Horus of the Ages

Question: What is the difference between Horus the Elder and Horus the Younger? Is it another case of religious beliefs changing over time?

Indeed it is, but, as with most Egyptian religious evolutions, it's long and complicated and full of neat little developments.

Horus the Elder is so called because he's both an older god - one of the oldest in Egyptian mythology, in fact - and because he's of an older generation than his younger counterpart. While we're used to the neat symmetry of couples in Egyptian mythological genealogy, Horus the Elder was originally one of the youngest generation of the Ennead, a sibling of Isis, Osiris, Nephthys and Set. This Horus is the one who is the more primordial, powerfully cosmic deity; he is the representative of the sky and firmament, which are contained in his great wingspan and fill with air from the wind of his wingbeats, and the speckles of his feathers are stars while his eyes are the sun and the moon. His conflict with Set is one of warring brothers, representing opposing forces such as the day sky against the sky of the night, or the god of air against the god of storms. The two of them also represent upper and lower Egypt, and they are often shown eventually reconciling and uniting the kingdom between them. Because he's a cosmic and powerful figure, on par with his brothers Osiris and Set, he was often associated with the oldest gods of the pantheon, particularly Hathor (sometimes said to be either his mother or wife) or Ra, with whom he was syncretized as the sun in the sky.

So Horus the Elder is a really fucking big deal, and his cults were no joke. Horus the Younger is also a big deal, but for different reasons; he's the royal son of Isis and Osiris, the heir to the united halves of Egypt and a god of war, cleverness and rulership. This version of Horus, when not out doing king things, is actually often represented as an infant or child, linking him as the heir of Osiris and Isis and emphasizing his youth when compared to his parents' generation. He was the special patron of the pharaohs and the power that ensured their victory in war, and his conflicts with Set are not the symbolic and representative variety of the elder Horus but direct struggles with his uncle for the throne of the gods and the disposition of the kingdoms. He, too, represents the kingdom of Upper Egypt as opposed to Set as Lower Egypt, but their fight does not end in reconciliation and balance but in the triumph of Horus over his enemy and unification through conquest. It's likely that Horus the Younger was originally another god entirely, but that he was syncretized with Horus the Elder over time until that original god's name was forgotten.

Translating hieroglyphs is always a journey, even now, but there's some linguistic evidence that originally even their names were different. Horus the Elder was actually named something similar to "Harwer", while Horus the Younger might have been closer to "Harsiese". Over the many centuries of the Egyptian religion, Horus the Younger slowly absorbed the attributes and stories of Horus the Elder until they were no longer unentanglable in most cases, and Horus the Elder became a faded and outdated cult figure with little presence of his own. By the New Kingdom, there was effectively only one important Horus, and he's the one we all know about - Horus the Younger, son of Osiris and heir of the Ennead, wearing the moon and sun eyes of his older and largely forgotten forbear.

For Scion, this gives us the usual Egyptian god conundrum: is there one Horus or two, and how much of his syncretization should be used when deciding what these gods are like and what they do? Are there two Horuses, one older, more powerful and remote, and the other younger and wily, ruling the pantheon? Is there only one, and has he changed over time or are these merely two cults with differing opinions on what Horus is all about? You can see from our current page on him that we're running Horus the Younger as having some of the associations of his older iteration, but whether or not that means there was only one of him or that the younger one just happened to become Fatebound to some of the elder's qualities remains to be seen.

Personally, I really like the idea of an old, crusty Horus the Elder hanging out somewhere, grousing with his brothers about kids these days and their uppity ideas about the sky and the sun.