elestial Cow.

Having invested the numbers four and twenty-eight with special sanctity
and brought them into association with the measurement of time, it was a
not unnatural proceeding to subdivide the month into four parts and so
bring the number seven into the sacred scheme. Once this was done the
moon's phases were used to justify and rationalize this procedure, and
the length of the week was incidentally brought into association with
the moon-goddess, who had seven _avatars_, perhaps originally one for
each day of the week. At a later period the number seven was arbitrarily
brought into relationship with the Pleiades.

The seven Hathors were not only mothers but fates also. Aphrodite was
chief of the fates.

The number seven is associated with the pots used by Hathor's
priestesses at the celebration inaugurating the new year; and it plays a
prominent part in the Story of the Flood. In Babylonia the sanctity of
the number received special recognition. When the goddess became the
destroyer of mankind, the device seems to have been adopted of
intensifying her powers of destruction by representing her at times as
seven demons.[406]

But the Great Mother was associated not only with the week and month but
also with the year. The evidence at our disposal seems to suggest that
the earliest year-count was determined by the annual inundation of the
river. The annual recurrence of the alternation of winter and summer
would naturally suggest in a vague way such a subdivision of time as the
year; but the exact measurement of that period and the fixing of an
arbitrary commencement, a New Year's day, were due to other reasons. In
the Story of the Destruction of Mankind it is recorded that the incident
of the soothing of Hathor by means of the blood-coloured beer (which, as
I have explained elsewhere,[407] is a reference to the annual Nile
flood) was celebrated annually on New Year's day.

Hathor was regarded in tradition as the cause of the inundation. She
slaughtered mankind and so caused the original "flood": in the next
phase she was associated with the 7000 jars of red beer; and in the
ultimate version with the red-coloured river flood, which in another
story was reputed to be "the tears of Isis".

Hathor's day was in fact the date of the commencement of the inundation
and of the year; and the former event marked the beginning of the year
and enabled men for the first time to measure its duration. Thus
Hathor[408] was