he sun-god Re.

It is Re who is king and is growing old: he asks Hathor, the Great
Mother, to provide him with the elixir of life. But comparison with some
of the legends of other countries suggests that Re has usurped the place
previously occupied by Horus and originally by Osiris, who as the real
personification of the life-giving power of water is obviously the
appropriate person to be slain when his virility begins to fail. Dr.
C. G. Seligman's account of the Dinka rain-maker Lerpiu, which I have
already quoted (p. 113) from Sir James Frazer's "Dying God," suggests
that the slain king or god was originally Osiris.

The introduction of Re into the story marks the beginning of the belief
in the sky-world or heaven. Hathor was originally nothing more than an
amulet to enhance fertility and vitality. Then she was personified as a
woman and identified with a cow. But when the view developed that the
moon controlled the powers of life-giving in women and exercised a
direct influence upon their life-blood, the Great Mother was identified
with the moon. But how was such a conception to be brought into harmony
with the view that she was also a cow? The human mind displays an
irresistible tendency to unify its experience and to bridge the gaps
that necessarily exist in its broken series of scraps of knowledge and
ideas. No break is too great to be bridged by this instinctive impulse
to rationalize the products of diverse experience. Hence, early man,
having identified the Great Mother both with a cow and the moon, had no
compunction in making "the cow jump over the moon" to become the sky.
The moon then became the "Eye" of the sky and the sun necessarily became
its other "Eye". But, as the sun was clearly the more important "Eye,"
seeing that it determined the day and gave warmth and light for man's
daily work, it was the more important deity. Therefore Re, at first the
Brother-Eye of Hathor, and afterwards her husband, became the supreme
sky-deity, and Hathor merely one of his Eyes.

When this stage of theological evolution was reached, the story of the
"Destruction of Mankind" was re-edited, and Hathor was called the "Eye
of Re". In the earlier versions she was called into consultation solely
as the giver of life and, to obtain the life-blood, she cut men's
throats with a knife.

But as the Eye of Re she was identified with the fire-spitting
uraeus-serpent which the king or god wore on his forehead. She was both
the moo