Curing sickness, madness or barrenness by drugs, purification or rite.
The god whose name every herbalist invokes governs a pharmacy of three hundred and sixty-five drugs ranked like a royal court, yet the tradition itself admits he could not have written a word of the book that bears his name.
He hewed the first plough from raw wood, then turned on his own body as a laboratory, tasting the hundred plants and meeting seventy poisons in a single day so that his people would know what to eat and what to fear.
A goddess carved in statues enough to face every day of the year, whose breath was plague and whose priests were physicians: the lioness the Egyptians both feared and begged.
Before she was the gentle cat with kittens at her feet, she was a lioness of the sun a dead king dared not offend. Egypt drank more wine at her festival than in all the rest of the year.
A black pig, a mighty storm, an eye put out: how the Egyptians told the wounding of Horus two ways at once, and why the healed eye became the very word for wholeness.
A carrion bird settles over a murdered god at Nedit, beats life back into him with her wings, and draws from the dead body a son sharp as a star: the strangest conception in Egyptian myth, and the making of an avenger.
Weret-hekau, Great of Magic: the goddess who reassembled a murdered god, hid her son in a marsh, and wrung the secret name of the sun-god out of his own poisoned body.
