Mythology

Although serpentine in form, Renenutet (Egyptian for ‘snake who nourishes’) was a popular and beneficent deity. Protective in nature and of a nurturing rather than venomous disposition, she was a goddess of the harvest and a divine nurse, fn the Old Kingdom Renenutet was venerated as a guardian of the king in this life and in the beyond, being identified, like Wadjet, with the flame-breathing royal uraeus (PT 302) and also the king’s robe ‘of which the gods are afraid’ (IT 1755, 1794). In the latter aspect she came to be sometimes associated with the bandages of the mummy. Her aspect as a goddess of fertility and harvest is clearly denoted in her epithets ‘lady of the fertile land’, ‘lady of the threshing floor’ and ‘lady of the granaries’, and her role in this area may have originated in the imagery of the serpent who protects the crops from the rats and mice which threatened standing crops and stored grain alike. Renenutet was also identified with the household and family life in her role as provider, nourisher and as a nurse of infants.

The interrelationships of the goddess with other deities were extensive. In the Fayum Renenutet came to be linked with Sobek and Horus as a member of a triad named by the Greeks Hermouthis, Sekonopis and Ankhoes. As a grain goddess she was identified as the mother of Osiris in his form of the child Nepri, and in the Book of the Dead Renenutet is said to be the mother of Horus by Atum and thus came to be identified with Isis, with whom she shared the trait of divine nurse. Her associations with children also identified her with Meskhenet as a birth goddess and with Hathor whose headdress she wore. In the New Kingdom Litany of Re she appears in the undeinvorld as the ‘Lady of Justification’ and in this form she may be associated with the goddess Maat. Finally, in the Late Period, like the god Shay, Renenutet was associated with the idea of fate and destiny, deciding not only the length of an individual’s life but also many of its events.