Ash

Here I am back from jury duty with a pile o' material about this moon / left eye business. But the first of my photocopies is about three different amulets, so, in typical random style, let me scribble my notes about the irrelevant one first. :)

The author, Carol Andrews, discusses a therioanthropomorphic amulet at the BM (EA 57334) with, unusually, the head of a wild boar. For the Egyptians, the boar symbolises chaos and evil; Andrews argues that this is probably an amulet of Set, but might possibly be "the rare Libyan deity Ash, who presided over the western desert and vinegrowing areas of the Delta". Ash could be represented with Set's head, and his name could be ridden with the Set animal as a determinative.

Now, as well as taking the form of ol' square-ears, Ash is (possibly) shown at least once in three-headed form - lion, snake, and vulture - not unlike the three-headed Mut, aka Sekhmet-Bast-Ra, of the Book of the Dead Chapter 164 - lioness, human, and vulture. (Margaret Murray makes an interesting connection between the three-headed Ash and a similar figure in the 1545 Cosmographia Universalis.)

ETA: Also from Margaret Murray: Ash is shown with Set's head, wearing the white crown, and "associated with a royal vineyard", on Second Dynasty seals from Abydos and Naqada - specifically, the royal tombs of Perabsen and Kha-Sekhemui. He appears in human form as "Lord of Libya", with Amentet, in the Fifth Dynasty on a "sculptured slab of Sahure". He's also mentioned in the Pyramid Texts and the Book of the Dead. The last known attestation is the 26th Dynasty coffin which portrays him with three heads. Also unusual about 'Ash is his lack of a tail, the band across his chest, and the snake he carries in his hand.

Murray remarks that "Multiple-headed gods are always rare in Egypt and are, I think, foreign deities and not indigenous." In his description of the coffin, Alan Shorter describes such "composite divinities" as cropping up "not unfrequently in reliefs and paintings of the later
periods".

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Andrews, Carol. "The Boar, the Ram-Headed Crocodile and the Lunar Fly". in Studies in Egyptian Antiquities: A Tribute to T.G.H. James (Occasional paper 123). London, British Museum, 1999. pp. 79 - 81.
Murray, Margaret. The God 'Ash. Ancient Egypt and the East, December 1934 (volume 2), pp 115-117
Shorter, Alan. A Possible Late Representation of the God 'Ash. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 11, No. 1/2 (Apr., 1925), pp. 78-79.

The Left Eye of God

Right then. The moon and the sun are linked as the eyes of a god in various places in Egyptian myth - I'll stick a bunch of notes behind the cut - but if my rummagings are correct, how the right eye, the solar Eye of Re, the ferocious goddess, overlaps with the left eye, the lunar Eye of Horus, is this: Thoth brings them both back.

I was familiar with two stories involving Thoth and an eye - the myth of the Distant Goddess, in which the Eye of Re decamps to Nubia in a huff, and Thoth (or Onuris, or Shu) is dispatched to get her back; and the healing of Horus' eye after Set's assault.

What I didn't know is that there's also a myth in which Horus's eye wanders off and Thoth returns it to him:

The eye of Horus sprang up as he fell on yonder side of the Winding Watercourse, to protect itself against (or, free itself from) Set.
Thot saw it on yonder side of the Winding Watercourse.
The eye of Horus sprang up on yonder side of the Winding Watercourse, and fell upon the wing of Thot on yonder side of the Winding Watercourse.
O ye gods, ye who ferry over on the wing of Thot to yonder side of the Winding Watercourse, to the eastern side of heaven, to speak with Set about that eye of Horus, may N. ferry over with you on the wing of Thot to yonder side of the Winding Watercourse, to the eastern side of heaven, that he, N., may speak with Set about that eye of Horus.
- Pyramid Texts 594-596

It'd make a great animated cartoon - Horus' eye either leaping out of his face (or perhaps off Set's forehead) and Thoth spotting it in time to catch it and fly it back to its owner. (Hmmm. I wonder if this is an image of the changeable moon travelling through the sky.)

Various other bits of the PT touch on the same story. Patrick Boylan discusses all this in a footnote:

"The legend of the flight and return of the eye is obviously similar in many respects to the legends of the Destroying Eye of Re, of the angry eye which becomes the serpent on the diadem of the sun-god, of Onuris who fetched the divine lioness from the eastern desert, and of Hathor of Byblos. All these legends are intricately interwoven - so much so, indeed, that it is often difficult to decide to which of them a particular feature or motif primitively belongs. Thoth is certainly associated primitively with the astral legend of the moon-eye that vanished and was found again. The primitive astral myth contains no suggestion of an angry eye of Horus. Thoth's function as pacifier of the eye is connected with the more reflective legends of the Eye as Serpent on the crown of Horus (in which Sechmet appears as the Eye in her form nsr.t, and Thoth is the shtp nsr.t). (p 32, fn 1)

It's a bit slack to just quote chunks of Boylan, but I'm knackered and he explains it so simply:

"The name of [Onuris] Ini hri.t, 'He who brings the one who was far away', refers probably to the bringing to Egypt from the mountain lands of the eastern deserts of a goddess in leonine form who was forced or induced to leave her desert home by an ancient battle-god in lion or falcon form. This ancient god was Horus the warrior-god who, because he brought to Egypt the stranger goddess, received the epithet Ini hri.t (Onuris) - 'He that fetches her that was far away'. Later this Hri.t came to be identified with the wd3.t and Ini hri.t was explained as 'He that brings the Eye that was far away'. Thus, the name of Onuris came to be written (as Thoth's could be, and sometimes was, written) as a deity carrying the wd3.t. (p 35)

And as a footnote to that lot:

"In some cases, of course, Thoth brings back to Horus (or Re) the right eye, or the Sun. This activity seems to be secondary or borrowed in the legends of the sun-god Re: it is based on his more primitive activity in connection with the moon." (p 35 fn 1)

So there you go - multiple versions of basically the same story, the eye leaving and being returned, with slippage between just which eye is doing the round trip.

( More notes )

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Andrews, Carol. "The Boar, the Ram-Headed Crocodile and the Lunar Fly". in Studies in Egyptian Antiquities: A Tribute to T.G.H. James (Occasional paper 123). London, British Museum, 1999. pp. 79 - 81.

Boylan, Patrick. Thoth, the Hermes of Egypt. Chicago, Ares Publishers, 1987. (A reprint of this, I believe.)

Darnell, J. C. 1997. The Apotropaic Goddess in the Eye. Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur 24, pp 35-48.

Troy, Lana. "Mut Enthroned". in van Dijk, J. (ed.), Essays on Ancient Egypt in Honour of Herman te Velde, Groningen, 1997, pp.301-315.

Willems, Harco. The coffin of Heqata (Cairo JdE 36418): a case study of Egyptian funerary culture of the early Middle Kingdom. Leuven, Uitgeverij Peeters en Departement Oriëntalistiek, 1996.