete and perfect profile.
How beautiful is your face! You appear in your sanctuary, Hathor the Great.
This is the goddess in her cow manifestation. Four sturdy but delicate hooves. A tail draped long, almost touching the ground. The Egyptian artisans were masters of low relief, works of great elegance in stone. The lines are all grace. The colors are soft. Ochre, buff, pale tan, nothing harsh or bleached white. All is alive here, even in the flatness of stone. This one is labelled “Hathor suckles Hatshepset.” The goddess and the queen.
I invoke your statue with the sacred texts. I exalt your ka to the height of heaven. I praise your statue …
The sun lights Hathor’s spine with a pale sweep and casts a slender shadow beneath her belly where we discover a small person given milk from her udders. It’s hard to tell – is Hatshepsut a child or a grown woman? She’s small next to this goddess, who is heaven and earth, ruler and creator, bringer of the fertile inundations.
You cause the flood flowing downriver in its season … You cause the sky to bring forth the northern wind, You cause the watered earth to close over the seed …
I like to think of Hatshepsut as a child. She wakes up early this morning, puts on her favorite necklace, adjusts her special cobra cap before the mirror. She sneaks out of the royal household before anyone else is awake. She relishes her natural child nakedness in the heat of Thebes. Her future, and history, that’s out ahead of her. And it will all come fast enough: marriage to her half-brother, Great Royal Wife, then Regent, then Queen. She’ll claim Pharoah as her title, one of the few female Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. She’ll be known as the temple builder. When she dies, they’ll try to take her out of history, scratch her name and face from the temple. But this morning she knows nothing of that. She plays, she runs, she still laughs and delights in mischief. Still drinks in as much as she can of Hathor’s divinity.
Come! The procession is in the place of inebriation …The girls rejoice for you with garlands…
It’s a photograph but I’m telling you a scent shimmers off this stone. A scent made of heat and sun and dust and sand and light. From the west bank of the Nile, it has defied time and space, thousands of years, thousands of miles, and become perfumed revelation for a woman living here, now, in a cold climate, in her house of wood and central heating.
The sky and the stars are rejoicing for you… The entire land praises you… Millions open their arms for you, hundreds of thousands kiss the ground for you.
The photo draws me back again and again. Is it purely the pleasure of looking? The beauty and grace of the image? It’s always more than that. I’m as fascinated by its power to draw as the image itself. Looking becomes slow study, taking in, perceiving the story that dwells in the images. Poring over library books about Hathor and Hatshepsut.
… seeing you each day, regularly, our hearts are pleased … you are the lady of prayers, the mistress of the library …
And last, in a strange turn, I discover that while I was taken up with study, this image had begun to work on me. Beneath the history, the craftmanship, the art, lies something much more. The studying self dissolves. Hathor and the queen who built her temple have taken up residence in me, in a place that sat vacant and patient for years. Unity envelops me. Not just within myself, but between myself and the All. I don’t seek explanations. It’s simply true. I return to look at Hathor/Hatshepsut and the feeling comes again and again.
There is the presence of a time marker now. There is the time before and the time after. Before, I was the woman in the wooden house, in the cold and barren interior, in the time before the perfumed image. In the time after, life has broadened, and has the feel of deep historical time, extending back beyond my lifetime, but part of me. This is new and not yet understood. Something very old wants to live again now, in this time. On this side of the time marker, I am the woman who learns she has an ancient soul. A soul re-awakened by the heat and the incantatory scent. The soul hears the call to the temple. She moves with the ancient dancers. She brings offerings under the cloudless Egyptian sky. Witnesses the birth of a new sun, and a new earth, where new life grows.
Hail to you … Bright One … Secret one of form, hidden one of image …
Italicized lines are from “Hymns to Hathor,” https://www.attalus.org/egypt/hathorhymn.html#D
How beautiful…; I invoke…; The sky and the stars…; Hail to you… from: “The beautiful face of Hathor.” Various locations at Dendera. Translated by B.A. Richter, “The Theology of Hathor of Dendera” (2016)
You cause the flood… from: “The Egyptian Agricultural Cycle.” On a doorpost of the temple at Dendera. Translated by S. Sauneron, “Une page de géographie physique: Le cycle Agricole égyptien” (BIFAO, 1960)
Come! The procession is … from: ‘Hathor Returns to Medamûd’. In the central kiosk at the entrance of the temple at Medamûd. Translated by J.C. Darnell, “Hathor Returns to Medamûd” (SAK, 1995)
Sally Miles paints, makes mixed media art and more recently, has fallen into the bottomless pool of wonder that is the art and culture of Ancient Egypt. She writes about art, spiritual experience and our relationship with plants, and has recently been published in The Ekphrastic Review.
After the Art 