The Eye of Horus: an eye that was healed
Horus was the falcon-headed son of Osiris and Isis. When his uncle Seth murdered Osiris and took the throne, Horus fought him for years. In one of their battles Seth tore out Horus’s left eye and broke it into pieces. Then the god Thoth, patron of writing and knowledge, found the pieces and made the eye whole again; in another version Hathor heals it with gazelle’s milk. Horus offered his restored eye to his dead father, and Osiris came back to life in the underworld.
That is why the Eye of Horus is called the wedjat, “the sound one” or “the whole one”. It means healing, protection, restoration after damage. Because Horus gave it to his father, it also became the symbol of every offering: in the Pyramid Texts, the oldest religious texts in Egypt, the bread and beer placed before the dead are called “the Eye of Horus”. As Horus was a sky god whose right eye was the sun and left eye the moon, the injured and restored left eye was also linked to the moon, which wanes and grows full again every month.
The Eye of Ra: the sun as a goddess
The Eye of Ra works differently. It is not a body part that can be hurt but a force the sun god sends out into the world, and it usually has the form of a goddess: Hathor, the lioness Sekhmet, the cobra Wadjet, Tefnut, Bastet. She is protective towards Ra and terrifying towards his enemies.
The clearest story is the Destruction of Mankind, told in the Book of the Heavenly Cow, whose earliest surviving copy was found on one of the gilded shrines of Tutankhamun. When humans plotted against the aged Ra, he sent his Eye against them as Hathor, who became Sekhmet and began to slaughter them. Ra changed his mind, but the goddess could not be stopped. So he had seven thousand jars of beer mixed with red ochre from Elephantine and poured over the fields. The goddess saw what looked like blood, drank it, became drunk, and returned to Ra gentle, forgetting her killing. Another myth, the Distant Goddess, tells of the Eye leaving Egypt in anger for Nubia as a lioness and being coaxed back by Thoth, a return celebrated with music and beer.
On the king’s forehead
The most visible Eye of Ra in Egyptian art is the uraeus, the rearing cobra worn on the king’s brow, as in the cobra on Tutankhamun’s gold mask. The cobra was believed to spit fire at the king’s enemies, as the Eye of Ra did for the sun god. Sun disks with cobras coiled around them, carved over temple doors, carry the same idea.
The Eye of Horus on bodies and coffins
The Eye of Horus, instead, is protection kept close. It was one of the most common Egyptian amulets, worn by the living as jewellery and placed in the wrappings of mummies, often over the cut through which the organs had been removed, to keep the body whole. On Middle Kingdom coffins a pair of eyes is painted on the side, right where the face of the mummy lay. The body rested on its left side, facing east, and through those eyes the dead could look out at the rising sun and at the offerings brought by the living. Mothers also invoked it to protect children, as Isis had protected the young Horus.
How to tell them apart
The two eyes are drawn almost the same way, and the Egyptians themselves sometimes blurred them, calling the sun “the Eye of Horus” in some texts. So the setting matters more than the drawing. A rough guide:
- Eye of Horus: a single eye with the falcon’s markings, on its own as an amulet, on a coffin, on jewellery or in offering texts. Theme: healing, wholeness, protection.
- Eye of Ra: a sun disk, a cobra, a lioness or a goddess, often on the king’s brow or over temple doors. Theme: the sun’s fire, royal power, punishment of enemies.
Online you will often read that the right eye is always Ra’s and the left always Horus’s. As a tendency it works, because the sun was the right eye of the sky and the moon the left. As a strict rule it does not: wedjat amulets exist facing both ways.
Two modern myths
Did the Egyptians use the parts of the Eye of Horus as fractions? The idea was proposed in 1911 by the Egyptologist Georg Möller, who noticed that signs for fractions of a grain measure (1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and so on) resembled parts of the eye. It became a famous story, repeated in many books. In 2002 the historian of mathematics Jim Ritter showed that the signs developed separately in hieratic script and were linked to the eye only later, if at all. Verdict: probably not.
And the ℞ symbol on prescriptions, does it come from the Eye of Horus? No. It is the abbreviation of the Latin recipe, “take”, which opened medical prescriptions in the Middle Ages.
Where to see them
Wedjat amulets are in almost every Egyptian collection, from Cairo to London, Paris, Turin and New York. The coffin of Khnumnakht is in the Egyptian galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tutankhamun’s gilded shrines and his mask, with its uraeus, are at the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza. The full Book of the Heavenly Cow is painted in the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings, which opens only occasionally; check with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
Sources
- R. H. Wilkinson, Reading Egyptian Art (1992) and The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt (2003).
- G. Pinch, Egyptian Mythology (2002).
- J. Ritter, “Closing the Eye of Horus: the Rise and Fall of ‘Horus-Eye Fractions'”, in Under One Sky (2002).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Coffin of Khnumnakht” (15.2.2) and “Wedjat Eye Amulet”.
- UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, “Amulets” (2015).
- E. Hornung, Der ägyptische Mythos von der Himmelskuh (1982).
