Eye of Horus

The fight with Set

The eye comes from the myth of Osiris. When Horus had grown up he fought Set, his father’s murderer, and in Adolf Erman’s retelling of 1907 it was “a fearful fight, which cost Horus an eye”. The god Thoth separated the two and spat on the eye, and it became whole. Horus then gave the restored eye to his dead father to eat, and Osiris came back to life. From then on, Erman explains, the offerings of the temple and tomb ritual were themselves called “the eye of Horus”. The Book of the Dead has the dead person say that Thoth “hath brought the Utchat, and he hath made it to rest after it departed”, and then: “I am sound, and it is sound”.

One version gives Set a disguise. In a chapter of the Book of the Dead that Budge summarised, Set turned himself into a black pig and struck the eye, and Ra told the gods to regard the pig as abominable from then on. Erman traces the Egyptians’ well-known horror of pigs to the same story.

Is it the left eye or the right?

Both: the amulets came as a pair, one eye facing each way. Egyptian texts made the sun the right eye of the sky god and the moon the left, as both Budge and Erman record, and the damaged eye was read as the moon. Plutarch, the Greek writer on Egyptian religion, says that when Set strikes the eye of Horus or swallows it and gives it back, the Egyptians meant the monthly waning of the moon. The Pyramid Texts speak of the two eyes as the White Eye and the Black Eye, and Budge thought that people who wore the amulet mostly had the white eye, the sun, in mind.

Eye of Horus or eye of Ra?

They began as different ideas, and Egyptian texts themselves let them run together. The eye of Ra is the sun god’s own eye, which could act apart from him. In the story of the destruction of mankind, Ra sends his Eye out in the form of the goddess Hathor to punish people who had spoken against him. Erman notes that the Eye of the Sun meant sometimes the sun itself and sometimes Hathor, and that in another myth the god set the eye on his forehead as a serpent, the Uraeus. The overlap is old: the sun was also called the eye of Horus, and Budge glosses the utchat in one text as “the Eye of Horus or Ra”.

Did Egyptians tattoo the eye of Horus?

At least one did. A woman buried at Deir el-Medina, the village of the craftsmen who built the royal tombs, between about 1300 and 1070 BC has more than 30 tattoos, and among the most prominent are pairs of the eye on her neck, shoulders and back. Anne Austin and Cédric Gobeil, who published her in 2017, suggest that a single eye protected her, and that the pairs of eyes with nefer signs, meaning good, between them strengthened her voice when she sang or spoke in rituals.