Who is Sekhmet, the Egyptian lioness goddess?

Sekhmet was a lioness goddess of ancient Egypt, and her name means “the Powerful One”. A daughter of the sun god Ra, she was the fierce Eye of Ra who destroyed his enemies. She was a goddess of war who could send plague, and also a patron of medicine, whose priests were physicians. She is shown as a woman with the head of a lioness, crowned with the sun disk and a rearing cobra.

Who she was in Egypt: At Memphis she was the wife of Ptah, the city’s creator god, and mother of Nefertem, god of the lotus. Kings took her as their protector in battle. Plague was blamed on her messengers, and her priests both sought to turn her anger aside and treated the sick. In the story called the Destruction of Mankind, part of the Book of the Heavenly Cow, Ra sends his Eye against people who plot against him. She sets out as Hathor and kills as Sekhmet, until Ra floods the fields with beer dyed red to look like blood. She drinks it, grows drunk, and the killing stops.
Her signs and animals: The lioness was her animal. On her head she wears the sun disk with the uraeus, the rearing cobra that guards the sun god and the king. Her statues sit on a throne or stand, often holding the ankh, the sign of life.
How Gerald Massey read her in 1907: Massey spells the name Sekhet, as Egyptologists of his day did. He reads her as the Great Mother in her solar form, a lioness and the consort of Ptah, and he joins her with the cat goddess as Sekhet-Bast. In the Destruction of Mankind he sees Egypt’s deluge: Sekhet the avenger is mistress of the waters, the rebels drown, and the flood is the light of dawn pouring over the creatures of the dark. He argues that Egypt’s myths of the deluge, this one among them, lie behind the flood of Noah.
What scholars say now: Egyptologists now write the name Sekhmet and derive it from sekhem, power. The translation Massey quotes has the fields “covered with water”, but in modern translations the liquid that covers them is the red beer Ra had made to end the killing, so the story is read as the taming of the goddess’s rage, not a flood. Scholars trace the flood of Noah to Mesopotamian stories, such as the epic of Gilgamesh, not to Egypt. Massey’s joining of Sekhmet with Bastet has some ground: Egyptians came to see the two as the fierce and the gentle sides of one goddess.
Where you meet her today: King Amenhotep III had hundreds of stone statues of Sekhmet carved for Thebes. Many now sit in museums around the world, the British Museum among them, and others still stand in the precinct of the goddess Mut at Karnak.
In Massey’s words: “She was the great mistress of terror in fire and flood.” (Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907), Book IX, p. 546)
In the app: Trainer › Word Trainer. In the app, the Word Trainer sets Massey’s Sekhet beside Sekhmet and shows where his sekhet means a field, and the Symbol Trainer explains the lion.

Last updated October 25, 2026.

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