Horus Tattoo Meaning

Kingship, the sky, vengeance and restoration, and the falcon who is the living king.

Horus is the falcon-headed sky god and the living king — the son of Osiris and Isis whose eyes are the sun and moon, born to avenge his murdered father and reclaim the throne, and incarnate in every living pharaoh; the divine articulation of kingship, succession, and the restoration of what was broken. To carry Horus is to carry kingship, the sky, vengeance and restoration, and the falcon who is the living king — the sky-god whose wings are the heavens, the avenging son, the god incarnate in the pharaoh, the healed Eye given to restore the father.

Horus (Heru, 'the distant one') is the falcon-headed sky god of ancient Egypt — one of the oldest and most important of all the Egyptian gods, the divine falcon soaring over the world. His very body is the sky and its lights: his eyes are the sun and the moon, his speckled breast the stars of heaven, and his outstretched wings the sky itself when he spreads them across the heavens. To look up at the sky was, in a sense, to behold Horus — the great falcon whose wings are the firmament, whose right eye is the sun and left eye the moon, whose dappled chest is the starry night.

Horus is the son of Osiris and Isis, and his birth and life are bound to the great Osirian drama. After Osiris was murdered by his brother Set, Isis conceived and bore Horus, and the infant was born in the marshes of the Delta in secret, while his mother hid him from Set, who would have killed the child to secure his usurped throne. Horus grew up in hiding, protected by Isis, the rightful heir concealed from the murderer who had taken his father's place. And his entire existence is the mission to avenge his father and reclaim the throne that is his by right — to defeat Set, avenge the murder of Osiris, and take up the kingship that Set had stolen. Horus is thus the divine falcon of the sky and the rightful heir: the sky-god whose body is the heavens, born in secret to avenge his father and win back the throne, the soaring falcon who is also the destined king. The Egyptian Horus is the falcon sky-god whose eyes are the sun and moon — son of Osiris, born to avenge his father and reclaim the throne. The Egyptian Horus is the falcon whose wings are the sky — Horus (Heru, 'the distant one') is the falcon-headed sky god, his eyes the sun and moon, his speckled breast the stars, his wings the sky itself when he spreads them; the son of Osiris and Isis, born in the marshes of the Delta in secret while his mother hid him from Set, his entire existence the mission to avenge his father and reclaim the throne that is his by right — the divine falcon of the sky and the rightful heir, the sky-god whose body is the heavens, born in secret to avenge his father and win back the stolen kingship.

Horus is among the oldest attested deities in Egypt — falcon imagery appears in the earliest pre-dynastic period (c. 3200–3000 BCE) and the Horus-pharaoh identification is documented from the first dynasty. There are at minimum fifteen distinct Horus forms in the Egyptian pantheon — Horus the Elder (Haroeris), Horus the Child (Harpocrates, depicted with finger to lips and a side-lock of youth), Horus of the Horizon (Horemakhet — the Sphinx at Giza is this form), Horus Behdety (the winged disc), and others. The Contendings of Horus and Set (Papyrus Chester Beatty I, c. 1160 BCE) is simultaneously the most complete mythological narrative of the conflict and one of the most comedic texts in Egyptian literature — the gods argue for eighty years, the tribunal cannot decide, the case is ultimately resolved by a letter from Osiris threatening to send demons after the gods if they do not grant his son the throne. The six components of the healed Wedjat eye were used in Egyptian mathematics as fractional notation — each part represented a fraction (1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64), summing to 63/64; the missing 1/64 was said to have been supplied by Thoth's magic, making the eye whole.

Horus across cultures

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