Editing Hathor (section)

===Festivals===

Many of Hathor's annual festivals were celebrated with drinking and dancing that served a ritual purpose. Revelers at these festivals may have aimed to reach a state of [[religious ecstasy]], which was otherwise rare or nonexistent in ancient Egyptian religion. Graves-Brown suggests that celebrants in Hathor's festivals aimed to reach an [[altered state of consciousness]] to allow them interact with the divine realm.{{sfn|Graves-Brown|2010|pp=166–169}} An example is the Festival of Drunkenness, commemorating the return of the Eye of Ra, which was celebrated on the twentieth day of the [[Thout|month of Thout]] at temples to Hathor and to other Eye goddesses. It was celebrated as early as the Middle Kingdom, but it is best known from Ptolemaic and Roman times.{{sfn|Graves-Brown|2010|pp=166–169}} The dancing, eating and drinking that took place during the Festival of Drunkenness represented the opposite of the sorrow, hunger, and thirst that the Egyptians associated with death. Whereas the rampages of the Eye of Ra brought death to humans, the Festival of Drunkenness celebrated life, abundance, and joy.{{sfn|Frandsen|1999|pp=131, 142–143}}

In a local Theban festival known as the [[Beautiful Festival of the Valley]], which began to be celebrated in the Middle Kingdom, the [[cult image]] of Amun from the [[Precinct of Amun-Re|Temple of Karnak]] visited the temples in the Theban Necropolis while members of the community went to the tombs of their deceased relatives to drink, eat, and celebrate.{{sfn|Teeter|2011|pp=67–68}} Hathor was not involved in this festival until the early New Kingdom,{{sfn|Sadek|1988|p=49}} after which Amun's overnight stay in the temples at Deir el-Bahari came to be seen as his sexual union with her.{{sfn|Teeter|2011|p=70}}

Several temples in Ptolemaic times, including that of Dendera, observed the Egyptian new year with a series of ceremonies in which images of the temple deity were supposed to be revitalized by contact with the sun god. On the days leading up to the new year, Dendera's statue of Hathor was taken to the ''[[wabet]]'', a specialized room in the temple, and placed under a ceiling decorated with images of the sky and sun. On the first day of the new year, the first day of the [[Thoth (month)|month of Thoth]], the Hathor image was carried up to the roof to be bathed in genuine sunlight.{{sfn|Meeks|Favard-Meeks|1996|pp=193–198}}

The best-documented festival focused on Hathor is another Ptolemaic celebration, the Festival of the Beautiful Reunion. It took place over fourteen days in the month of [[Epiphi]].{{sfn|Bleeker|1973|p=93}}{{sfn|Richter|2016|p=4}} Hathor's cult image from Dendera was carried by boat to several temple sites to visit the gods of those temples. The endpoint of the journey was the Temple of Horus at [[Edfu]], where the Hathor statue from Dendera met that of Horus of Edfu and the two were placed together.{{sfn|Bleeker|1973|p=94}} On one day of the festival, these images were carried out to a shrine where primordial deities such as the sun god and the [[Ennead]] were said to be buried. The texts say the divine couple performed offering rites for these entombed gods.{{sfn|Verner|2013|pp=437–439}} Many Egyptologists regard this festival as a [[hieros gamos|ritual marriage]] between Horus and Hathor, although Martin Stadler challenges this view, arguing that it instead represented the rejuvenation of the buried creator gods.{{sfn|Stadler|2008|pp=4–6}} C. J. Bleeker thought the Beautiful Reunion was another celebration of the return of the Distant Goddess, citing allusions in the temple's festival texts to the myth of the solar eye.{{sfn|Bleeker|1973|pp=98–101}} Barbara Richter argues that the festival represented all three things at once. She points out that the birth of Horus and Hathor's son Ihy was celebrated at Dendera nine months after the Festival of the Beautiful Reunion, implying that Hathor's visit to Horus represented Ihy's conception.{{sfn|Richter|2016|pp=4, 202–205}}

The third month of the [[Egyptian calendar]], [[Hathor (month)|Hathor or Athyr]], was named for the goddess. Festivities in her honor took place throughout the month, although they are not recorded in the texts from Dendera.{{sfn|Verner|2013|p=43}}