Below, a female harpist, with exposed breast, sitting in a vine/grape arbor, plays music to which a naked man, dances, his genitals being prominently displayed as swinging to the rythmn. This painting is on a fragment of leather and was found at the Hathor shrine at Deir el-Bahri in Egypt. (cf. p.133 for the text and Plate 54. Geraldine Pinch. Votive Offerings to Hathor. Oxford. Griffiths Institute. Ashmolean Museum.1993. ISBN 0-900416-55-6). Song and dance and apparently even nudity were aspects of the Hathor cult, she being the goddess of procreation, love and sex. The grapes allude to wine which, with beer was consumed in quantity to achieve drunkeness in Hathor's honor, recalling how Re the sun-god, had thousands of gallons of beer dyed red to resemble blood, which when drunk by Hathor caused her to cease her destruction of mankind upon falling into a drunken stupor. I understand that these motifs entered the Hebrew Bible as Israel honoring the Golden Calf with song, dance, drunkeness and nudity, perhaps recalling events at the Hathor shrines in the southern Sinai and Arabah, places Israel is said to have wandered in. In Egyptian myth Hathor was a cow-sky-goddess who gave birth to the sun each day as the Golden Calf that rode the solar bark or boat across the heavens.
