THE SEVEN MOTHERS IN ANCIENT EGYPT

THE SEVEN MOTHERS IN ANCIENT EGYPT

The seven givers of liquid life to the nursling were portrayed as women in Amenta: the seven Hathors who were present as Fates, at child-birth; and as cows in the constellation of the Great Bear. The sucklers might be imaged as seven women, seven cows, seven sows. Thus the Romans had evidently heard of them as a sevenfold form of Rerit the sow, a co-type with the Cow. The Bengalee Folk-tale shows the Egyptian Mythos reduced to the stage of the Aryan Märchen. The typical seven Mothers of the child also survive amongst the other curiosities of Christianity. It is said in the Gospel of the Nativity that Mary “the virgin of the Lord” had been brought up with seven other virgins in the Temple.

Also there are seven women in the Gospels who minister to Jesus of their substance. Again we are able to affiliate the folk-tale with the original Mythos. After which it is of little importance to our inquiry which country the Aryan Märchen came from last. The Seven Hathors or Cows in the Mythos are also the Seven Fates in attendance at the birth of a Child; and in the Babar Archipelago Seven Women, each of them carrying a sword, are present when a child is born, who mix the placenta with ashes and put it into a small basket, which they hang up in a particular kind of tree. These likewise are a form of the Seven Hathors who were present at Child-birth as the Seven Fates in the Mythos. In such ways the Kamite Mythos passed into the Aryan Märchen.
The Child who had no father had been mythically represented as the Fertiliser of the mother when in utero, like Ptah, the God in embryo. Hence he was called the Bull of his Mother. But why the Bull? Because this was not the human Child. It was Horus as the calf, born of the Cow and a pre-human type when the fatherhood was not yet individualised.

The Solar God at Sunset made his entrance into the breeding-place of the nether world, and is said to prepare his own generation for rebirth next day, but not in human guise.The bull of his Mother is shown upon the horizon as Horus the calf. But when the persons and transactions are presented anthropomorphically, in accordance with the human terminology the calf which had no Father but was his own bull becomes the child who was born without a father.