t to spy the land, as the winged Horus spied the enemies of Re.

Thus the new weapon of the gods--we have already noted Hathor's knife
and Horus's winged disk, which is the fire from heaven, the lightning
and the thunderbolt--is the flood. Like the others it can be either a
beneficent giver of life or a force of destruction.

But the flood also becomes a weapon of another kind. One of the earlier
incidents of the story represents Hathor in opposition to Re. The
goddess becomes so maddened with the zest of killing that the god
becomes alarmed and asks her to desist and spare some representatives of
the race. But she is deaf to entreaties. Hence the god is said to have
sent to Elephantine for the red ochre to make a sedative draught to
overcome her destructive zeal. We have already seen that this incident
had an entirely different meaning--it was merely intended to explain the
obtaining of the colouring matter wherewith to redden the sacred beer so
as to make it resemble blood as an elixir for the god. It was brought
from Elephantine, because the red waters of inundation of the Nile were
supposed by the Egyptians to come from Elephantine.

But according to the story inscribed in Seti Ist's tomb, the red ochre
was an essential ingredient of the sedative mixture (prepared under the
direction of Re by the Sekti[201] of Heliopolis) to calm Hathor's
murderous spirit.

It has been claimed that the story simply means that the goddess became
intoxicated with beer and that she became genially inoffensive solely as
the effect of such inebriation. But the incident in the Egyptian story
closely resembles the legends of other countries in which some herb is
used specifically as a sedative. In most books on Egyptian mythology the
word (_d'd'_) for the substance put into the drink to colour it is
translated "mandragora," from its resemblance to the Hebrew word
_dudaim_ in the Old Testament, which is often translated "mandrakes" or
"love-apples". But Gauthier has clearly demonstrated that the Egyptian
word does not refer to a vegetable but to a mineral substance, which he
translates "red clay".[202] Mr. F. Ll. Griffith tells me, however, that
it is "red ochre". In any case, mandrake is not found at Elephantine
(which, however, for the reasons I have already given, is a point of no
importance so far as the identification of the substance is concerned),
nor in fact anywhere in Egypt.

But if some foreign story of the action of a sedati