Today on Monday Mysteries we tackle the legend of the Wadjet, aka the Eye of Horus.

Chris and I were in Turin, Italy, last week, and we spent a day at the Egyptian Archeology museum there.  Very interesting – I highly recommend it, even if you have only a passing interest in Ancient Egypt.

For all that I was a Classics major, my area was Ancient Rome and Greece, so I’m not really that conversant with Ancient Egypt.  There were many interesting things we ran across at the museum, but, one small symbol was particularly intriguing. It  kept popping up in all shapes and sizes in various paintings, sculptures, tablets, drawings, across centuries of Egyptian artifacts.  The symbol that caught our eye is the Wadjet, aka the Eye of Horus.  We had fun making this our little museum mission, trying to spot the Eye of Horus in all its different forms:

1. By itself

Single Eye of Horus – right

2. As a pair

Two Eyes of Horus

3. By itself pointed the other way

Single Eye of Horus – left

4. Not just painted, but also carved:

Eye of Horus – tablet

We spotted it all over, in many different eras of art. After many hours of looking for it, we even saw it when we took at break at the cafeteria in the museum shared an order of tiramisu. The cocoa patterns after we were done were oddly like the Eye:

Eye of Horus on a Tiramisu Plate

Anyway, I found it unusual that this symbol looks like it has “legs”, but is taken to be an eye. So, when we got back I looked it up online. Doing that revealed quite a lot of legends associated with this symbol. To summarize one of the basic stories, the god Horus, god of the moon, got into a fight and had one of his eyes torn out. It was miraculously restored later, though, and it now is taken to have been used (by the Ancient Egyptians)  to  symbolize health, or power, or the waxing/waning of the moon. One version of the legend says that only his left eye was ripped out, so when you see the right eye, that signifies the other phase of the moon.   Or something.

But then, in another story, the Wadjet part of the legend is that Wadjet means “green one”, and it is taken to refer is a goddess. Here’s my artistic homage to that myth, using our tiramisu “eye” as a starting point:

Artistic homage to Wadjet

Anyway, I was trying to sort it all out for this post, but ran out of time. But you can check out the information at this link or at this other link or at yet another link. And then you can decide for yourself what the real solution is to today’s Monday Mystery…

One side note:  The museum’s labels on a lot of these artifacts explained that one tends see a face whenever the Eye of Horus appears.  Ironically,  though, I — who can see faces in just about anything — mostly did NOT see a face when the Eye of Horus appeared, primarily because I didn’t really see it as an eye.

However, I do see a face in the following image — but only because of the accidental gash in the side of the box that now appears near the bottom  looks (to me) like a mouth;  combined with the two Eyes of Horus above, the whole thing does look like a face. To me, at least.

“Face” of Horus

But then again, I usually do see a face in just about anything.