Neith was one of the most ancient and powerful goddesses of Egypt — the goddess of war, hunting, weaving and creation, a primordial creator-goddess who existed before all things and brought the world into being, and the divine mother and protector. Both a fierce warrior with bow and arrows and a wise creator and weaver, she is among the oldest deities of Egypt, present from the very beginning.
The Ancient Warrior-Goddess
Neith (Egyptian Neith) was one of the oldest deities in the Egyptian pantheon, worshipped from the earliest dynasties and before. She was a goddess of war and hunting, depicted often with a bow and arrows or crossed arrows over a shield (her ancient emblem), and wearing the Red Crown of Lower Egypt, of which she was a patron. As a war-goddess she was fierce and protective, a fighter and a guardian; her weapons made her a formidable defender. She was also a goddess of weaving (her name may be connected to weaving, and she was the patroness of weavers and the maker of the cloth that wrapped the dead), uniting the arts of war and the domestic crafts in one ancient goddess.
The Primordial Creator
Neith was, in her own theology, a great primordial creator-goddess — a deity who existed before creation, who emerged from the primordial waters and brought the world into being. At her cult-center of Sais, she was honoured as the self-created mother of the gods, the goddess who was “the first to give birth to anything,” who existed when nothing else did and who created the world and the gods, including (in some accounts) the sun-god Ra himself. She was thus a creator on the level of Atum or Ptah — a self-generated primal deity from whom the cosmos came, the divine mother of all. Her famous inscription at Sais declared her the goddess “who was, who is, and who will be,” whose veil no mortal had lifted — a mysterious, eternal, all-encompassing divine power.
The Mother and Protector
Neith was a great mother-goddess and protector. She was the mother of the crocodile-god Sobek, and a divine mother-figure to gods and pharaohs. As a protective goddess, she watched over the dead: she was one of the four goddesses (with Isis, Nephthys and Serqet) who guarded the corpse and the canopic jars holding the organs of the deceased, protecting them in the tomb. She was also a wise judge and arbiter among the gods — in the Contendings of Horus and Set, her wise counsel was sought to help settle the dispute over the throne. Thus she combined fierce strength, creative power, maternal protection and wisdom in a single ancient goddess.
The Eternal Goddess
Neith endures as one of the most ancient, powerful and many-sided of the Egyptian goddesses — the warrior with her bow, the weaver, the primordial creator who brought the world into being, the divine mother and protector of the dead, the wise arbiter. She embodies the great age and depth of Egyptian religion, reaching back to its very beginnings, and a vision of the divine feminine as at once fierce and creative, warlike and nurturing, eternal and all-encompassing — the goddess “who was, who is, and who will be,” present from before the dawn of the world.
The ancient goddess of war and weaving who existed before all things and wove the world into being — "who was, who is, and who will be," whose veil no mortal has lifted.