The eye of Horus

 The most common story around the eye of Horus is that Horou’s eyes were disassembled by his opponent Seth and later reassembled by Thoth. However, Horus didn’t take the reassembled eyes but gave it to his father as his third eye– The God of the Dead. This move allowed the eye of Horus to became the symbol of light, hope and healing.  While each six parts of the eye are associated with the 6 unit fractions, each part are also associated with a particular sense. Those are sense of touch, taste, hearing thought, sight, and smell. If we were to add all the fractions together we would only get 63/64. One version is the believe of the missing 1/64 is associated with the “sixth sense”. 

 

Upon my research, I came across the eye of Ra. The eye of Horus and the eye of Ra are very similar in terms of appearance. However, they have different meaning/symbolism. While the eye of Ra only protects royal member, the eye of Horus protects everyone. As the word “Ra” means sun in Egyptian. The eye of Ra is also a symbol for sun, heat and light.

 

It seems that the eye of Horus are heavily related to medicine, both back then and now. It is believed that the fractions were used to prescript medicine (which makes sense with the use of unit fractions at that time). I am surprised that the symbol of “Rx” I saw when I bought my prescribed lenses a few month ago comes from the eye of Horus symbol. 

Comments

  1. Amanda FritzlanNovember 9, 2022 at 11:59 AM

    Duncan, I am curious what the "sixth sense" may have meant for ancient Egyptians. It is interesting that the royal people had their own eye symbol for luck, protection, light.

    ReplyDelete

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