Nekhbet has a minion!

Nekabet the Vulpiers

“She is the Mother of Mothers,
The White Crown,
The Pharaoh’s Hen,
She whose wings are spread over you,
She who suckles you and never weans you.”
- Hymn of Nekhbet

Nekhbet was a very ancient goddess of childbirth, and birthing rooms were attached to Nekhbet’s temples. The priestesses of Nekhbet wore robes of vulture feathers, and bared their breasts when escorting the dead to their tombs, as a magical promise of the nursing Nekhbet’s tender care.

The Egyptians considered the vulture to be an excellent mother, and its wide wingspan was seen as all-encompassing and providing a protective cover to its infants. The hieroglyphic meki – “to protect” - is the picture of a vulture sheltering her young with her wings.

Myths about the vulture said that when her young are hungry and the land barren, she makes the supreme sacrifice by tearing her own flesh and plucking at her breast, feeding her fledglings on drops of her own blood. The hieroglyphic peses – “to spread oneself over someone in protection” - is the image of an outstretched vulture’s wing.

On the Stela of Vultures dead bodies are carried off by vultures to be reborn. A passage from the Book of Ani says that the first gate of the underworld was guarded by vultures, whose “tearing beaks” could admit the dead to the place whence they rose again. To the ancient Egyptians, the vulture personified resurrection in the underworld; a predatory bird who takes into its body dead flesh and spins out new life when she lays her eggs.

Coffins have been found with a feather (shuty) pattern which covers much of the lid, the wings of Nekhbet wrapped around the body from the shoulders to the feet. Amulets of vultures were buried with the dead. The sky itself was sometimes thought of as a great vulture. To this vulture-mother the dead ascend, seeking Nekhbet to take them to a new life in the sky.

A daughter of Ra, Nekhbet’s sister was Wadjet.

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