Well documented. Several independent sources across different periods. In the record from the very beginning.
Sekhmet sḫmt
the powerful one, lady of plague and of healing
The myth, retold
The story as it is told
A retelling, not a translation. What follows is the story as it is commonly told, drawn together from the better popular and scholarly accounts. It is not keyed to any single ancient text, and the ancient sources rarely agree with each other as neatly as a retelling has to. The attested record — with its sources, its gaps, and its disagreements — is below.
Sekhmet's name means "the powerful one." It is the feminine form of the word for power, and it is not a compliment or a euphemism — it is a description of what she does.
Her epithets include "lady of terror" and "she who mauls." The Egyptians did not soften her, and neither should we.
The night humanity nearly ended
Ra has grown old, and he learns that people are plotting against him. So he sends out his Eye to deal with it, and the Eye goes as Sekhmet.
She does deal with it. She deals with it so thoroughly that the killing does not stop when the plotters are dead. She goes through the rest of humanity, and she is enjoying it, and there is no mechanism to call her off — because the Eye, once sent, is not really under anybody's control.
Ra changes his mind. This is the detail that makes the story: the supreme god looks at what he has set in motion and wants it stopped, and cannot simply order it.
So he does something cleverer. He has beer brewed — vast quantities of it — dyed red with ochre, and poured out over the fields.
Sekhmet arrives, sees a flood of red, takes it for blood, and drinks. She drinks until she cannot walk. She falls asleep. And when she wakes up she is calm, and humanity is still here because a god got her drunk.
They drank to that, on purpose
The remarkable part is that this was not just a story. It was a festival.
Rites connected to her pacification involved actual heavy drinking — beer, often coloured red, consumed in quantity. Egyptians re-enacted the thing that saved the species. It is one of the very few points where you can see a myth and the behaviour it licensed sitting right next to each other in the evidence.
The one who sends the plague lifts the plague
Sekhmet brings disease. Her arrows carry it; the dangerous stretch at the turn of the year is hers, and texts are full of appeals to keep her passing by.
And her priests were physicians.
That is not a contradiction the Egyptians needed to resolve. The logic is straightforward once you accept the premise: the power that sends the plague is the power that can lift it, so the person you want at the bedside is the one who serves her. Medical papyri invoke her by name. The wab priests of Sekhmet functioned as a recognised medical body.
If disease has an author, the author is who you negotiate with. It is a perfectly rational system built on a premise we no longer share.
Seven hundred statues
Amenhotep III commissioned Sekhmet statues in a quantity that is difficult to comprehend — the figure usually given is around seven hundred, in black granodiorite, seated and standing, apparently intended to provide one of each for every day of the year.
Why is not certainly known. A long illness has been suggested. So has a plague. Both would fit a king trying to placate the goddess who sends and withholds sickness, on a daily schedule, at enormous expense.
They were dispersed across museums in the nineteenth century, which is why Sekhmet is one of the most commonly encountered Egyptian statues in the West. If you have stood in front of a black lioness-headed woman in a museum, it was probably one of his.
How to spot her
A lioness-headed woman with a sun disk on her head and a cobra at the front of it. Egypt had a great many lioness goddesses — Menhit, Pakhet, Mehit — and the disk is what distinguishes her. Without an inscription, the disk is your best guide.
At Memphis she is the wife of Ptah and the mother of Nefertem, which is a domestic arrangement worth pausing on: the craftsman, the lioness who nearly ended the world, and their son the lotus.
Overview
Sekhmet is the destructive capacity of the sun, personified as a lioness, and the Egyptians did not soften her. Her name means "the powerful one" — literally the feminine of "power" — and her epithets include "lady of terror" and "she who mauls."
She is also a goddess of healing, and her priests were physicians. This is not a contradiction the sources try to resolve; it is the logic of the thing. The power that sends plague is the power that lifts it, so the deity you petition for a cure is the one who sent the disease. Ancient Egyptian medicine treats her as both cause and remedy, and her priesthood, the wab priests of Sekhmet, functioned as a recognised medical body.
Attestation history
Old Kingdom. Sekhmet is attested early, associated with royal power and with the king's destructive force in battle.
New Kingdom. She reaches extraordinary prominence. Amenhotep III commissioned an enormous number of granodiorite statues of her — the figure usually given is around seven hundred, intended to provide one seated and one standing statue for every day of the year — installed principally in the Mut precinct at Karnak and at his mortuary temple. Examples are now distributed across museums worldwide, which is why Sekhmet is one of the most commonly seen Egyptian statues in Western collections.
The Book of the Heavenly Cow, inscribed in New Kingdom royal tombs, contains the Destruction of Mankind narrative.
Late Period. Her plague associations intensify; she is invoked in protective and apotropaic contexts, and the beginning of the year — a season of epidemic — was a time for placating her.
What the texts say
The Destruction of Mankind. Ra, grown old, learns that humanity is plotting against him. He sends out his Eye as Sekhmet (in some tellings she emerges from Hathor) to punish them. She does so with such enthusiasm that she cannot be stopped and is on course to annihilate the human race entirely. Ra relents and orders beer to be dyed red with ochre and poured over the fields. Sekhmet, taking it for blood, drinks until she is too drunk to continue, and humanity survives.
The story is doing several things at once: it explains why humanity persists without claiming humanity deserved to, it makes the supreme god's control over his own instrument doubtful, and it grounds a festival — the drinking rite associated with her pacification is attested as actual practice, not merely as narrative.
The Eye of Ra. Sekhmet is one manifestation of the Eye, alongside Hathor, Bastet, Wadjet, and others. The Eye is the sun's disk sent out as an independent, dangerous, female agent — a role rather than a fixed identity, which is why these goddesses convert into one another so readily.
Memphite triad. At Memphis she is consort of Ptah and mother of Nefertem, completing one of the best-attested divine family groupings in Egypt.
Iconography
A lioness-headed woman, normally wearing a sun disk encircled by a cobra — the disk is what distinguishes her from other lioness goddesses, of which Egypt had many. She usually holds an ankh, sometimes a papyrus sceptre.
She is often paired conceptually with Bastet, and later tradition treats the two as the fierce and the mild aspects of a related power; the cat and the lioness. Distinguishing lioness goddesses — Sekhmet, Menhit, Pakhet, Mehit, Tefnut in leonine form — usually requires the inscription.
Cult and practice
At Memphis she was worshipped with Ptah and Nefertem. The Mut precinct at Karnak holds the great concentration of Amenhotep III's statues. Her priesthood combined ritual and medical roles, and medical papyri invoke her directly.
Rites of pacification, including the drinking of beer coloured red, are attested as festival practice connected to the Destruction of Mankind narrative.
Reception
Sekhmet has an unusually strong presence in modern goddess-centred and Kemetic revival practice, where she is often framed in terms of righteous anger and protection. That is a contemporary reading, and a coherent one, but it is modern and is documented here as such rather than projected backward.
The record
Every claim above traces to a row here. Source, exact place in that source, and what it actually supports.
| Source | Locus | Attests |
|---|---|---|
[book-heavenly-cow] | *Book of the Heavenly Cow*, New Kingdom royal tombs | the Destruction of Mankind and the red-beer pacification |
[budge-1901] | Book of the Dead | protective and destructive invocations |
Sources
[budge-1901]— Budge, trans., Egyptian Literature (1901). Public domain. Budge caveat applies.[book-heavenly-cow]— The Book of the Heavenly Cow. Citation incomplete: a specific public-domain edition or translation has not yet been identified for this corpus. Do not treat this key as resolved until04-BIBLIOGRAPHY.mdcarries a full entry.[wilkinson-2003]— Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses. In copyright; cited only.
Open questions
- Resolve the
[book-heavenly-cow]citation — identify a usable public-domain edition and add it to the bibliography, or downgrade the claims resting on it. - Verify the ~700 statue figure for Amenhotep III against an excavation or museum publication; the number is widely repeated and the "one for every day" rationale may be a modern gloss.
- Cite the wab priests of Sekhmet as physicians from a primary medical papyrus.
- Establish the earliest dated attestation; "Old Kingdom" is currently corpus-level.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ●full — Multiple attestations across periods.
"Sekhmet", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded full, retrieved 2026-08-10.