Goddess Heket

Goddess Heket name

Goddess Heket

Goddess Heket was one of the particular radical of eight deities that form the Ogdoad, the basis of the Hermopolis creation myth. Heket was the female twin of Hek, a god  of  space.  She  later  formulated into a frog goddess who assisted at childbirth. Heket is first referred in the Pyramid Texts (2345 b.c.), a mathematical group of magical inscriptions, in which she accompanies the spirit of the went king to his lay in the sky. Her most important  connexion  was  with  childbirth, a distinction she shared with Bes and Tauret, who also saved mothers and children. Heket was especially addressed upon during the last levels of labor. A Middle Kingdom papyrus (2055-1650 b.c.) tells how Heket attended the wife of the high priest of Re when she was about to give birth to the future king.

Amulets and scarabs in the mold of a frog were often  worn  by  pregnant  women  in  the  hope  that Heket  would  serve  them  during  labor.  Magical inscriptions  on  ivory  wands,  modern  in  the  Middle Kingdom,  refer  to  Heket  as  the  guardian  of  the home.  A  temple  sacred  to  Heket  was  found  at Qus in Upper Egypt, and there is a source to her furore in the tomb of Petosiris (fourth century b.c.) at Tuna el Gabel in Middle Egypt. Petosiris was a full priest of the god Thoth, and he showed on his tomb that Heket led him to a shrine full by the yearly deluge of the Nile and asked him to resort her temple.  Petosiris  says  that  he  cited  his  scribe and gave him orders to figure a new temple with a wall around it to keep it safe from future floods of the Nile.

During the Eighteenth Dynasty, representations of Heket, with the consistency of a woman, are presented in the divine birth scenes of the king in Queen Hatshepsut temple at Deir el Bahari. In the Netherworld, Heket was present when the deceased was reborn. The frog contract in hieroglyphs was a secret writing  for  the  phrase wehem ankh (doubling life), a phrase that started in the Middle Kingdom used to draw the deceased.