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Plate 1 A right eye with the falcon’s markings below it, beneath a sun disc with a cobra wound round it

Eye of Ra

The sun god Ra’s own eye, thought of as a goddess who could leave him and act on her own: as Hathor or the lioness Sekhmet she punished rebellious humans, and as the cobra on his brow she guarded him. It is a different idea from the eye of Horus, though Egyptian texts let the two overlap.

Egyptian hieroglyphics. Also called eye of ra meaning, eye of ra vs eye of horus, eye of re, right eye of horus.

Meaning

The eye of Ra is the sun god’s eye seen as a power apart from him, usually female and dangerous. Adolf Erman, in his Handbook of Egyptian Religion (1907), notes that the Eye of the Sun meant sometimes the sun itself and sometimes the goddess Hathor, and that in one myth the god set his eye as the serpent on his forehead, “the symbol of his might”: the cobra of the Uraeus. As a goddess it can be a lioness crowned with the sun disc, like the Metropolitan Museum’s statues of Sekhmet. Nadine Guilhou, in the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, calls Hathor in this role the sun god’s daughter and “the fiery, protective ‘Sun Eye’”. The eye of Ra belongs to ancient Egyptian religion, and its best-known story survives in royal tombs of the New Kingdom.

Origin and history

In a creation story that Budge translated in Legends of the Gods (1912), the creator says his eye was taken from him and brought back by Shu and Tefnut, the first gods he made. Men and women, he says, came into being from tears. He gave the eye “the uraeus of fire”, and it was angry when it found that another eye, the moon, had grown in its place; then it took its place in his face and ruled the whole earth. Erman, summarising the same legend, thought the text so altered by late copyists that “any attempt to make sense of this myth is useless”. He explained one detail: mankind came from the god’s tears because of a play on the very similar Egyptian words for tears and for mankind.

The eye’s most famous story is the one scholars call the Myth of the Heavenly Cow, or the Destruction of Mankind. Guilhou records that it is first found on the inside of the outermost of the four gilded shrines of Tutankhamun, and then in the tombs of Sety I, Ramesses II, Ramesses III and Ramesses VI in the Valley of the Kings. Ra has grown old and mankind rebels. On the advice of the gods he sends out his eye, “for there is no eye whatsoever that can go before it and resist thee and it when it journeyeth in the form of Hathor”, in Budge’s translation. She kills the rebels and wades in their blood. Ra takes pity on the survivors and has beer coloured red and spread over the land by night; the goddess drinks it, becomes drunk and returns appeased. Ra then leaves the earth for the sky, carried on the Heavenly Cow.

What made the beer red is read differently. Guilhou gives red ochre, mixed in to make it look like blood. Budge, following Brugsch, took the ingredient to be mandrakes, and had them mixed with human blood. Budge also notes that festivals of Hathor and Ra were afterwards kept with “sleep-producing beer”.

Eye of Ra or eye of Horus?

They began as different ideas. The eye of Horus is the eye Horus lost in his fight with Set and the god Thoth made whole again; as the utchat or wedjat it was one of the commonest amulets in Egypt, Budge writes. The eye of Ra is the sun god’s eye as a goddess: sent out in anger, appeased, set on his brow as a cobra. The two run together because the Egyptians also called the sun and the moon the eyes of a god. Victoria Altmann-Wendling, writing on the moon for the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (2024), says the commonest Egyptian picture of the moon, recorded from the earliest periods, was an eye: “the Horus-eye, wedjat-eye, or left eye”; and that the sun and moon were taken as the right and left eye of the sun god. Budge gives the same pairing for Horus the Elder, the sky, “the Sun being the right eye, and the Moon the left”, whose titles include “Horus of the Two Eyes”, and in one text he glosses the eye as “the Eye of Horus or Ra”. So the right eye as the sun and the left as the moon is an Egyptian idea. The modern part is the tidy rule that every right-facing wedjat is “the eye of Ra” and every left one “the eye of Horus”: the Egyptians called both eyes wedjat and let the names overlap. Flinders Petrie, cataloguing the amulets at University College London, writes that the eyes “are properly a pair, right and left, representing the two eyes of Horus, which are also compared to the sun and moon”, so an amulet facing right is not, by that fact alone, an eye of Ra.

How the eye is shown

Adolf Erman describes the sun god as usually shown with a hawk’s head “surmounted by the sun”, and the disc “encircled with its terrible servant, the fire-spitting serpent, who destroys his enemies”. That cobra is the eye, which the god set on his forehead in the creation story. Goddesses who take the eye’s part wear the same pair: the Brooklyn Museum’s granodiorite bust of Sekhmet has a sun disc and cobra on her brow, which, the museum says, mark her as the daughter of the sun god. The eye could also be drawn as an eye. Petrie notes that chapter 140 of the Book of the Dead speaks of the sun as the eye and was to be said over an eye amulet of lapis lazuli ornamented with gold. The drawing here joins the two forms: the disc ringed by its cobra above a right wedjat, the sun’s side.

The eye’s departure and return

In another story the eye leaves Egypt and has to be brought back. The Brooklyn Museum’s label for its bust of Sekhmet, dated about 1390–1352 BC, tells it this way: as the Eye of Re she was sent abroad to destroy Egypt’s enemies, and, angry that Re had set another goddess in her place while she was away, she would not come home until she was pacified by wine, music and dance. The museum adds that the Egyptians explained the sun’s yearly movement south and back again as the eye’s departure and return. In Lower Nubia the runaway appears as the lioness Tefnut. Martina Minas-Nerpel, in the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (2026), describes a scene in the temple of el-Dakka in which Thoth, as a standing baboon with raised arms, appeases the lioness, named “Tefnut, daughter of Ra, residing in the Abaton”, and persuades her to return to Egypt to protect her father; Thoth of Pnubs, as he is called there, takes the part that Shu plays in other tellings. Guilhou ties the end of the Heavenly Cow story, the appeased goddess going back to the palace, to this “return of the Distant Goddess”, which was celebrated every year in the Festivals of Drunkenness, recorded for example in the Ptolemaic temple of Hathor at Dendera.

Sekhmet, the eye as a lioness

In Budge’s translation of the Destruction of Mankind the goddess who wades in blood is called Sekhet, his spelling of the lioness goddess Sekhmet, consort of Ptah at Memphis. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds one of some six hundred statues of her made for Amenhotep III, a lioness-headed woman with a large sun disc above her head for her father, the sun god. The Met writes that the statues have been shown to form a “litany in stone” that appeased the goddess and called on her not to use her powers for harm, delivering the king from illness and evil for a year; there may once have been 730, a seated and a standing figure for each day.

Write in hieroglyphs

stringmash.comHieroglyphics translatorSpell a name in Egyptian hieroglyphs, letter by letter, and put it in a cartouche.

See also

Uraeus, Winged sun disk, Sekhmet, Hathor, Goddesses of war, Scarab.

Sources

  1. A Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Adolf Erman, translated by A. S. Griffith, 1907, Archibald Constable, London (Internet Archive), pp. 7–10, 29, 35, 47
  2. Myth of the Heavenly Cow, Nadine Guilhou, “Myth of the Heavenly Cow”, in Jacco Dieleman and Willeke Wendrich (eds.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (2010), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (eScholarship, University of California), pp. 1–2, 4
  3. Legends of the Gods: The Egyptian Texts, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1912, Project Gutenberg, The legend of the creation; The destruction of mankind
  4. The Gods of the Egyptians, Volume I, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1904, Methuen, London (Internet Archive), Vol. I, pp. 19, 439–440, 467
  5. Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1899, Project Gutenberg, Chapter on the Book of the Dead
  6. Egyptian Magic, E. A. Wallis Budge, 1901, Internet Archive (Getty Research Institute copy), Amulet 12
  7. Amulets, illustrated by the Egyptian collection in University College, London, W. M. Flinders Petrie, 1914, Constable and Company, London (Internet Archive), No. 138
  8. Statue of the Goddess Sakhmet, Internet Archive copy, 10 March 2026, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, object description; audio guide transcript
  9. Conceptualizations of the Moon, Victoria Altmann-Wendling, “Conceptualizations of the Moon”, in Tanja Pommerening, Annette Imhausen and Willeke Wendrich (eds.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (version 1, June 2024), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (eScholarship, University of California), pp. 5, 7
  10. Thoth of Pnubs, Martina Minas-Nerpel, “Thoth of Pnubs”, in Solange Ashby and Willeke Wendrich (eds.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (version 1, February 2026), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology (eScholarship, University of California), abstract; pp. 1, 3
  11. Bust of the Goddess Sakhmet, Object label, accession 1991.311, ca. 1390–1352 B.C.E. (Internet Archive copy, 17 August 2025), Brooklyn Museum, object label; caption

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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 8, 2026. How we research

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