Sekhmet

Sekhmet is the fierce lioness-headed Eye of Ra sent to punish humanity for plotting rebellion. The New Kingdom text known as the Book of the Heavenly Cow gives the episode in full and does not soften what follows. Once loosed on the plotting humans, Sekhmet does not stop when the immediate rebellion is put down; she wades through the survivors, delighting in the killing, and Ra watches his own punishment outrun his intention until he decides to spare what remains of humanity rather than let her finish. Stopping her is not simple, because she has already tasted blood and wants more of it. Ra's solution is to have a great quantity of beer dyed red with ochre spread across the field she means to cross next, so that from a distance it reads as the blood she is already hunting. She drinks it as blood, grows drunk, and falls asleep before she can resume the slaughter, waking without the killing rage that drove her, at which point the text calls the same figure Hathor rather than Sekhmet, the same transformation Hathor's own article tells from the other side. The rampage is Sekhmet's own defining act in the myth, the reason later Egyptians built entire cults, including Amenhotep III's statue program at Karnak, around appeasing her before she could begin it again.

Sekhmet was venerated in antiquity, though the record shows no unbroken continuous cult, and the concrete form that standing took is unmistakable in the surviving archaeological record. The pharaoh Amenhotep III commissioned several hundred statues of Sekhmet, seated and standing, most carved from black granodiorite, for the precinct of the goddess Mut at Karnak, part of a building program that scholars connect to a period of pestilence or unrest during his reign, an act of ritual appeasement on a scale unmatched by any other Egyptian deity's surviving statuary. The number is large enough, plausibly one for each day of the year, that no comparable cult object survives from ancient Egypt in anything like the same quantity for a single deity. Centuries of later reuse, plundering and export scattered the statues far beyond their original setting; examples now stand in museum collections on every continent, from Cairo to New York to London, each one a discrete surviving instance of the same defensive religious logic: Sekhmet was sent out by Ra to punish humanity and had to be managed rather than simply worshipped in comfort.