The Woman Who Would Be King by Kara Cooney

Hatshepsut took up her new role as dominant protector with energy, and as such she gave special attention to Egypt’s goddesses. Perhaps believing that her power stemmed from the divine feminine, capable of both great destruction and soft tenderness, she embellished the temples of these goddesses, rebuilding those in ruin, and even elevating some divinities to a higher level with grand buildings and new festivals. The goddess Mut of Thebes was a beneficiary of Hatshepsut’s pious devotion.
Mut
literally means “mother,” but she was also believed to be the consort of the god Amen. Mut had her own temple precinct in the larger Karnak complex, and indeed, the foundations of many stone buildings in Mut’s temple space were created by Hatshepsut. 24 Mut was depicted wearing the double crown, and it is likely that Hatshepsut, as Lady of the Two Lands, felt a kinship with this celestial being, enough to link her own feminine kingship with Mut’s great and ferocious power. Hatshepsutprobably felt a real connection to this lioness divinity, performing countless rituals in the goddess’s sanctuary, offering meals, and, most important, offering the goddess beer, getting her drunk so that she would not unleash her ferocious power on Egypt’s people.
    But King Hatshepsut never neglected Amen, her father, the god she believed had placed her in this position in the first place; and more than to any divinity in the land, she strengthened her link to the god of Thebes. The name “Amen” means “hidden one,” and his true nature was thought to be concealed. Hatshepsut, too, claimed obliquely that her own true character as king had been hidden, only to be revealed as she gradually moved closer to the throne. One of her later obelisks reads that she is “Maatkare, the shining image of Amen, whom he made appear as King upon the throne of Horus, in front of the holies of the palace, whom the Great Ennead nursed to be mistress of the circuit of the sun’s disk.” 25 She thus claims to be the visible manifestation of the god Amen, who was believed to exist before creation itself; that is, he represented unformed potential that could become anything—mother or father, man or woman, child or adult, animal or human. This god was thought to permeate everything and everyone. Amen’s existence depended on a body created from nothingness, from infinity, from darkness, within the primeval waters. And he did this miraculously, from his own divine plan, from the potentiality of the universe.
    The inscriptions on the surface of this same later obelisk clarify Hatshepsut’s new, divine place in the cosmos:
    I have made this with a loving heart for my father, Amun, having entered into his initiation of the First Occasion and having experienced his impressive efficacy. I have not been forgetful of any project he has decreed. For My Majesty knows he is divine, and I have done it by his command. He is the one who guides me. I could not have imagined the work without his acting: he is the one who gives the directions.
    Nor have I slept because of his temple. I do not stray from what he has commanded. My heart is perceptive on behalf of my father, and I have access to his mind’s knowledge. I have not turned my back on the town of the Lord to the Limit but paid attention to it. For I know that Karnak is heaven on earth, the sacred elevation of the First Occasion, the Eye of the Lord tothe Limit—his favorite place, which bears his perfection and gathers his followers. 26
    Hatshepsut thus tells her people that she was able to converse personally with the creator god Amen-Re, to witness the circumstances of his First Time—that is, to see and understand his masturbatory creation of himself and of the universe itself. In Egypt, creation was an ongoing process, not a single origin story that happened once at the beginning of history, like the Bible’s Genesis. In Egyptian belief, the king had to construct the right conditions for the god to manifest