Hathor

Hathor is commonly depicted as a woman wearing a headdress of cow horns cradling a sun disk, which symbolizes her connection to both motherhood and the solar deity Ra. The cow imagery reflects her nurturing, maternal nature and her role as a divine protector. In some representations she appears fully as a cow, reinforcing her identification with fertility, nourishment, and the life-giving aspects of nature in Egyptian cosmology.

Hathor's most famous temple is at Dendera (Denderah) in Upper Egypt, one of the best-preserved temple complexes from the Ptolemaic and Roman periods. The Temple of Hathor at Dendera features extensive reliefs and a famous astronomical ceiling depicting the zodiac. Hathor was also widely worshipped at other sites including Thebes, where she was associated with the necropolis as 'Mistress of the West' welcoming the dead into the afterlife.

In some Egyptian traditions, Hathor was regarded as the mother (or in some texts, the wife) of Horus, though this role is more commonly attributed to Isis in the dominant Osirian myth cycle. Hathor's name itself means 'House of Horus,' suggesting she was conceptually the enclosure or sky in which Horus resided. Egyptian mythology was not rigidly consistent across regions and periods, so multiple goddesses could serve overlapping maternal and protective roles depending on the local tradition.

The Festival of Drunkenness was an annual celebration honoring Hathor (also known in this aspect as Sekhmet, her fierce leonine form), associated with the myth in which the goddess was calmed from her destructive rage by red-dyed beer that she mistook for blood. Participants drank beer and wine to recreate this pacification, and the festival was held at temples including Dendera and in the Theban mortuary complex. The ritual symbolized renewal, the calming of chaos, and the restoration of cosmic order (ma'at).