Meet the Gods and Goddesses in the Met’s ‘Divine Egypt’

The Egyptian gods have gathered in New York. From the falcon-headed Horus to the lioness Sakhmet, the shrouded Osiris to the cow goddess Hathor and the sky-bending Nut, these divine beings—drawn from a pantheon of more than 1,500 deities—assemble at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s evocative new exhibition “Divine Egypt.” Their images, once carved in stone and cast in gold, were not mere symbols but living presences, believed to channel divine power and bridge the human and celestial worlds.

“In this exhibition, you will see about 140 works from the Met’s collection,” said the Met’s director, Max Hollein at last week’s preview. “And another 70 or so spectacular loans from institutions from across the world. Many of these works have never been displayed together. Some have never been shown in the U.S., and all of them you will see now in a completely new way.”

“Divine Egypt,” now on view through January 19, 2026, examines the visual language surrounding ancient Egypt’s gods—how artists over thousands of years shaped a visual language for the divine.

Diana Craig Patch, curator and head of the Met’s Department of Egyptian Art, led me through the exhibition. “There is much that we do not know—and perhaps can never know,” she said. “The archaeological and textual records for ancient Egypt are fragmentary and incomplete. Ancient Egyptian culture lasted for approximately 3,000 years. They occupied a river valley that was 800 miles long.”

That vast span of time and geography, she explained, fostered remarkable adaptability. “One of the defining characteristics of ancient Egyptian culture—of its divine landscape—is its flexibility,” Patch said. “Religious beliefs and practices changed over time and comprised a great diversity of local traditions. Two deities could merge, and some deities, over time, assumed the iconography of other, older, more important figures. It is this fascinating adaptability that this exhibition tries to capture through divine images represented in sculpture and relief.”

She added that while Egypt’s monumental temples were the domain of kings and priests, most people experienced religion on a more intimate level. “The inner sanctum was for the king or the priest who acted on his behalf,” Patch said. “But people still found ways to commune with their gods—through shrines, festivals, and offerings left at temple courtyards.”

Amid this undulating cosmology, one figure stands as a rigid outlier: Ptah, the god of creation and craftsmen. When we paused before him, Patch noted how his image remained unchanged for thousands of years. Why, she wondered, did Ptah stay the same when other gods transformed? “Some gods do and some gods don’t,” she said. “If we had control over where things were found in space and time, we might have a better understanding. But so much of the archaeological record is fragmentary—it doesn’t survive complete. We found lots of new things, but not always the answers we expected. The divine landscape is complicated; it moves around. They add things over time—they never get rid of anything, which is why you have all these creation myths.”

Our tour began.

Hathor, the Cow Goddess of Love and Kingship

Carved in dark granodiorite, the head of a cow goddess stares serenely ahead, her horns curving around a sun disk. The work—once part of a full statue—radiates a quiet power, its polished surface catching light like the river itself. She is Hathor, the nurturing mother of kings, the goddess whose milk sustained divine rule.

Craig Patch: “Hathor—or cow—this goddess who has a whole series of manifestations; one of her manifestations is a cow that nurtures the king. The king drinks milk, which gives him power and rejuvenation. She’s protecting a very early king in front of her. But if you look carefully, nursing from her, there is Ramses. This is one of the ways the Egyptians conceptualized how the king maintains his divinity and power—it’s literally nourishment from the goddess herself.

“She can appear as a woman, a cow, or a hybrid—sometimes even as a human-headed snake. You can’t lock her into a single image. She’s a goddess of love, motherhood, music, drunkenness—so she’s complex, but always benevolent. You see her with the sun disk and horns, or in full cow form, or as the face on a sistrum, the rattle that’s used in her rituals. That’s one of the things I love about Egyptian art—it’s not about likeness, it’s about presence. The image allows the god to appear in the world. When you’re looking at Hathor nursing the king, that’s not symbolic. For them, it’s happening.”

Ra, the Sun God and His Serpent-Slaying Mongoose

Small but uncanny, this bronze creature—a hybrid somewhere between an otter and a mongoose—embodies both mischief and cosmic purpose. Egyptians believed such animals protected the sun god Ra from the serpent Apophis, who attacked him nightly as he journeyed through the underworld.

Craig Patch: “Here’s one that everybody argues about—the little animal. Some people call it a ferret, some say it’s a weasel or a mongoose. The Egyptians didn’t worry too much about distinctions like that. Anything that ate snakes was on the side of the sun god.

“This one’s a fun one. It’s been mislabeled in the past because people said, ‘It doesn’t look Egyptian.’ By the Late and Roman periods, things get very loose. It’s not that they forgot how to do it; it’s just a different way of making things.

“It’s not Greek, it’s not Roman—it’s Egyptian. But at that point, they’re doing it their own way. It’s very expressive. That’s why you get pieces like this where someone looks at it and says, ‘That can’t be Egyptian.’ But it absolutely is.

“The otter mongoose—the otter goose, as I personally call it. Yes, the raised paws are definitely otter-like, but the tail and the fur are much more mongoose-y. But the thing is, the Egyptians often weren’t fussy about identification between things that did the same thing. Mongooses and otters—long, low to the ground, dark, move fast, eat snakes and lizards. They look similar. They do the same thing. So, some places they did otters, some places they did mongooses, and eventually they didn’t get too fussy.”

What did the otter and mongoose mean to them?

Craig Patch: “They ate snakes, and snakes go after the sun god Ra—every night the sun god goes under the earth to be born the next morning. He runs into a big nasty python and has to be killed. And one of the things that kills snakes are cats. Another thing that kills snakes are mongooses and otters. So they become protection. Just like the baboon whose paws in the morning are raised to the sun became a symbol of the sun god.”

Animal Mummies, Offerings of Faith

This gallery explores how people related to deities when they couldn’t enter temples. These macabre offerings—cats, falcons, and ibises carefully wrapped in linen—were often bred by temples and sold to worshippers as votive gifts, a devotional economy built on mass sacrifice and faith.

Craig Patch: “By the end of Egyptian history, they even began mummifying animals and burying them in cemeteries dedicated to the gods. Pilgrims would buy the mummies—cats, dogs, ibises, falcons, even snakes or fish—and donate them as offerings, a way to give the god a and earn divine goodwill. Most of the animals were bred for this purpose, though some sacred ones lived in temples their whole lives and were mummified when they died.

“You paid for animal mummies and they were donated to the god that you bought them for. Dogs, cats, ibises. There were a lot of different ones, Sometimes they didn’t actually wrap an animal in it. They scooped up whatever they had and wrapped it. This is beautifully done, but inside is not an ibis. It’s been x-rayed—it’s not in there. It’s a lot of loose stuff, feathers, and bone. But it’s supposed to be an ibis. It’s a symbolic ibis. They probably ran out of ibises that day. So they just put something in there. It’s the gesture that mattered—the act of giving the mummy, not necessarily what was inside.”

Anubis, the Canid-Headed Guide of Souls

Craig Patch: “You come around the corner, you’re now overcoming death, which everybody had to do. And there’s Anubis, the god of embalming and who leads the dead into the next world.”

Did Anubis’s characteristics change?

Craig Patch: “Minor stuff, not major. He pretty much is a canid-headed god from the beginning. He was Khentyamentiu in the first dynasties, and Khentyamentiu seems to be absorbed later by Anubis. Khentyamentiu is shown generally as that kind of image—the reclining canid. Then he merges with Anubis and becomes a human with a canid head.”

What does the canid have to do with death?

Craig Patch: “So whatever the wild animal is that this is copied after, and it is open to discussion, but it is probably the golden wolf, the Egyptian wolf. It’s not a jackal, actually—it’s a wolf. It’s been recast genetically. It lives in the desert and is often found in cemeteries because it digs there. It also, when it finds food, will cache it in cemeteries. So it’s that association with the desert and where the dead are buried that led it to be connected. That’s what we think we understand. Again, we can never be sure. You know, falcons soar, so a sky god—choosing a falcon makes sense. A cow produces milk, nurturing the king—makes sense. Why Wadjet is a cobra in one place and a lion in another has to do with roles. But why was she a cobra to begin with? You don’t always have answers to why they chose what they did. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it’s not.”

Nut, the Sky Goddess Who Swallows the Sun

Before we reached the coffin showing Nut, the sky goddess, Craig Patch explained the creation story that sets the scene.

Craig Patch: “The world is all water and out of the water is all sorts of swimming things, and one of them achieves consciousness. And he swims to a rising mound of land and climbs out, and that is Atum. And as he stands on his mound, he self-creates; he uses his semen to create a son and a daughter—air and moisture. They create earth and sky and then they create the gods you most likely know: Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephthys.”

She continued as we stopped at the coffin.

Craig Patch: “And this coffin shows Nut, who is the sky goddess, in two forms. This is her typical form, where she swallows the sun every night and gives birth to it in the morning.

Min, the God of Fertility and Creation

Craig Patch: “One of the earliest examples of monumental statuary from ancient Egypt, this is also one of the three best preserved sculptures known collectively as the Coptos Colossi. While later representations of Min are shrouded, this statue is nude except for a belt around his waist. The figure’s left hand would have grasped an erect phallus made from a separate piece of stone. This was Min’s traditional pose as a fertility god, which is imagery that lasted around 3,000 years.”

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com