The Destruction of Mankind by Ra
At a Glance
- Central figures: Ra, the sun god and creator; Sekhmet, his lion-headed daughter and instrument of destruction; and the rebellious human population Ra had made.
- Setting: Egypt, during Ra’s divine reign over the world; the story comes from the Book of the Heavenly Cow, inscribed in several royal tombs of the New Kingdom.
- The turn: Ra learns that humanity is plotting against him and summons the gods - who advise him to send Sekhmet down to punish the rebels.
- The outcome: Sekhmet’s rampage is stopped only when Ra orders beer dyed red with ochre poured across the fields; she drinks it believing it to be blood, falls into a stupor, and the slaughter ends.
- The legacy: A portion of humanity survived, preserved by Ra’s intervention - and the practice of offering beer mixed with red ochre to pacify Sekhmet became part of her cult.
Ra had grown old. Not diminished - still the sun moving across the sky, still the source of every living thing - but old in the way a king grows old after long centuries of rule. And mankind, the people he had fashioned and set upon the earth, noticed. They spoke of it. Then they began to conspire.
Word of the conspiracy reached Ra, and his anger was not the cold anger of a god who has grown indifferent. It was the anger of a creator who has been betrayed by what he made. He convened the Ennead - the council of the great gods - in a place hidden from human sight, and he put the question to them directly: what is to be done?
The Council in the Hidden Place
The gods assembled: Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, and the others who had been present at the making of the world. They listened. Then Nut spoke for the rest. Let your Eye go out against them, she said. Let it fall upon the ones who have plotted against you.
Ra’s Eye - the fierce solar force that could be sent forth as a weapon - was Sekhmet. Lion-headed, war-goddess, his daughter in whom his wrath took physical form. Ra looked at her, and she looked back at him, and the matter was settled.
Sekhmet descended to the earth.
Sekhmet in the Fields
She moved through the villages at the edge of the desert first, where the rebels had gathered. She was not selective. The slaughter spread across the fields, into the river marshes, through the delta towns. Blood ran between the irrigation channels and pooled in the low ground. Sekhmet drank from it, and the drinking made her want more.
Ra watched from the sky. He had wanted punishment. What he was watching was something else - the total consumption of mankind, not the chastisement of the guilty but the erasure of everyone. His own creation, emptied from the world. The anger in him shifted. He had not intended this. He needed to stop her.
The problem was that Sekhmet, once set loose, answered to nothing. Her bloodlust had become its own force, as self-sustaining as fire. She would not hear commands. She would not stop until there was nothing left to kill.
The Beer of Red Ochre
Ra sent word to his priests at Heliopolis. He gave them a single instruction: brew beer, as much as can be brewed, and grind red ochre into it until it runs the color of blood.
Through the night the priests worked. They mixed seven thousand jars. At Ra’s command, the jars were carried to the fields where Sekhmet was rampaging and poured out across the low ground before dawn - a vast shallow flood, red as the slaughter already soaking the earth, spreading between the furrows and glinting in the first light.
When Sekhmet came to the fields that morning, she stopped. She bent down and drank. The smell, the color, the taste - it was blood, or what her frenzy told her was blood. She drank more. The intoxication came up through her slowly, and her muscles slackened, and the burning in her narrowed to a dull glow, and then went out. She lay down among the empty jars.
The sun continued its arc across the sky. Below it, the fields were still.
What Ra Did Next
Sekhmet woke without hunger. The frenzy was gone. Ra looked at what remained of humanity - shattered, reduced, but not destroyed - and he accepted it.
He did not return to the earth. The work of ruling from so close had become too much for him, and the rebellion, even defeated, had left a distance between him and the people he had made. Ra withdrew to the back of Nut, the sky-goddess, and took up the position he holds now - above and apart, the sun crossing daily from east to west, maintaining ma’at from a greater remove.
Thoth was given authority to act in Ra’s place during the darkness, and the moon was made from his light. The gods who had counseled Ra took their stations in the world below. The order was redrawn.
Mankind survived - marked by the memory of what Sekhmet had done, and by the fact that Ra had chosen, at the last moment, to pull her back. The red beer remained in the temples, poured out in offering at festivals of Sekhmet, the jars carried in procession to the place where the goddess receives what is given to her.