Heket
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Heket Ḥqt |
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Heket (also Heqet or Hekit ) was the goddess of birth in ancient Egypt . She is the wife of Khnum and daughter of Re . She is usually depicted as a frog-headed woman, sometimes just as a frog. She is the "mistress of the city of Herwer ", probably not Antinoupolis , as is often assumed.
For the ancient Egyptians the frog became a symbol of life and fertility, because the frog brought fertility and thus life to the otherwise fallow land with the annual flood of the Nile.
The goddess Heket has been documented since early times. In Abydos there are steles on which she is depicted together with Khnum. When the legend of Osiris and Isis arose with the Osiris myth , Heket was the goddess who "breathed" life into the new body of Horus . So she became the goddess at the last moment of birth. As the birth of Horus became more and more connected with the resurrection of Osiris, Heket's role was also connected more with the resurrection itself. Heket thus helped both the earthly and the afterlife.
See also
literature
- Hans Bonnet : Lexicon of the Egyptian religious history. 3rd, unchanged edition, Nikol, Hamburg 2000, ISBN 3-937872-08-6 , pp. 284–285.
- Richard H. Wilkinson : The world of the gods in ancient Egypt: Faith - Power - Mythology. Theiss, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-8062-1819-6 , p. 229.