s enemies were identified with the followers of Set, it
was natural that the traditional enemy of Set who was also the more
potent other "Eye of Re" should assume his mother's role of punishing
rebellious mankind. That Horus did in fact take the place at first
occupied by Hathor in the story is revealed by the series of trivial
episodes from the "Destruction of Mankind" that reappear in the "Saga of
the Winged Disk". The king of Lower Egypt (Horus) was identified with a
falcon, as Hathor was with the vulture (Mut): like her, he entered the
sun-god's boat[198] and sailed up the river with him: he then mounted up
to heaven as a winged disk, i.e. the sun of Re equipped with his own
falcon's wings. The destructive force displayed by Hathor as the Eye of
Re was symbolized by her identification with Tefnut, the fire-spitting
uraeus-snake. When Horus assumed the form of the winged disk he added to
his insignia two fire-spitting serpents to destroy Re's enemies. The
winged disk was at once the instrument of destruction and the god
himself. It swooped (or flew) down from heaven like a bolt of destroying
fire and killed the enemies of Re. By a confusion with Horus's other
fight against the followers of Set, the enemies of Re become identified
with Set's army and they are transformed into crocodiles, hippopotami
and all the other kinds of creatures whose shapes the enemies of Osiris
assume.

In the course of the development of these legends a multitude of other
factors played a part and gave rise to transformations of the meaning of
the incidents.

The goddess originally slaughtered mankind, or perhaps it would be truer
to say, made _a_ human sacrifice, to obtain blood to rejuvenate the
king. But, as we have seen already, when the sacrifice was no longer a
necessary part of the programme, the incident of the slaughter was not
dropped out of the story, but a new explanation of it was framed.
Instead of simply making a human sacrifice, mankind as a whole was
destroyed for rebelling against the gods, the act of rebellion being
murmuring about the king's old age and loss of virility. The elixir soon
became something more than a rejuvenator: it was transformed into the
food of the gods, the ambrosia that gave them their immortality, and
distinguished them from mere mortals. Now when the development of the
story led to the replacement of the single victim by the whole of
mankind, the blood produced by the wholesale slaughter was so abu