ding features of the symbolism of the
cowry. In many places in Africa and elsewhere the similarity of this
shell to the half-closed eyelids led to its use as an artificial "eye"
in mummies. The use of the same objects to symbolize the female
reproductive organs and the eyes may have played some part in
transferring to the latter the fertility of the former. The gods were
born of the eyes of Ptah. Might not the confusion of the eye with the
genitalia have given a meaning to this statement? There is evidence of
this double symbolism of these shells. Cowry shells have also been
employed, both in the Persian Gulf and the Pacific, to decorate the bows
of boats, probably for the dual purpose of representing eyes and
conferring vitality upon the vessel. These facts suggest that the belief
in the fertilizing power of the eyes may to some extent be due to this
cowry-association. Even if it be admitted that all the known cases of
the use of cowries as eyes of mummies are relatively late, and that it
is not known to have been employed for such a purpose in Egypt, the mere
fact that the likeness to the eyelids so readily suggests itself may
have linked together the attributes of the cowry and the eye even in
Predynastic times, when cowries were placed with the dead in the grave.

Hathor's identification with the "Eye of Re" may possibly have been an
expression of the same idea. But the role of the "Eye of Re" was due
primarily to her association with the moon (_vide infra_, p. 56).

The apparently hopeless tangle of contradictions involved in these
conceptions of Hathor will have to be unravelled. For "no eye is to be
feared more than thine (Re's) when it attacketh in the form of Hathor"
(Maspero, _op. cit._ p. 165). If it was the beneficent life-giving
aspect of the eye which led to its identification with Hathor, in course
of time, when the reason for this connexion was lost sight of, it became
associated with the malevolent, death-dealing _avatar_ of the goddess,
and became the expression of the god's anger and hatred toward his
enemies. It is not unlikely that such a confusion may have been
responsible for giving concrete expression to the general psychological
fact that the eyes are obviously among the chief means for expressing
hatred for and intimidating and "brow-beating" one's fellows. [In my
lecture on "The Birth of Aphrodite" I shall explain the explicit
circumstances that gave rise to these contradictions.]

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