The Gods of the Egyptians, or Studies in Egyptian Mythology, by E. A. Wallace Budge, Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum, with 98 color plates and 131 illustrations in the text, Volume II, Methuen & Co., 36 Essex Street, W.C., London, 1904. 552 pages.
E. A. Wallace Budge (1857-1934) had a long career at the British Museum, studying ancient languages, travelling to purchase antiquities, and investigating why tablets from British Museum sites all along Egypt were popping up at antiquities dealers in London and subsequently purchased by the very museum that owned them to begin with. Oh well.
In between all that, he found the time to get himself published, and this heavily stuffed tomb is one of the examples. Within it, he defines the Egyptian gods based on his research and shows how during the late stages of the civilization, many of them were co-opted into each other.
Interestingly, this book has a variation on the name Sekhmet, leaving out the M, hence Sekhet. In case there is any suspicion that these two names are not referring to the same deity, a passage on page 59 of a very familiar story puts it to rest:
When Ra ordered the goddess Sekhet to go forth
and destroy mankind because they had mocked him and had spoken
lightly of his age, she started on her journey from Henen-su.
So, I think it is safe to say that Sekhet is Sekhmet. Other passages of the book refer to Sekhet-Aaru, which is not a reference to the goddess Sekhmet, but rather another name for the Elysian Fields, i.e., the Field of Reeds, which was a marshy farmland just perfect for an agricultural-based heaven. This would be the opposite of Duat, which was a pit of punishment, and more like hell.
At any rate, the author documents what he believes is the merger of gods and goddesses during the new kingdom, and as the following passage explains, there was a bit of a smashup between the gods around 1450 BC, if the evidence at the Temple of Nut can be trusted. So, Bast, Sekhmet Minhit, and Mut all blend together.
Just to make things a bit weird, the author goes so far as to call Mut a hermaphrodite. Not so sure on this one. It might be one smash-up too far. For what it’s worth, when I asked Cooper, he said he didn’t know any Mut, but that there was no doubt in his mind that Ira was one hundred percent woman. Hence, I think he’s come to some conclusions about who Ira really is, yet that doesn’t explain to me how she got to Denver Circa 1977 to resume her mission.
Without further adieu, here is the passage which starts on page 28. There are many hieroglyphics accompanying the text, and so I have attached an example to the bottom of quote:
The principal female counterpart of Amen-Ra, the king of the gods in the New Empire was MUT, whose name means “Mother,” and in all her attributes we see that she was regarded as the great “world-mother,” who conceived and brought forth whatsoever exists. The pictures of the goddess usually represent her in the form of a woman wearing on her head the united crowns of the South and the North, and holding in her hands the papyrus scepter and the emblem of life. Elsewhere we see her in female form standing upright, with her arms, to which large wings are attached, stretched out full length at right angles to her body; at her feet is the feather of Maat. She wears the united crowns, as before stated, but from each shoulder there projects the head of a vulture; one vulture wears the crown of the North, and the other two plumes, though sometimes each vulture head has upon it two plumes, which are probably those of Shu or Åmen- Rā.In other pictures the goddess has the heads of a woman or man, a vulture, and a lioness, and she is provided with a phallus, and a pair of wings, and the claws of a lion or lioness. In the vignette of the Chapter CLXIV of the Book of the Dead she is associated with two dwarfs, each of whom has two faces, one of a hawk and one of a man, and each of whom has an arm lifted to support the symbol of the god Åmsu or Min, and wears upon his head a disk and plumes. In the text which accompanies the vignette, though the three-headed goddess is distinctly called “Mut” in the Rubric, she is addressed as “SEKHET-BAST-RA,” a fact which accounts for the presence of the phallus and the male head on a woman’s body, and proves that Mut was believed to possess both the male and female attributes of reproduction. We have already seen that the originally obscure god Åmen was, chiefly through the force of political circumstances, made to usurp the attributes and powers of the older gods of Egypt, and we can see by such figures of the goddess as those described above that Mut was, in like fashion, identified with the older goddesses of the land with whom, originally, she had nothing in common. Thus the head of the lioness which projects from one shoulder indicates that she was identified with Sekhet or Bast, and the vulture heads prove that her cult was grafted on to that of Nekhebet, and the double crowns show that she united in herself all the attributes of all the goddesses of the South and North. Thus, we find her name united with the names of other goddesses, e.g., Mut-Temt, Mut-Uatchet- Bast, Mut-Sekhet-Bast-Menḥit, and among her aspects she included those of Isis, and Iusäaset. Locally she usurped the position of ÅMENT, the old female counterpart of Åmen and of APET, 0 , the personification of the ancient settlement Åpt, from which is derived the name Thebes (Ta-ȧpt); she was also identified with the goddess of Åmentet, i.e. , Hathor in one of her forms as lady of the Underworld ; and with the primeval goddess ÅMENT, who formed one of the four goddesses of the company of the gods of Hermopolis, which was adopted in its entirety by the priests of Åmen for their gods; and with the predynastic goddess TA-Urt, Ah; and, in short, with every goddess who could in any way be regarded as a ” mother goddess.” The center of the worship of Mut was the quarter of Thebes which was called Åsher, or Åshrel, or Ashrelt, and which probably derived its name from the large sacred lake which existed there ; the temple of the goddess, Het-Mut, with its sanctuary, was situated a little to the south of the great temple of Amen-Ra. From the inscriptions which have been found on the ruins of her temple we find that she was styled “Mut, the great lady of Åshert, the lady of heaven, the queen of the gods,” and that she was thought to have existed with Nu in primeval time, she was, moreover, called “Mut, who giveth birth, but was herself not born of any,” Here also we find her associated with several goddesses, and referred to as the “lady of the life of the two lands,” and “lady of the house of Ptah, lady of heaven, queen of the two lands,” etc. The great temple of Mut at Thebes was built by Åmen-ḥetep III., about B.C. 1450, and was approached from the temple of Åmen-Ra by an avenue of sphinxes; the southern half of the building overlooked a semi-circular lake on which the sacred procession of boats took place, and at intervals, both inside and outside the outer wall of the temple enclosure were placed statues of the goddess Mut, in the form of Sekhet, in black basalt. Another famous sanctuary of Mut was situated in the city of Pa-khen-Ament, the Пaxvaμovvís of Ptolemy, and the capital of the Nome, the Diospolites of Lower Egypt.
Having presented all of that, I am starting to see a pattern in which this turn of the century generation of Egyptian archeologists all seem to have died in 1934. I wonder if it was something they ate.
The headline photo is from a double paged plate in the book depicting the Sekhet-Aaru.
