I work with several goddesses, though primarily I work within the Greek pantheon these days, and you’ll likely expect that Hera is the only one who makes my heart sing… She is surely the one for whom I most often will write and publicly praise. There are others, and one of these others is Hathor.
Somewhere a hundred reconstructionists just shrieked with horror and threw salt my way. The shock, the audacity…
Anyway. Hathor is a goddess I came in contact with through a ritual put on by my coven, during the beginnings of my initiation year. And though sometimes we drift apart, we always reunite… though at times her voice feels far off, her presence loose… eventually I feel her pull again, and I turn my eyes toward the setting sun, and bask in the heat of the day, watching the vultures overhead with a smile.
Hathor is many things. Hathor has so many names, is credited and prayed to for so many things, that it would be impossible to name them all here.
One of the many things she is to me, is that heat. That pull of heat and light that is the sun in full summer. She is the dryness of the earth and the grasses, she is the push of rushing blood and sweat streaked skin. She is the dust that coats the face and feet of revelers as the days grow long. She is that danger, that rush of lust, she is the warp your mind takes on when you’ve been out, body working, heart pumping, when you splash yourself with water and turn your eyes to the nearest blush of pale bare skin… the nearest tapping of hearts beating.
She is the frenzied rush of life. The frenzy of summer. And so much more.
Not along ago, I sat thinking of Hathor… It had been a while, since I felt the buzzing behind my ears that signals her coming… Not surprising, not really. I have been preoccupied. With other things, other worries. I have been too pent up in this shell of my own making. Too constricted within my corner of things, that I did not have time for frenzy. I did not have the energy to spare for the level of ecstasy that comes with her love.
But things are changing…
So as I sat and rolled her through my mind, stroking and sifting through all those little facets of what I know of her. The words. The history. The truths that come of feeling and knowing. That cannot be translated or communicated. I knew that it would soon be time to visit her again… that soon I would run through the marshes of sleep rushing after the peak of her horns, zipping quickly as the insects that gather and click.
I decided that I needed to create something just for her. Something that, when enjoyed, would bring on that dry heat, that eternal frenzy of life, blood, and sex.
Now, given that Primal Heart and myself have had such incredible luck with our adventuring into the making of cordials I thought, perfect. A drink of the frenzy of summer. A booze to sip when days are long and the body is tight… perfect.
So the other night under the full moon, as I sat up late… long after I had completed my lunar workings… long after I should have gone to sleep. I got up and I gathered my things atop my altar space… and I began.
I sliced into figs, I spooned out and mixed up spices of all kinds… I leveled in a healthy score of herbs and orange rind… a bit of honey… and I poured over it all a delicious warm bourbon.
And so it sits, wrapped in red under my altar… shining… teasing… waiting for the moment that it can be unveiled… Waiting for the warmth of summer and the blush of full lips.
For Hathor.
