SET-HORUS.
Since the northern constellations were symbolised by the name of Set, the god of darkness, we should take Set-Horus to mean that the stars in the Dragon were rising at sunrise. This may explain the meaning of a remarkable figure which has set Egyptologists thinking a great deal. It is the combination of Horus and Set—a body of Horus with two heads, those of the hawk and jackal.
Now then for the myth. The reason why Naville went to the temple of Edfû for his facts is that in the later-time temples—and this is one of them—the inscriptions on the walls have chiefly to do with myth and ritual, whereas in the period covered by the earlier dynasties the temple inscriptions related chiefly to the doings of the kings. When we come to read the story which Naville brings before us, it looks as though the greatest antiquity must be conceded to it from the fact that the god Horus—the rising sun—is accompanied by the Hor-shesu, the followers or worshippers of Horus. These people are almost prehistoric, even in Egyptian history. De Rougé says of them, as I have previously pointed out, C'est le type de l'antiquité la plus reculée. They represent, possibly, the old sun-worshippers at a time when as yet there was no temple of the sun. Now, in this famous myth of Horus, Horus, accompanied and aided by the Hor-shesu, does battle with Typhon, the god of darkness, who had killed his father Osiris, and Horus avenges his father in the manner indicated in the various inscriptions and illustrative drawings given in the temple of Edfû. How does he do it? We find that in this conflict to revenge his father Osiris, he is represented in a boat killing a hippopotamus with ten darts, the beast being ultimately cut up into eight pieces. In some drawings it is a hippopotamus that he is slaying; in others, possibly for some totemic reason, a crocodile has been selected, but we can only see that it has been a crocodile by the fact that a little piece of the tail remains. Doubtless the reference had been found objectionable by some crocodile-worshipping people.
In very many inscriptions the constellation which, as I have stated, represents the hippopotamus, is really represented as a crocodile, or as a crocodile resting on the shoulders of a hippopotamus, so that there is no doubt that the crocodile and the hippopotamus were variants; and we can quite understand, further, that the hippopotamus must have been brought into Egypt by a tribe with that totem, who must have come from a very long way up the Nile, since the hippopotamus was never indigenous in the lower reaches of the river; so that we have in the myth to do with a hippopotamus-worshipping tribe, which, for that reason, probably came from a region very far to the south. There is evidence of local tribes in Egypt among which the crocodile was sacred.
ILLUSTRATION FROM A THEBAN TOMB, SHOWING THE ASSOCIATION OF THE CROCODILE AND HIPPOPOTAMUS, AND HORUS SLAYING THE CROCODILE, AND THE CONSTELLATION OF THE THIGH.
The astronomical explanation of this myth is, I think, very clear. The inscriptions relating to one of the very earliest of the illustrations refers to Horus, "the great god, the light of the heavens, the lord of Edfû, the bright ray which appears on the horizon." The myth, therefore, I take it, simply means that the rising sun destroys the circumpolar stars. These stars are represented in the earliest forms of the myth either by the crocodile or the hippopotamus; of course they disappeared (or were killed) at sunrise. Horus, the bright ray on the horizon, is victorious by destroying the crocodile and the hippopotamus, which represent the powers of darkness.
HORUS AND CROCODILES.