The Woman Who Would Be King by Kara Cooney Page A

himself and the world continuously. According to her obelisk texts, Hatshepsut’s kingly transformation allowed her to participate in and absorb mysteries that she could not before. This mystical aspect of her coronation should not be downplayed; it provided one-to-one contact with the god.
    These later obelisk inscriptions are clear: Hatshepsut wanted everyone to know that she was only doing as Amen, her father, had commanded, that she would continue to perform any work that he required, and that she would act according to his guidance. She was advertising to her people that she had glimpsed the will of Amen’s heart. She was telling everyone, by building this connection to the sky itself, that she was truly in communion with the workings of the cosmos. For her, Karnak Temple was the epicenter of Amen’s creation, the place where heaven and earth joined, the sacred structure that allowed Amen to manifest himself and his great creative powers in the world of humanity. Hatshepsut was making some bold statements—not of martial powers or financial authority, but of access to the innermost workings of a god’s heart and to the secret nature of the universe itself. She had tapped into the source.
    This was a rich ideology that Hatshepsut could exploit. She used the mythology of Amen to support a flexible view of her own hidden and internalized gender, lending a mythical, semidivine connotation to the adaptations demanded for her to manifest kingship. Atum-Re (of Heliopolis) and Osiris (of Abydos) were given their due during her reign, but evidence suggests that Hatshepsut saw in the god Amen an elasticity and an ambiguity that worked well for her own feminine rule. 27 To cement her unconventional kingship, Hatshepsut used her deep theological training to find models that reinforced her own emerging androgyny. In some later texts, Amen was known as a father and a mother simultaneously, and Hatshepsutfit herself into this indistinctness. Indeed, Amen had a feminine counterpart named Amenet, who was understood to be a kind of consort but, more correctly, was herself a feminine manifestation of the Great God. 28
    Hatshepsut was intimately aware of Amen’s many forms and names, many of them invested with great masculine powers of fecundity and creation. She was able to link herself as a feminine complement to each of them, allowing her kingship to force a nuance of gendered royal divinity never seen before, as “Khenemet-Amen Hatshepsut, who lives forever, the daughter of Amen-Re, his beloved, his only one who came from him, shining image of the Lord of All, whose beauty was fashioned by the powers of Heliopolis.” 29 She sometimes represented herself as a ruler with masculine/feminine powers, and in one text she is told: “They allow your borders to reach to the extent of the heavens, to the borders of deep darkness. The Two Lands are filled with the children of your children, great is the count of your seed.” 30
    In keeping with her new role as caretaker of divine creation, Hatshepsut was the first known king to publish depictions and texts of the divine Opet festival. During these rites, priests carried the veiled statue of Amen-Re the two miles from Karnak to Luxor Temple to meld with the sexualized forms of the god—Amenkamutef and Amenemipet. Hatshepsut surrounded this procession with excess and embellishments. 31 Amen’s connection with the sun god, Re—joined as a kind of superdivinity forming the synchronized Amen-Re at Karnak Temple—also allowed her to tap into the solar aspects of divine kingship as sun priest. Working within this solar theology, Hatshepsut worshipped and built temples for the sun god’s daughters—the Eyes of Re—identifying with their ruthless violence and ferocity in protection of the sun. She underscored the ability of the female divinity to excite the sun god through laughter, love, and sexuality. Hatshepsut understood that it was the goddess who woke the god from his deathlike sleep,