Hathor: The Goddess of Beauty

Hathor is known as the goddess of beauty and love. She is also called the Lady of Malachite. In the mountains of Sinai, green malachite was mined, pulverized and applied as eye shadow. This goddess of joy teaches us to adorn, pamper, and love our self. She teaches us that taking time to honor and build relationship with self brings out our true beauty.

Pondering beauty, my thoughts turn to our culture which obsesses over image. Beautiful people are portrayed as fashionable and wealthy. Beauty brings us status and a sense of worth in our society. Beauty is what every person dreams to be. We are told we can acquire it and create elaborate means to make it ours. Through magazines and media we are offered a million different techniques for attaining our most beautiful self. You can pluck and tuck, cut and snip, burn and peel, inject and reject, or basically destroy everything that is undesirable in you. As I flip through these magazines I find myself becoming more and more despondent of my true beauty. I spend more time thinking of the things I need to buy and the parts I need to change, instead of spending the time pampering and honoring my true self.

Beauty is not something that can be bought and sold. The most radiant people are those who admire their uniqueness. It is the devotion of time and honoring that ultimately brings out our true light. Eating good food, walking in nature, and making time to relax keeps us nourished and healthy. Spending time taking baths, anointing our skin with oils and lotions, and reveling in pleasant fragrances are daily rituals that builds relationship with our body. This devotion fills us in a way that radiates our health, happiness and confidence to the world. We walk down the street with a glow to our skin and a smile on our face, and we are attractive.

Media promises us idyllic beauty through consumption, which distracts us to search on the outside for something that is found within. We focus on the façade of shallow idolized glamour. We look at homogenized super models as the standard. We buy products in hopes that the wrinkles and lumps disappear, and these imperfections wash away. All of this distracts us into omitting our differences in the desire to look more like our idols. We spend our time comparing versus revering our body in all its’ splendor. Our beauty comes from our diversity of form, which is the variance of our shape and size. Our blemishes, sometimes called moles and other times beauty marks, accentuate that which is rare and irreplaceable within us.

In her lessons of beauty and joy, Hathor reminds us that we are her embodiment. When we adorn our body with flowers and fragrances, it helps our image and our look. But it also creates a moment where we can see our self in all of our magnificence. We offer to ourselves a moment of reverence, which feeds our bodies as well as souls. In the end, we are able to relate to each other in all of our glorious imperfections.

Liisa Korpela is an herbalist and gardener in Eugene, Oregon. For the last five years, she has been the steward of the gardens at Nicki Scully’s retreat center and this year became Shamanic Journey’s office manager. Her love and involvement with plants has been cultivated into Bella Botanica, offering herbal extracts and natural beauty products that are made from wild-crafted, organic, and homegrown ingredients. She is inspired to share her love of the plant world and natural medicine through writing, teaching, and her healing formulas.

Visit her website at www.bellabotanica.com, or email her direct at liisa@bellabotanica.com. (541) 338-9519.