This Week's Preparation for Timna: All Things Hathor
Hathor's head. Faience, from a sistrum's handle. 18th Dynasty. From Thebes, Egypt. The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, London
This week in preparation for my research at Timna Park in the Negev, I have burrowed into all things Hathor. Hathor is typically known as an ancient Egyptian goddess of music, motherhood, sexuality, love...and beer. (I think of her as "the party goddess," whereas I associate the goddess Isis, with whom she is often associated, as being the "intellectual" of the pair. Isis was about wisdom and invention, along with motherhood.) When I started looking into the Egyptian link to the copper mines at Timna, however, I was surprised to learn that Hathor was also the patron goddess of copper miners. This is why today at Timna park there are remains of a chapel to Hathor.
All pharonic Egyptian gods and goddesses are complex. First, Egyptian civilization lasted for thousands of years, so the meanings and associations of their many deities were not static. Second, the culture was not necessarily as dualistic as "Western" culture (whatever that is). The meanings of any particularly diety can even have, at a superficial level, contradictory aspects or attributes.
For this reason, I figured the more I can burrow in deeply to understand the nuances of Hathor, the more I can gain an understanding of how she was perceived and revered at Timna -- and why.
I am eagerly awaiting this book via interlibrary loan: Votive Offerings to Hathor by Geraldine Finch. It was recommended to me by an Egyptologist at Stanford who works at another Hathor site I love, Deir el Medina (the Arabic name for the "Village of the Workers") in Luxor. It is a very expensive book from England, so our library does not have it, and it is in high demand from UCLA. I am hoping Stanford Library comes through!
Our library does have this book, When the Drummers Were Women, A Spiritual History of Rhythm by Layne Redmond. This book contains a chapter devoted to just Hathor, "The Golden One," and her relationship to drumming and rhythmic arts.
I have mixed feelings about this book. It is a wonderful escape, but the author seems, via her tone, to be of the Marija Gimbutas school of thought on goddess studies. I.e, it's that school of thought adopted by some Second Wave feminists that now sounds dated and essentialist: women are "by nature" more peaceful than men, so cultures where mother goddesses were prevalent were more peaceful and gave women high status. I am grossly oversimplifying for brevity, but I think the picture cross-culturally, cross-historically, and cross-temporally is really quite a bit more complex. In the Near East, a lot of goddesses were goddesses of both love and war, or had other "dual" aspects. In ancient Babylon, Ishtar was a major deity, but women sure did not have high status (or many rights, if you read the Code of Hammurabi). And so forth.
So basically, I look at this school of thought as one that became popular when VietNam Era protest and the rise of Second Wave feminism dovetailed. It resurged in the late 80s/early 90s when Grateful Dead hippies picked up the thread. I see it as a way of envisioning a more peaceful existence while trying to increase the role of power of women in society. And that is indeed a laudable use of imagination. It's just not necessarily 100% archaeologically "accurate" from an academic perspective.
So from a scholarly perspective, I approach this book critically and cautiously. As an artist, I gratefully let it inspire my imagination.
Another exciting Hathor bit, I have located a sistrum, a musical instrument associated with Hathor. My Egyptologist friend Mary, who lives part-time in Luxor and runs The Egyptian Blue Lotus Foundation, is a big fan of Hathor. She has FOUR sistrum, each of which she has had commissioned by artisans in Luxor. She is willing to sell me one when she is back at her East Coast home.
And I have been investigating a trance dance tradition in Egypt, North Africa and throughout the Middle East called the Zar. It seems to me that the tradition has a lot of similarities to the rhythm traditions and mourning rituals of ancient Egypt, ala Hathor priestesses, and I would like to pull on this thread a little to see if it goes anywhere. In some videos of the zar, the traditional way of holding the drum is the same as on Egyptian wall paintings, and the type of drum looks similarly familiar. Alas, ala the hippy era ideas about peaceful goddess societies where women ruled, sometimes what we want to be true...is untrue or only partly true; but it is also good to turn over rocks if you are sure there are no cobras or scorpions under them.
The Zar is traditionally done by women, often in groups, to expel bad stuff. Depression, evil spirits, mourning, et cetera. This drumming and dancing can go on for a whole week. It is a kind of folk medicine tradition still practiced in poor rural areas where science-based medicine is not necessarily available or affordable. The tradition is dying out in Egypt because religious fundamentalists are clamping down on it. It remains alive through belly dance, though, as many belly dance songs have a section of zar music in them.
Here is an example of the zar in dance, I think perhaps from Israel?
And of just the music, courtesy of the Egyptian Center for Arts and Culture in Cairo:
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