Harpocrates

Harpocrates is a misunderstanding that became a god. Egyptian artists drew children with a finger at the mouth — it is simply the convention for 'this figure is a child' — and Greeks and Romans meeting the image decided it meant hush, and made the infant Horus the god of silence and secrets, which he had never been. Meanwhile in Egypt he was doing something quite specific: the cippi, small stelae showing the child standing on crocodiles with snakes and scorpions in his fists, were poured over with water that was then drunk as a cure for stings and bites. A god of childhood who is also a piece of medical equipment.

Variant accounts

• Whether Harpocrates is a separate god or a form of Horus is a matter of convention.He is Horus as an infant, and treatments that enumerate the forms of Horus list him among them. He is recorded separately here because the Late Period and Greco-Roman cult is distinct in practice — its own shrines, its own objects, its own geographic range far beyond Egypt — and because a registry that folded him into Horus would lose all of that. The disagreement is recorded rather than resolved.Reference treatments of the forms of Horus and of the independent Greco-Roman cult of Harpocrates. (secondary)

Domains

• childhood

Relations

• counterpart of: HorusHorus as an infant — the same god at a different age, and yet worshipped separately, with his own temples, his own amulets and his own Mediterranean-wide following, which is why he is recorded rather than folded in.Reference treatment of Harpocrates as the child form of Horus, son of Isis and Osiris. (secondary)

Sources

• Harpocrates is Horus the Child, shown as an infant with a finger to his lips, worshipped widely in the Late Period and across the Greco-Roman world, and invoked on the Horus cippi against venom.: Reference treatments of Harpocrates, of the finger-to-lips gesture and of the Horus cippi. (secondary)