nception of the Dragon
Tiamat--(from a Cylinder-seal in the British Museum, after L. W. King).]

But if the dragon was compounded of all three deities, who was the
slayer of the evil dragon?

The story of the dragon-conflict is really a recital of Horus's vendetta
against Set, intimately blended and confused with different versions of
"The Destruction of Mankind".[132] The commonplace incidents of the
originally prosaic stories were distorted into an almost unrecognizable
form, then secondarily elaborated without any attention to their
original meaning, but with a wealth of circumstantial embellishment, in
accordance with the usual methods of the human mind that I have already
mentioned. The history of the legend is in fact the most complete,
because it is the oldest and the most widespread, illustration of those
instinctive tendencies of the human spirit to bridge the gaps in its
disjointed experience, and to link together in a kind of mental mosaic
the otherwise isolated incidents in the facts of daily life and the
rumours and traditions that have been handed down from the
story-teller's predecessors.

In the "Destruction of Mankind," which I shall discuss more fully in the
following pages (p. 109 _et seq._), Hathor does the slaying: in the
later stories Horus takes his mother's place and earns his spurs as the
Warrior Sun-god:[133] hence confusion was inevitably introduced between
the enemies of Re, the original victims in the legend, and Horus's
traditional enemies, the followers of Set. Against the latter it was
Osiris himself who fought originally; and in many of the non-Egyptian
variants of the legend it is the rain-god himself who is the warrior.

Hence all three members of the Trinity were identified, not only with
the dragon, but also with the hero who was the dragon-slayer.

But the weapon used by the latter was also animated by the same Trinity,
and in fact identified with them. In the Saga of the Winged Disk, Horus
assumed the form of the sun equipped with the wings of his own falcon
and the fire-spitting uraeus serpents. Flying down from heaven in this
form he was at the same time the god and the god's weapon. As a fiery
bolt from heaven he slew the enemies of Re, who were now identified with
his own personal foes, the followers of Set. But in the earlier versions
of the myth (i.e. the "Destruction of Mankind"), it was Hathor who was
the "Eye of Re" and descended from heaven to destroy mankind with fir