Sekhmet is asteroid #5381 and also known as 1991 JY. Sekhmet was discovered by the American astronomer Carolyn Jean Spellmann Shoemaker at the Palomar Observatory. Sekhmet belongs to the type Sq and to the group Aten. Sekhmet seems to have an “asteroid moon”, but this isn’t confirmed yet.

Sekhmet is named after the lion-headed Egyptian goddess Sachmet (Sḫmt). Spelling her name knows many variants like always in the cases of deities of Egyptian mythology because how to read Ancient Egyptian is far from certain. Sachmet’s name means “the mighty” and she’s got an epithet meaning “the mistress of trembling”. This of course means that she makes the enemies of the pharaoh tremble because she protects the pharaoh. Sachmet is sometimes depicted wearing a Sun-disc and a fire-spitting Uraeus-snake on her head, sometimes shown with the head of a lion, and sometimes she completely is a lion. Other goddesses were also shown with the head of a lion, so Sachmet can in such cases only be known by accompanying inscriptions. Sachmet is a daughter of Ra, and the wife of Ptah, and the mother of Nefertem.

Sachmet has a tale, which is known from inscriptions in the tomb of pharaoh Sethos I.: Once the gods lived together with the humans. All of them on Earth and in peace. Ra was the king of the gods as well as of the humans. But while he lived on Earth together with the humans, he also grew old and became weak. The other deities made use of this circumstance and became themselves more powerful. When the humans figured out that Ra had become weak meanwhile, the humans conspired to have human kings and wanted to get rid of Ra for this purpose. But the gods knew of the conspiracy, so they decided to punish the humans. The gods held a summit and decided that Hathor should be turned into a wild and blood-thirsty lion, that would kill the conspirators. Ra agreed. Hathor was turned into the lion, that was called Sachmet. She did indeed kill humans. But also all other living beings. She killed everybody, who crossed her way, and she literally drank human blood. When Ra saw how cruel Sachmet was, Ra thought that she is going too far. Then Ra found that he wasn’t able to command Sachmet. She ignored his order to stop the massacre. So Ra let the gods brew thousand jars of beer, coloured the beer red with hematite dust, and then the gods poured out the beer in Sachmet’s way. She confused the red beer with blood and drank it. While she was drunk and hence weak and harmless, the gods turned her back into Hathor.

Ra didn’t want to risk that such events would repeat. So he decided that the gods should live separated from the humans. Ra went on the back of the goddess Nut, who had turned into a cow for this purpose, and let her carry him into the sky. Other deities got hold of the belly of the cow, got lifted up this way too, and turned during the ride into the stars.

I already wrote and published here articles on Ptah and Nut and Hathor as well as on Ra and other facets of the Sun. So this article on Sekhmet is a supplement. Sachmet is the Egyptian goddess of braveness and of warfare. The ancient Egyptians were rather smart people, so they understood the tight connection between medicine and warfare. They were so consequent to make Sachmet also their goddess of medicine and healing. The healers of ancient Egypt usually were priests of Sachmet.

Sekhmet belongs to the mythological theme, subgroup Egyptian mythology as well as the subgroups healing and warfare. Hence Sekhmet is most relevant when in an aspect with other asteroids of the Egyptian mythology theme. This is in particular true for synastries. Sekhmet is of course also similar to Asclepius, to Aesculapia, and mostly to Selqet, who is an Egyptian goddess of healing too. While Asclepius represents what the ancient Greeks added to medicine and Aesculapia represents what the ancient Romans added to medicine (not much because they basically relied on healers from Greece), Selqet as well as Sekhmet represent the Egyptian contribution to medicine. Egyptian history was very long, so there can be contributions on different levels. Selqet clearly has the more primitive level. Sekhmet represents an understanding of healing diseases as a kind of fighting a war versus the diseases. This is very much the same understanding of medicine as in modern times too! So Sekhmet also is a good representative of modern medicine and of modern days’ medical doctors.