🐄 Hathor: The Joyful Body
🐄 Hathor: The Joyful Body
Series: The Sacred and the Sensual
by Rosalind Green
“She was worshiped not for what she withheld, but for what she gave.”
The House of Horus
Hathor’s name means House of Horus — but she was never anyone’s house to keep.
She was the goddess of joy, dance, love, intoxication, and music — the living rhythm of creation. Egyptians painted her with a sun disk between cow horns, surrounded by mirrors and sistrums, her image alive with sound and light.
She was both celestial and bodily: goddess of the Milky Way and of milk itself. To praise Hathor was to celebrate the pleasure of being alive. She was the heartbeat inside art, laughter, wine, and touch.
The Ecstatic Temple
In Dendera, her temple rose with columns carved into her face, crowned with cow ears that listened to the music of devotion. Pilgrims brought perfume, jewelry, and song. Her festivals filled the night with drums, dancers, and wine.
Ecstasy was her liturgy. The goal wasn’t to escape the body, but to let the body become prayer.
To dance was to dissolve into the rhythm of the universe; to laugh was to echo the creation myth itself — joy as the sound of divine birth.
Hathor’s worship blurred the line between art and ritual: painters, musicians, lovers, and midwives all belonged to her.
The Power of Pleasure
In the myth where humanity’s chaos angers Ra, Hathor becomes the fierce lioness Sekhmet — unleashed wrath and blood. Yet when the slaughter threatens the world, she is tricked into drinking red-dyed beer. Drunk and dizzy, she turns back into herself: gentle, laughing, overflowing with life.
Pleasure redeems her.
Through intoxication she remembers love. Through surrender she returns to creation.
Even her shadow teaches that sensual joy is not indulgence — it’s restoration.
The Mirror and the Sistrum
Hathor’s emblems — the mirror and the sistrum — tell her story without words.
The mirror reflects beauty, but also awareness: to see oneself as divine. The sistrum shakes metal disks that imitate the sound of papyrus rustling in the wind — a sound that wakes the gods. Both invite participation. You don’t worship Hathor from a distance; you join her rhythm.
She teaches that the sacred feminine is not austere; it’s embodied, sensual, generous. To create, one must first feel.
The Modern Pulse
Hathor survives wherever joy is treated as devotion.
In artists who dance paint across canvas, in lovers who treat laughter as sacrament, in the people who find holiness in the warmth of another body.
She is the patron saint of the sensual life — proof that art, music, and pleasure can be prayer when offered with open hands and open heart.
To honor her is simple:
Live beautifully. Touch with gratitude. Laugh like the world depends on it.
Rose Meow™ by Rosalind Green
A study of art, cannabis, sex, and spirit — written without flinching.