Hat-Mehit ḥꜣt-mḥyt

Egyptian gods wear animals for reasons you can usually work out.

The falcon is the height of the sky, so Horus wears a falcon. The jackal digs at the desert edge where the cemeteries are, so Anubis wears a jackal. The scarab appears to generate itself out of a ball of dung, so Khepri is a beetle.

Hat-Mehit wears a fish, and the reason is different in kind.

The fish is not an animal that says something about her. It is the hieroglyph of her nome — the administrative sign of the province of Mendes, the mark that appears on the standard carried in front of the district in processions.

She is the goddess of Mendes wearing the logo of Mendes.

Territory before personality

I keep turning this over because it inverts how the rest of the pantheon works.

Most of these deities are a quality first — fierceness, wisdom, generation — and a location second. Sekhmet is a lioness who happens to be worshipped at Memphis. Thoth is the moon and writing, and Hermopolis is where his temple is.

Hat-Mehit is the place, first. Budge says she is "called the Mother" of Mendes — not the mother of a god, not the mother of the king, the mother of the city. Her son exists, and her consort exists, but the thing she is the mother of is a district.

Which means her emblem is doing something closer to a coat of arms than to a totem.

The family at Mendes

The triad is worth setting out, because all three members are strange.

Her consort is Ba-neb-Tettu, the Ram of Mendes — a ram god who in late times was understood to be the Soul of Osiris.

Her son is Heru-pa-khart, the dweller within Tettu — the local Harpocrates, Horus in his infant form.

And she wears the fish.

A ram, a fish and a baby. It is not a combination that suggests any single theological scheme, which is exactly what you would expect from a genuinely local cult that grew where it stood.

Then Isis arrived

The most instructive thing about Hat-Mehit is what happened to her, and Budge lets you watch it happen in one paragraph.

In late dynastic times, as the ram of Mendes came to be regarded chiefly as the Soul of Osiris, Hat-Mehit was wholly identified with Isis. And once she was Isis, her son "became to all intents and purposes 'Horus, the son of Isis,' by Osiris."

That is a whole local pantheon being absorbed in a single move. The mother becomes the national mother. The son becomes the national son. The consort becomes an aspect of the national god of the dead.

This reference has watched Thebes do the same thing from the other side — taking over Khonsu, Mut, Min and Montu to give Amun the depth he lacked. Mendes shows the receiving end.

What the priests refused to give up

And here is the part I find genuinely moving, in a bureaucratic sort of way.

The priests of Mendes accepted the merger. Their ram became Osiris. But they were, Budge says, "careful to preserve the peculiar characteristics of their god, i.e., virility and the power to create, and to recreate."

So they made a claim. They declared that the phallus and the lower part of the backbone of Osiris were kept in their temple — a building called Per-khet, the "House of the staircase."

Think about what that is. A local priesthood, losing its god to a national theology, anchors the one attribute it cannot afford to lose to a physical relic in its own building. You can have our god. The generative power stays here, in this room, and you will have to come to Mendes for it.

The Ram of Mendes was then called "Osiris as the Generator."

A small goddess in a large negotiation

Hat-Mehit herself is thin in the sources. A fish, a city, a title borrowed from Hathor ("the Eye of Ra, the lady of heaven"), a vague connection to Punt that Budge does not explain.

But she sits at the centre of one of the best-documented takeovers in Egyptian religion, and her emblem tells you why the takeover mattered to somebody. She was not an idea that could be relocated. She was a province, personified — and a province cannot be absorbed without somebody on the ground working out what they get to keep.