Lee, my favorite Egyptian deity is Hathor, the cow-eared goddess of love, music, and joy. She was sometimes represented as a cow, as in a beautiful New Kingdom papyrus scroll showing her as a lustrous white cow emerging from the side of a mountain.
Hathor had her dark capacity as well, when, upon overindulging in beer, she transformed into Sekhmet, the terrifiying lion-headed goddess of war, who lusted for the taste of shed blood. This seems to anticipate the ideas and imagery seen in the the Hindu mother goddess, who is known in her benign form as Parvati, refined consort of the god Shiva, who likewise can manifest in fearful mien as Kali, the wrathful, destructive dark deity who nonetheless bestows her mysterious blessings upon her adherents. Kalidasa, perhaps the greatest of Sanskrit poets, was a devotee of Kali, as was Ramakrishna, the compassionate Bengali mystic who witnessed the Divine Mother as an effulgent ocean of light.
