Wedjat Eye (Eye of Horus)

WED-jat

egyptian: wDAt

Definition

The wedjat eye (Egyptian wDAt, "the sound one" or "the intact one"; also written udjat) is the restored Eye of Horus — the eye that was injured and then made whole again. Thomas Allen renders it the "Sound Eye." It is the great Egyptian emblem of wholeness, healing, and protection. Because the eye is hurt and then healed, Egyptians read it as a lunar symbol: the Moon damaged at the dark of the month and "filled out" again as it waxes back to full.

In Tradition

Egyptologists read the wedjat as a single symbol carrying two readings at once: the lunar Moon-eye and the solar Eye of Re. Its central myth, told in Book of the Dead spell 17, is that Horus's eye was crushed in his fight with Seth and then restored — by Thoth, the moon-god — to soundness. That restoration to wholeness is what the eye stands for, and it maps onto the Moon's recovery from invisibility back to full.

In Practice

In Egyptian funerary religion the wedjat is the standard protective amulet, placed with the body and named again and again in the Book of the Dead. Spell 17 states it directly: "Osiris this N. filled out the Sound Eye after its crushing on that day when the Two Comrades fought" — and the texts add "it was Thoth who did this with his own fingers." The eye is given fixed proportions: spell 101 invokes "the Sound Eye of 7 cubits, with its 3.5-cubit pupil," tying the deceased's soundness to the eye's own (Allen, BD 101). It recurs across spells 42, 64 and 71 as a protective binding and as the reference point of the judicial "night of accounting." By the Greco-Roman period the udjat-inside-a-disc was a frequent way of drawing the Moon itself, as in the Dendera temple astronomical reliefs. When you meet a wedjat on a coffin or amulet, it is usually carrying this idea of made-whole-again protection rather than marking a specific star.

Historical Origin

The wedjat is attested from the Old Kingdom forward and is prominent in the New Kingdom and Saite Book of the Dead. The spell-17 restoration passage and the spell-101 7-cubit / 3.5-cubit-pupil proportions are in Thomas George Allen, The Egyptian Book of the Dead (OIP LXXXII, 1960), pp. 89, 125, 146, 176. The Graeco-Roman udjat-as-Moon reliefs at Dendera are discussed in Belmonte and Lull, In Search of Cosmic Order (2018, pp. 470-471), drawing on Aubourg, Cauville, and Von Lieven.

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading