Reret rrt

Go outside tonight, north of the tropics, and find the Big Dipper. Seven bright stars, unmistakable, and they never set — they wheel around the pole all night, every night, and never dip below the horizon.

The Egyptians looked at those seven stars and saw Set: the god of storm and violence and the desert, the one who murdered his brother. They called the shape the Thigh, after the foreleg of an ox.

And they needed something to hold him there.

The chain

The account is short and does not hedge:

The chief opponent of Set was the hippopotamus goddess Reret, who was believed to keep this power of darkness securely fettered by a chain.

She stands beside the Thigh, holding the chain that keeps it in place.

What I find remarkable is that this is a piece of theology you can verify. The Great Bear never sets. It is up there all night, circling, going nowhere. If your story is that a goddess has that constellation on a chain, the sky agrees with you every single night for your entire life.

Egyptian religion runs on maintenance — the sun has to be rowed through the night, the serpent has to be fought again tomorrow, order has to be re-established constantly and never stays established. Here is the same logic, put where anybody can check it.

Why the north is the bad direction

The geography behind this is worth spelling out, because it is not obvious to anyone living in Europe or North America.

Stand in Upper Egypt — the southern valley — and look north. That is where the cold comes from. The mist, the rain, the darkness. Everything unwelcome arrives from the north, and every one of those is an attribute of Set.

So the northern sky is his natural domain, and the constellation that owns the northern sky is his constellation. It is not an arbitrary assignment. It is someone describing the weather.

(The source goes on to note that the Hebrews called the region of darkness Sephon, and connects it to Saphon, north — a comparative claim offered without evidence, and recorded here as his rather than as fact.)

A hippopotamus with hands

The image is specific and slightly alarming:

the arms and hands of a woman attached to the body of a hippopotamus, and in each hand a knife.

If you know Egyptian art you are already thinking of Taweret — the upright pregnant hippopotamus who protects women in childbirth, one of the most beloved figures in the whole tradition, found in houses rather than temples.

These two are not obviously distinguishable in the sources read here, and the honest position is that this reference does not yet know what separates them. Two upright hippopotamus goddesses, both armed, both protective, both in the northern sky. Somebody in Egypt knew the difference.

Her temple was called Het-Khaat. That is all that is said about it.

She is not only a jailer

Her job is given as two things, and the second is easy to skim past.

She keeps Set restrained. And she makes clear a way in the sky for the birth of Heru-sma-taui — a form of Horus that one nineteenth-century scholar identified with the spring sun.

So she is not just holding the door shut on something bad. She is holding the northern darkness still so that something can be born in the sky. A jailer and a midwife, and the two jobs are the same job: the light cannot arrive until the dark is pinned down.

That is a better piece of theology than most of what gets quoted from this material.

And then the source takes it all back

Immediately after describing her distinctive body, her two knives, her temple and her two duties, the same paragraph adds:

the texts, however, make it clear that Reret was nothing but a form of Isis.

No texts are cited. No attempt is made to square it with the hippopotamus, the knives, or the chain.

I have left both statements standing, because that is what the page is for. The best source available says two incompatible things about her in consecutive sentences and does not choose between them, and reporting only the tidier half would be a kind of lying.

She may well be Isis in the north with a chain in her hand. She may be an old independent goddess who got absorbed the way half the goddesses in this reference got absorbed. What is certain is that somebody stood outside, looked up at seven stars that never set, and decided the reason they never go anywhere is that a hippopotamus is holding them.