Patron of: protection against snakes, scorpions and other dangerous animals.
Patron of: protection against snakes, scorpions and other dangerous animals.
Appearance: a woman with the head of a cheetah, her hair braided and ending in scorpion tails. Sometimes she wears a headdress of snakes.
Description: The ancient Egyptians revered felines as sacred for many centuries apparently, as Mafdet is a very old goddess, dating to around the First Dynasty. She was prayed to for protection against scorpion stings and snakebite, and invoked in healing rituals for those who had been afflicted by such.
Mafdet, "The Runner", was a panther goddess whose ferocity prevails over snakes and scorpions. the scratch of her claws is lethal to snakes, so symbolically the harpoon of the king becomes Mafdet's claws for decapitating his enemies in the Underworld. When Mafdet is described as leaping at the necks of snakes, the imagery seems to suggest her form takes on that of a mongoose. In one epithet, Mafdet wears braided locks, probably a reference to her displaying the jointed bodies of the scorpions which she has killed.
Mafdet was depicted in the Pyramid texts as killing a snake. Her fame came mainly in the Old Kingdom and not so much is known about her except that she stood for (official) power. She could appear as a lynx, a leopard or a cheetah, but normally she was shown as a woman dressed in a cat's skin. She fought snakes and scorpions and evildoers in general and could be seen as a cat climbing up a pool (by some said to be used for executions), and if so thereby manifesting the judicial authority.
In the early New Kingdom she is also depicted attending in the Judgment Hall, perhaps to take care of the legal consequences. Her name can possibly mean "runner" and she is mentioned on the Palermo Stone from the fifth dynasty. She was somehow identified with the dwarf god Bes. Her parents were (at least in the New Kingdom) - Amon and Mut.
Worship: As her cult was incredibly ancient but supplanted by that of Bast, it is unknown how widespread Mafdet's cult was.
The ferryman who navigates the boat, provided by Aken, along the winding waters of the Underworld. He also acts as a herald announcing the arrival of the king into the presence of the sun-god Re.
Similar to the Furies of Greek mythology being called "The Kindly Ones," Mahes was rarely referred to by name and was instead referred to as "The Lord of the Massacre.
Patron of: punishment of those who violate Maat, the universal order.
Appearance: a man with the head of a young lion, often shown carrying a knife.
Description: Another feline deity, Mahes was the son of Bast and Ptah and may be an Egyptian assimilation of the Nubian lion-god Apedemak. When Maat was violated, the other gods would work to set it aright, but Mahes would be sent to punish the one who had committed the transgression. Interestingly enough, he encompassed his own opposite, and his name was invoked as a protection for the innocent.
Worship: Cult center at Leontopolis, also worshipped alongside Bast at Bubastis. The Greeks also worshipped him for a time, possibly aligning him with the Furies.
Sun-god of Lower Nubia.
Mandulis wears a crown of ram-horns surmounted by high plumes, sun disks and cobras. His name in Egyptian inscriptions is 'Merwel' but the Greek vision, as found in the text known as the 'Vision of Mandulis' is used almost universally. A chapel to Mandulis existed on the island of Philae off the eastern colonnade approaching the temple of Isis, a goddess who seems to be regarded at least at his close companion.
But it is in the temple of Kalabsha (now resited just above the High Dam at Aswan), the most impressive monument in Lower Nubia from the Graeco-Roman period, that the best evidence of the cult of Mandulis can be found. Constructed on the site of an earlier New Kingdom sanctuary Kalabsha (ancient Talmis) took its present form during the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus. Mandulis, as represented on its walls, does not seem at all out of place among the other members of the Egyptian pantheon placed in his company. From the 'Vision of Mandulis' we find the enforced equation of this Nubian solar deity to Egyptian Horus and to Greek Apollo.
The Egyptian Heaven and Hell, The Eighth Division of the Duat - where the Sun God passes in the Eighth Hour of his journey. It reads, "The Majesty of this great god taketh up its place in the Circles of the hidden gods who are on their sand and he addressed to them words in his boat whilst the Gods tow him along through the City by means of the magical powers of the serpent Mehen." - Wallace Budge
The divine snake whose coils protected Ra as he journeyed on his boat through the waterways of the kingdom of night. Mehen is usually seen draped in protective coils about the deck-house in which Ra stands.
The earliest mention of the god occurs in a Coffin Text of the Middle Kingdom. Detailed representation of the 'coiled one' can be found in vignettes of funerary papyri and on the walls of tombs in the Valley of the Kings especially Sety I and Ramesses VI.
Mehen means coiled one or as a verb, to coil, in ancient Egyptian was played on a spiral game board - most often explicitly in the form of a snake ? with varying numbers of slots (playing squares), six sets of differently colored marbles (the playing pieces, with six marbles to a set), and six special playing pieces in the form of a dangerous, predatory animal ? most often lions (but sometimes dogs or even hippos). It is the only multi-player ancient Egyptian board game known ? the others were contests between two players (or teams), while Mehen could accommodate as many as six contestants. Strangely, it also seems to have ceased being played in ancient Egypt from just after 2000 BC. (during the early Middle Kingdom) ? a very strange situation. Why? Why would the ancient Egyptians abandon their only multi-player board game? One possible clue: Mehen was also the name of the serpent god of the ancient Egyptian Sun Cult -- and this double meaning points to the reason I1ve added ŒForbidden1 to this game1s description and a possible reason for its fall from favor as a recognized game in the ancient Egyptian empire.
The Sun Cult envisioned the god Mehen as a huge serpent who wrapped the Sun God Re in its coils when he set in the west and protected him on his journey, on the river of night, from the evil forces of the underworld. But at some point, perhaps even before the Old Kingdom, the game and the god became intertwined. The game became more than just a simple pastime, and began to take on religious aspects ? so much so that the game became deliberately confused (syncretized, is the proper term) with the serpent deity in texts and thought. To quote Tim Kendall, "It is not possible to know (with the evidence we have) if this deity was inspired by the game itself, or whether the game was inspired by an already existing mythology."
Now this taking on of a religious aspect would have been a natural thing and not in and of itself dangerous ? this also happened with the game of Senet, which in spite of this, or maybe because of it, survived until the very end of Egyptian civilization. But by the early Middle Kingdom the cuts used on the snake's back of the Mehen board to mark, to separate, the playing squares would have been seen to Œkill1 the snake ? which would have been a very threatening and evil thing. Tim Kendall writes: 3Mehen1s role was essential, for if Re were not protected from these enemies, he might not rise in the morning, which would result in the cessation of all life. In Egyptian belief, 'life' applied not only to the living but also to the dead, who were believed to travel with the sun and to rise, reborn, with him at dawn.2
From that time forth, the game apparently ceased to be played (possibly banned and forbidden) and the god Mehen became associated with another, more well-known, Egyptian game - Senet - and the game of Mehen became lost in the mists of time . . . or was it?
In the 1920s, anthropologists, explorers, and adventurers found a curious, spiral based, game being played by Baggara Arabs of the Sudan - The Hyena Game. Tim Kendall writes: " In all essential details the "Hyena Game" seems to have been identical to Mehen. It was played on a spiraling track, employed stick dice of precisely the kind known from Archaic Egyptian contexts, and had two types of pieces, one representing a predatory animal. The only difference would seem to be that the ancient Egyptians allotted six counters to each player rather than only one.*"
Mehen was played formally in ancient Egypt since before at least 2700 BC up until perhaps a little after 2000 BC., and probably elsewhere even later, in the form of crude boards pecked in the stones of Cyprus and in fleeting, hastily scratched-out boards in the sands of the deep, trackless deserts surrounding Egyptian and Nubia - and possibly just preserved down through the long ages, as a faint echo of the mighty Egyptian empire, by Arab nomads and Bedu.
This ancient Egyptian game, forbidden, distant, but not ever entirely lost, is here again in the present.
Mehen Snake Board
Queen Nefertari playing Senet
Cow-goddess of the sky.
Her name means 'great flood'. In the Pyramid Era Mehet-Weret represents the waterway in the heavens, sailed upon by both the sun-god and the king. She is also a manifestation of the primeval waters- consequently being sometimes considered as the 'mother of Re'. (Compare Neith with whom Mehet-Weret identifies.) From vignettes in the New Kingdom funerary papyri the goddess is pictured as a cow lying on a reed mat with a sun disk between her horns.
Patron of war
A lion-headed woman.
Together with her husband Khenmu and their son Hike, Menhit was worshipped in Upper Egypt, the three were called the Esna Triad. She is called "The Slaughterer" and like most Egyptian war-deities, she was believed to ride ahead of the Egyptian armies and cut down the great warriors of their enemies. Her consort was Onuris, the war god who was said to have bought her from Nubia.
Patron of: the Valley of the Kings.
Appearance: a woman with the head of cobra, or a scorpion with a woman's head.
Description: Mertseger was the protector and guardian of the Valley of the Kings, where she lived on a nearby mountain. Her wrath would descend on anyone who disturbed the tombs there, usually by sending poisonous animals against the transgressor.
She also protected the valley against unscrupulous workers who might try to steal treasure, or carve out a secret entrance. Yet for all her ferocity, she was merciful. Should a person repent of his crimes against the valley or the tombs, she would heal the wounds he had suffered.
Worshipped: Worshipped by the workers of Deir el-Medina, the people who built many of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
Meskhenet, Goddess of the Birth Brick and Childbirth
Meskhenet (Mesenet, Meskhent, Meshkent) was a goddess of birth, personified by the birthing brick that the Egyptian women squatted on while giving birth. She was either depicted as a birthing brick with a human head, or as a human with the headdress of a cow's uterus.
Meskhenet was a goddess who presided at child birth. In her form of a tile terminating in a female head (called in the Book of the Dead "cubit-with-head") she represents one of the bricks upon which women in ancient Egypt took a squatting position to give birth. Her presence near the scales in the hall of the Two Truths, where the dead person's heart is examined and weighed to ascertain suitability for the Egyptian paradise, is there to assist at a symbolic rebirth in the Afterlife. Her symbol of two loops at the top of a vertical stroke has been shown to be the bocornuate uterus of a heifer.
In addition to ensuring the safe delivery of a child from the womb, Meskhenet takes a decision on its destiny at the time of birth. In the Papyrus Westcar the goddess helps at the birth of the future first three kings of the 5th Dynasty. On the arrival of Userkaf, Sahure and Neferirkare into the arms of Isis, she approaches each child and assures it of kingship. Similarly she is the force of destiny that assigns to a scribe promotion among the administrators of Egypt.
A hymn in the temple of Esna refers to four "Meskhenets" at the side of the creator god Khnum, whose purpose is to repel evil by their incantations.
In ancient Egypt, where child mortality was high, Egyptians called upon the help of their gods through magical objects, like birth bricks, and special ritual practices during childbirth. The Egyptian birth brick was associated with a specific goddess, Meskhenet, sometimes depicted in the form of a brick with a human head. On the newly discovered birth brick, the main scene shows a mother with her newborn boy, attended on either side by women and by Hathor, a cow goddess closely associated with birth and motherhood.
-- Archaeologists uncover 3700-year-old 'magical' birth brick in Egypt. EurekaAlert, 25th July 2002 She was thought to act as a midwife, and presided over the birthplace - Hatshepsut's (1473-1458 BC) record of her birth at Deir-el-Bahari:
Khnum, and other deities associated with child birth are there to assist the birth, Isis the great mother and her twin sister Nephthys, Bes the protector of children, and Meskhenet, protectress of the Birthing-Place, and Taweret, the protectress of childbearing women, all were present to hail the birth of Hatshepsut, the great king, the daughter of Amun-Ra and Royal Wife Ahmose. After the birth all the deities surround the mother and child while Meskhenet, sits on her throne and promises the royal child, "I am behind you, protecting you, like Ra."
In the tale of Raddjedet and her triplets, it was Meskhenet who foretold that each one would be a ruler - "Then Meskhenet went to him and said, 'A king who will rule throughout this entire land.'"
She was also a goddess of fate who read the destiny of the child. She guarded the baby through infancy using her protective powers.
Meskhenet also appears in the Hall of Judgement when the heart of the deceased was thought to be weighed. She would testify to the character of the newly dead, and perhaps continued her guardianship role in "rebirth" in the underworld. In the Papyrus of Ani, she appears next to the scales, as a human headed birthing brick. She is then depicted as a female goddess, along with Renenutet, in front of Ani and his wife. She was linked to Shai, the god of destiny, and often found with him in The Book of the Dead.
In the papyrus of Ani, Shai stands by himself near the pillar of the Balance, and Renenutet is accompanied by Meskhenet, who appears to be the personification of all the conceptions underlying Shai and Renenutet and something else besides.
There was no cult center for Meskhenet, but she was represented on birthing bricks and in The Book of the Dead. She was the goddess of birth, of fate and destiny, as well as the goddess of rebirth into the afterlife.
Lion-god, son of Bastet, called Miysis by the Greeks.
His local roots were at Leontopolis (modern Tell el-Muqdam) in Nome 11 of Lower Egypt in the Eastern Delta. Osorkon III (Dynasty XXII) erected a temple to him at Bubastis, the town sacred to the god's mother. Mihos' name is also found in amuletic papyri of the late New Kingdom.
Maahes (Mahes, Mihos, Miysis, Mysis) was the ancient Egyptian lion-god of war. Both a god of war and a guardian and a lord of the horizon. He was believed to help Ra fight against Apep in the solar barque each night, a god who protected the pharaoh while he was in battle. By Greek times, he was attributed as being a god of storms and winds. He also had links to perfumes and oils. Maahes was a god who seems to have first appeared in the New Kingdom, and is thought to have been a deity of foreign origin.
In Egypt, they worship lions, and there is a city called after them the lions have temples and numerous spaces in which to roam; the flesh of oxen is supplied to them daily... and the lions eat to the accompaniment of song in the Egyptian language.
- Aelian
Usually depicted as a lion-headed man carrying a knife or a sword, Maahes sometimes wore the atef crown or the solar disk and uraeus on his head. Occasionally he was portrayed as a lion devouring a captive.
Lions were bred in the god's temples. Maahes guards the door to the astral plane, and his eye and hand guard the gates of night. He was called 'Wielder of the Knife'... Another epithet, 'The Scarlet Lord' referred to his bloody sacrifices, while other titles included 'Helper of the Wise Ones', 'Lord of Slaughter', 'Manifester of Will', 'The Initiator', and 'Avenger of Wrongs'. Maahes repels evil, protects initiates, and stands guard during magical rites. He is a god of sight, sun god of the Nile Delta, and god of midsummer, who was invoked to bring forth the souls of men, gods, and underworld spirits for divination or to discover the truth of a matter.
-- Maahes, Terri Sharp
Maahes was thought to be the guardian of sacred places, and the one who attacks captive enemies. He protected the innocent dead and condemned the damned. He was thought to be one of Osiris' executioners, and a defender of the solar barque against the attack of the snake-demon Apep and his followers. He protected the pharaoh while he was in battle, just as he protected the sun god Ra. He was also a god, and a protector of the horizon, due to his leonine form - lions were connected to the horizon by the Egyptian mind. He was also thought to be the personification of the summer heat, just as the Eye of Ra - different lioness goddesses - were thought to represent the burning heat of the sun.
As with the meaning of his name, 'See in Front' - 'to see' (it was also the start of the word for 'lion') 'in front of' - seemed to be related to seeing, because his name was followed by the picture of the eye. Yet the sound was also used in the Egyptian word for truth and order - ma'at. His name might have even meant 'Truth Before Ma'at', among other things, maybe including a pun on the word for lion. Maahes punished those who violated Ma'at while the other deities set it right. Yet he was also called on to protect the innocent, despite being 'Lord of the Massacre', who killed with the knife or the sword.
Thought to be the son of either Bast and Ptah at Per-Bast (Bubastis) or the son of Sekhmet and either Ptah or the sun god Ra. In the tale of "The Taking of Joppa", Thothmose III was called 'Maahes, Son of Sekhmet'. The Egyptians confused the two goddesses, and their children. He was linked to Nefertem and Shesmu, both being lion-headed deities who were also related to perfumes and oils. Nefertem and Maahes were probably especially confused by the Egyptians due to their respective mothers - Sekhmet and Bast. He was also connected with the war-god Onuris as well as with the sky god Shu. There are suggestions that he might have been an assimilation of the Nubian lion-god Apedemak.
This is the site of ancient Leontopolis... The temple of the local lion god Maahes (Greek Miysis), situated in the east part of the ruins, suffered the fate of many similar buildings in the delta: most of its stone blocks have been removed and reused, leaving even the date of the structure uncertain.
-- Atlas of Ancient Egypt, John Baines and Jaromír Málek
His cult centre was at Leontopolis in Lower Egypt, but he was worshiped around Upper Egypt, and in Nubia. Maahes was depicted in the temple of Debod, which was moved to Madrid, Spain, before the Aswan Dam building would have flooded and destroyed it. Osorkon III (Dynasty XXII) build a temple to him in Per-Bast (Bubastis) while Nay-ta-hut (Leontopolis) housed a necropolis for lions, his sacred animal. Other major cult centres for Maahes included Djeba (Utes-Hor, Behde, Edfu), Iunet (Dendera), Meroe (the royal city of the Meroitic rulers of Nubia) and the Bahriya and Siwa Oases.
Ithyphallic god of sex.
God with a large erect penis.
With Isis
A god of fertility, sexuality, and travelers through the eastern Sahara.
Son of Ra and Shu. An ancient god of pre-dynastic origins.
Sometimes he is shown in the garb of a pharaoh, wearing a feathered crown and carrying a flail.
As orgiastic festivals were held in his honor, Min was quite a popular god.
Min was honored with a variety of ceremonies, some involving the harvest, others praying for a male heir to the pharaoh. Lettuce was his sacred plant, for it was believed by the Egyptians to be an aphrodisiac.
The Greeks identified him with their god Pan, and the Romans believed Min to be the same god as Priapus.
Min was pictured as an bearded, ithyphallic man, with his legs close together. He wore two tall feathers, the same headdress that we find Amun wearing. His arm is raised, holding a whip, or a thunderbolt. In the New Kingdom he was seen as a white bull.
In early times Min was a sky-god whose symbol was a thunderbolt. His title was Chief of Heaven. Well into the Middle Kingdom he was identified with the falcon-god Haroeris (Horus the Elder). Above all, Min was worshipped by men as a fertility god, a bestower of sexual powers. He was also seen as a rain god that promoted the fertility of nature, especially in the growing of grain.
During the Min festivals that celebrated the beginning of the planting season, we find renderings of pharaohs ceremonially hoeing the ground and watering the fields under the supervision of Min. Likewise at the Min festival that marked the beginning of the harvest season, the pharaoh was seen reaping the grain.
Despite his fertility associations, Min was also known as Lord of the Eastern Desert. In this role he was the protector of the caravan routes from his cult center at Koptos to the Red Sea. As the Lord of Foreign Lands he was the protector of nomads and hunters.
A falcon-headed god of war whose cult was at Hermonthis (Armant).
Mont was favored by the kings of the 11th Dynasty, who used his name as part of theirs. Sometimes pictured as a bull-headed man, he was reputed to incarnate himself in the bull called Buchis, kept in the shrine at Hermonthis. Mont also had solar characteristics (a bull often represents the heat and power of the sun) and for a while was supreme god in the south, until he was included in the Theban triad and demoted by the god Amun of Thebes. As war against the Hittites, Rameses II found himself losing; he called upon Amun and rallied his forces to the counterattack.
He successfully routed the Hittites and then declared that he was like the god Mont. The Greeks and Celts might have had gods who intervened in battles, but the Egyptians had a god on the battlefield their king. For all his qualities Mont was later dropped from the Theban triad in favour of Khons, the lunar god.
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