Who is Hathor, the Egyptian goddess of love and music?

Hathor was one of the great goddesses of ancient Egypt: a goddess of the sky, of love and beauty, of music, dance and joy, and of mothers. Her name means “house of Horus”. She was called the daughter of the sun god Ra, and was one of the goddesses known as his Eye. She is shown as a cow, as a woman wearing cow’s horns with the sun disk between them, or as a face with a cow’s ears.

Who she was in Egypt: Her greatest temple stands at Dendera in Upper Egypt. The building seen today is Ptolemaic and Roman, on a far older holy site. She was the patron of the miners of Sinai, where Egyptians dug turquoise, and of trade with foreign lands. At Thebes she received the dead in the western hills where the tombs were cut. Her worship was full of music, dancing and drink, with a Festival of Drunkenness in her honour.
Her signs and animals: The cow was her animal. Isis later took over her crown of horns and sun disk, so the two goddesses can be hard to tell apart. In Hathor’s rites the sistrum, a sacred rattle, and the menat, a heavy necklace of beads, were shaken. The sycamore fig was her tree, and she was called Lady of the Sycamore.
How Gerald Massey read her in 1907: Massey keeps the name Hathor. In his reading she is a form of the Great Mother as Mother-earth, the giver of food and drink. For him the first mother, Apt, was imaged as the hippopotamus or water-cow, and Hathor followed her as the milch-cow who suckles the child Horus. He takes her name as the house of Horus in her sacred tree. He calls her the Egyptian Venus, and argues that she lived on in the Venus of the Mediterranean and in the amorous fairy queen of Irish legend.
What scholars say now: Egyptologists read her name as Massey did: house of Horus. His Egyptian Venus also rests on an ancient match, since the Greeks called her Aphrodite, the goddess the Romans knew as Venus. But Egyptologists describe Hathor as a goddess of the sky and the sun, the daughter and Eye of Ra, not as Mother-earth: in Egyptian thought the earth was a god, Geb. His line from Hathor to the fairy queens of Ireland is not accepted by scholars of Egypt or of Irish myth.
Where you meet her today: The temple at Dendera, with its columns crowned by her face, is one of the best preserved in Egypt. Sistrums topped with her face are in most large Egyptian collections, and in painted copies of the Book of the Dead she steps out of the western mountain as a cow to receive the dead.
In Massey’s words: “The goddess Hathor, the Egyptian Venus, was the fairest representative of Mother-earth.” (Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907), Book II, p. 105)
In the app: Trainer › Symbol Trainer › Cow. In the app, the Symbol Trainer explains the cow with the sun disk between her horns, and the Guide answers questions about Hathor with Massey’s own passages.

Last updated October 25, 2026.

Next questions

Get it on Google Play