A few notes from "Amulets of Ancient Egypt"

[ikhet_sekhmet]

"All the great gods and goddesses, as well as some of their less well-known divine colleagues, appear as amulets. Thus among lion-headed figures are found not only Sekhmet, Bastet and Wadjyt but Pakhet and Mehyt and the fierce god Mahes." (p 12)

"The problem is that the Egyptians believed most of their gods were able to manifest themselves in animal form, but there were not enough types of animal to suffice. Thus any one species might represent a number of different gods... Sekhmet, Tefnut, Mehyt, Pakhet and Bastet, even Wadjyt, might all appear as an amulet of a lion-headed woman." (p 14)

Cat-shaped amulets, representing Bastet, were most popular in the Third Intermediate Period. (p 12)

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Andrews, Carol. Amulets of Ancient Egypt. British Museum Press, London, 1994.

Comments

[lemon-cupcake.livejournal.com]

The problem is that the Egyptians believed most of their gods were able to manifest themselves in animal form, but there were so many types of animal to suffice. Thus any one species might represent a number of different gods...

An extraordinarily ignorant remark for Andrews to have made; she would know as well as anyone that there were many animals in the Egyptians' environment who were never used to represent any deities.

The use of a common animal form for multiple deities expressed a common function. Thus, for example, Goddesses depicted with a lioness head all operated at times as the "Eye" (i.e., agent, punning on ir.t 'doing/doer' as well as 'eye') of Re.

[ikhet-sekhmet.livejournal.com]

Now I'm trying to think of some examples of animals which were not associated with any deity!