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The eye of Horus: meaning, myth and the eye of Ra

13 October 2026

The eye of Horus, or wedjat eye, stands for healing, protection and being made whole. It is the eye of the falcon god Horus, torn out by his rival Seth and restored. Egyptians wore it as an amulet for more than two thousand years, alive and in the grave.

It pictures a human eye with its brow, plus the dark markings found under a falcon's eye: a line falling straight down and a long curl. The two marks tell it apart from an ordinary eye sign.

Horus was a falcon god

Horus was a sky god in the form of a falcon, and the king ruled as his earthly form. The falcon sign writes his name, ḥr, often voiced 'Hor'. Heru and Har are other modern ways of saying the same Egyptian name, and Horus is its Greek form.

The wedjat is its own sign, D10 in Gardiner's list. The plain eye, D4, shows a human eye with no falcon markings, and it writes the word ir, 'to do, to make', more often than 'eye'.

Falcon Eye of Horus (wedjat)Eye

Seth tore out the eye of Horus

Egyptian texts tell the myth in pieces, never as one complete tale. Seth killed his brother Osiris, and Osiris's son Horus fought Seth for the throne. In the struggle Seth damaged or tore out Horus's eye. In most texts Thoth, the ibis-headed god of writing and the moon, healed it. In the late New Kingdom tale of the Contendings of Horus and Seth, Seth tears out both eyes, and Hathor restores them with gazelle milk instead.

Horus then offered the healed eye to his dead father, and it brought Osiris back to life. The Pyramid Texts can therefore call any offering 'the eye of Horus': food and drink given to the dead were the restored eye given again.

Egyptians likened the filling of the eye to the waxing of the moon, which shrinks and grows whole again each month. The details shift from text to text.

Ibis on a standard

The eye of Ra belongs to the sun god

The eye of Ra belongs to the sun god. It is the sun itself. It also acts on its own as a goddess, fierce and protective. Hathor, Sekhmet the lioness and Wadjet the cobra all carry the title, and the rearing cobra on a king's brow, the uraeus, is that eye guarding him. In the Book of the Heavenly Cow, first known from one of Tutankhamun's gilded shrines, Ra sends his eye as Hathor to punish rebellious humans. He stops the slaughter with beer dyed red, which she drinks as if it were blood. In another myth the eye leaves Ra in anger and has to be coaxed home.

The eye of Horus is wounded and healed, then given away to restore life. Its sky body is the moon. It stands for wholeness, health and the dead made complete.

The two still overlap. Some texts swap one eye for the other, both are drawn as the same wedjat, and both protect. Many texts make the sun the right eye and the moon the left eye of the sky god Horus, and the Egyptologist Richard Wilkinson thinks the pair drifted apart over time into a lunar eye of Horus and a solar eye of Ra. Others point out that no text clearly ties Horus's eyes to the sun and moon before the New Kingdom. The modern rule 'right eye Ra, left eye Horus' follows that later split, and many texts ignore it.

Sun Erect cobra

Tell the eye of Horus from the eye of Ra

Wedjat means the sound one

The Egyptian name is wḏꜣt, said 'wedjat', usually translated 'the sound one' or 'the whole one'. It comes from wḏꜣ, 'to be whole, unharmed', the same word as in the royal wish 'life, prosperity, health', where the fire drill writes its sounds.

Osiris's name, wsjr, is spelled with a seat and the plain eye.

Fire-drill Seat

Every large collection has wedjat amulets

Wedjat amulets first appear in the late Old Kingdom. In faience, stone and gold they turn up in great numbers, many of them placed among a mummy's wrappings to keep the body whole. Every large Egyptian collection has a case of them.

Middle Kingdom box coffins have a pair of these eyes painted on one side. The body lay on its left side with its face behind them, and the coffin was set with that side to the east, so the dead could see the rising sun. Tutankhamun's treasure, now gathered at the Grand Egyptian Museum, includes a pectoral built around the wedjat, flanked by the cobra Wadjet and the vulture Nekhbet.

At Edfu, the great temple of Horus, the falcon writes the god's name all over the walls, and the reliefs on the enclosure wall tell of his war with Seth.

Modern stories have grown around the eye

Scribes wrote fractions of the hekat, a grain measure, from a half down to a sixty-fourth with special signs, and many books draw these as the six pieces of the wedjat, the 'Horus-eye fractions'. In 2002 the historian of mathematics Jim Ritter argued that the signs grew out of ordinary hieratic writing: the further back you go, the less they look like parts of an eye, and hieroglyphs drawn as eye pieces appear only from the New Kingdom. On that view the tie to the myth came late and owes much to modern scholars. Some grammars still list the pieces as fractions.

No Egyptian text links the eye to the pineal gland. That comparison is modern, drawn from anatomy pictures. The eye in a triangle on the American dollar is the Christian Eye of Providence from European art, and no evidence ties it to the wedjat.

Two falcon marks finish the wedjat

Start with the eye and its brow, then add the two falcon marks below: the straight drop and the curl. Then draw the plain eye beside it and compare.

Draw the wedjat eye

Questions

What does the Egyptian eye symbol mean?

The eye with a falcon's markings under it is the wedjat, the eye of Horus: healing, protection and being made whole. The same drawing can stand for the eye of Ra, the fierce eye of the sun that guards the king. Egyptians wore it as an amulet and painted it on coffins so the dead could see out.

Is the eye of Horus a left or a right eye?

Both forms exist. Amulets and paintings show left and right versions, and the choice often follows which way the scene or the row of signs faces.

Is the eye of Horus the same as the blue evil eye charm?

No. The blue glass nazar of Turkey and the Mediterranean is a separate charm with its own history, and like the wedjat it is meant to protect.

Is the eye of Horus bad luck?

Egyptians wore it for protection and gave it to the dead for the same reason. Any idea of bad luck is modern.

Glossary

amulet: A small charm worn by the living or wrapped with a mummy for protection, often shaped like a sign such as the ankh or the scarab.
coffin: A box for the body, of wood or stone, often shaped like a person and painted with spells, names and gods. Rich burials nested several coffins inside a sarcophagus.
Egyptologist: A scholar who studies ancient Egypt: its language, writing, objects, buildings and history.
Gardiner code: A label for a hieroglyph from the sign list in Alan Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar of 1927, such as A1 for the seated man. The signs are grouped by what they show.
Middle Kingdom: The age when Egypt was united again, about 2055 to 1650 BC. Its texts became the classic form of the language that later scribes copied.
mummy: A body dried and wrapped in linen so that it would last. Egyptians believed the spirit needed it in the afterlife.
New Kingdom: Egypt's age of empire, about 1550 to 1069 BC, the time of Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and Ramesses II.
Old Kingdom: The age of the pyramid builders, about 2686 to 2181 BC, from the 3rd to the 6th Dynasty.
pyramid: A royal tomb with four sloping sides meeting at a point, built in the Old and Middle Kingdoms. Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza is the largest.
Pyramid Texts: The oldest religious spells of Egypt, carved in the burial rooms of pyramids from the reign of Unas, around 2350 BC, on.
relief: A carving on a flat surface. In raised relief the background is cut away. In sunk relief the figures are cut into the stone.
temple: The house of a god, where priests served the god's statue. Temples for dead kings kept up their offerings after death.