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I've just encountered the lioness-headed, ithyphallic, flail-brandishing, mummified diety seen at Hibis and possibly elsewhere. Blimey! Perhaps it's Mut
Mut would be my guess, the temple at Hibis being dedicated to Amun, Mut and Khonsu. And the ithyphallic/flail brandishing element is almost as strongly identified with Amun (especially Amun Kamutef) as it is with Min, with whom one tends immediately to associate it.
The mummiform bit, which again helps to identify this as a form of Mut, because Khonsu is frequently depicted as mummiform, is an interesting touch. When deities are mummiform, it doesn't have to do with the necropolis or afterlife per se--Ptah, e.g., has very few such associations and yet is frequently mummiform. Rather, it symbolizes ideality, perfection or completeness as such.
This aspect of being complete-in-oneself is reinforced by Mut's phallus, the potency by which she becomes "mother of her father", "the mother who became a daughter," et al., corresponding to Amun's epithet kamutef, "bull [stud] of his mother", i.e., his own begetter, one who possesses in himself the conditions of his own being.
Mind you, there's always the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy - cross-gender deities being rare because they're known to be rare.
This is true, though I would imagine that in most cases the orthography would tend to prevent a reading of what seems like, e.g., a verbal adjective with "-t" at the end really being a fused female divinity, but I'm not experienced enough at reading Egyptian primary texts "in the wild" without the crutch of an accompanying translation to say for certain. It's something I'm definitely going to keep in mind in future, though.
Sothis seems to have got around a bit!
Very much so. Since she embodies the beginning of the year, and hence the festival cycle through which the potencies of the Gods are expressed in time, she represents, as an aspect of another deity brought out in the fusion form (e.g., Bast-Sothis as the Sothis-aspect of Bast), the power of manifesting-all-divine-potencies-in-the-medium-of-worldly-time.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-06-09 05:50 pm (UTC)I've just encountered the lioness-headed, ithyphallic, flail-brandishing, mummified diety seen at Hibis and possibly elsewhere. Blimey! Perhaps it's Mut
Mut would be my guess, the temple at Hibis being dedicated to Amun, Mut and Khonsu. And the ithyphallic/flail brandishing element is almost as strongly identified with Amun (especially Amun Kamutef) as it is with Min, with whom one tends immediately to associate it.
The mummiform bit, which again helps to identify this as a form of Mut, because Khonsu is frequently depicted as mummiform, is an interesting touch. When deities are mummiform, it doesn't have to do with the necropolis or afterlife per se--Ptah, e.g., has very few such associations and yet is frequently mummiform. Rather, it symbolizes ideality, perfection or completeness as such.
This aspect of being complete-in-oneself is reinforced by Mut's phallus, the potency by which she becomes "mother of her father", "the mother who became a daughter," et al., corresponding to Amun's epithet kamutef, "bull [stud] of his mother", i.e., his own begetter, one who possesses in himself the conditions of his own being.
Mind you, there's always the possibility of a self-fulfilling prophecy - cross-gender deities being rare because they're known to be rare.
This is true, though I would imagine that in most cases the orthography would tend to prevent a reading of what seems like, e.g., a verbal adjective with "-t" at the end really being a fused female divinity, but I'm not experienced enough at reading Egyptian primary texts "in the wild" without the crutch of an accompanying translation to say for certain. It's something I'm definitely going to keep in mind in future, though.
Sothis seems to have got around a bit!
Very much so. Since she embodies the beginning of the year, and hence the festival cycle through which the potencies of the Gods are expressed in time, she represents, as an aspect of another deity brought out in the fusion form (e.g., Bast-Sothis as the Sothis-aspect of Bast), the power of manifesting-all-divine-potencies-in-the-medium-of-worldly-time.