Lament of Hathor by Samuel Baca-Henry
Author Interview
Lament of Hathor is no ordinary book, as I suspect is also the author, Samuel Baca-Henry, an authority in vegan, animal rights advocacy and ancient Egyptian civilisations. An initial look may suggest this book does not readily fit in with my series of interviews with authors about their books on, say, animals in scientific research or the representation of animals in the arts and literature. Nonetheless, this book is unique, special, and deserving of our attention. Samuel Baca-Henry has written and illustrated, with photographs, on a previously little-researched aspect of the moral and legal status of animals.
How did you become concerned about animal rights? And how would you describe how they matter to you now?
I have lived on a houseboat in Seattle since 2014. Every spring, I take delight in the ducklings. I love them and want them to be safe. In 2019, I was eating a chicken’s wing while admiring baby ducks. It hit me that there’s no difference between these ducklings I love and this chicken I’m eating. Why care so much for the well-being of the ducklings yet be indifferently violent toward the chickens? I went pescatarian, vegetarian, veganish, vegan in diet, and, eventually, fully vegan.
In January 2023, I read my first book about animal rights. It was Henry Stephens Salt’s 1892 Animals’ Rights. I was inspired to learn about historical fights for animal rights. From the bibliographic appendix in Salt’s book, I learned about Thomas Taylor’s 1792 book, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes. Taylor’s Vindication is a parody of Mary Wollstonecraft’s trailblazing A Vindication of the Rights of Women (and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man).
Taylor attempts a reductio ad absurdum of Wollstonecraft’s feminism by “advocating” for the Rights of animals. He even cites his own translations of Porphyry’s treatise on Vegetarianism (3rd century CE) and Plutarch’s writings on animal intelligence (1st century CE). See also Plutarch’s On the Eating of Flesh.
This mockery of women by way of animals was my first insight into the intertwined oppressions of non-humans and humans.
Then, in Egypt in September 2023, I had my inspiration to write Lament of Hathor when I saw a wall carving depicting this ancient Egyptian cow goddess nursing the pharaoh Hatshepsut at her temple (see Question 2 below).
While writing, I learned about more variations of animal rights going back millennia, from Sumerian legal codes to the Torah, from the Laws of Manu to the Edicts of Ashoka. And ancient Egyptian post-mortem judgments against harming certain animals.
With the passage of time, I came to understand that rights are not enough. After all, in the present day, some animals in some places do have some rights. Yet, these rights are diminished by loopholes, exceptions, and omissions. Rights can be unenforced or revoked overnight. Despite rights, most animals are still oppressed. The same is true for humans and the environment.
So, rights, like welfare reforms, while good and necessary as part of institutional and legal changes, are insufficient, whether for humans, animals, or the environment. We must champion not just rights and more rights (or welfare and more welfare), but liberation. Liberation for the animals, for humans, and for the environment.
Their oppressions have been intertwined since at least the post-Ice Age Agricultural Revolution and the rise of patriarchal civilizations built and grown on exploitation, violence, and imperialism. So must the resistance be intertwined. Will we achieve Liberation? For everyone everywhere forever? I don’t think so. Not Now. Not In One Generation. Not In Our Lifetime. Not in thousands or tens of thousands of years. Even if achieved, liberation would require constant defense. But liberation isn’t a destination. It’s a vision and practice of daily resistance, linking us to those who fought before and those who’ll fight after. Lament of Hathor is one of my contributions to that ancient fight.
When did your interest begin in ancient Egyptian civilisations? What prompted you to link it and animal rights? Is this why you wrote and published Lament of Hathor? What are you seeking to accomplish with the book?
I was into ancient Egypt as a kid. My earliest memory of Egypt is my grandmother giving me and my brother the VHS of Sesame Street’s Don’t Eat the Pictures, filmed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
But I really returned to Egypt in university around 2005. I took a course on early Christian monasticism and was fascinated by ascetics who left places like Alexandria for the desert, for example, Anthony, Evagrius, Syncletica, Melania the Elder, Pachomius, and Moses the Black (3rd & 4th centuries CE). Around 2021, I became interested in Egyptian Islamic Sufi mystic poets like Ibn Ata Allah al-Iskandari and Ibn al-Fāriḍ (circa 7th c. AH / 13th c. CE).
In autumn 2023, my parents invited me on a trip to Egypt. On the second day, we crossed the Nile from Luxor to the west side and started at the temple of Hatshepsut, one of the female pharaohs. She had a massive mortuary temple complex in this area. The sun setting in the west is a common symbol of death and the afterlife.
Walking around, I suddenly saw a carving on one of the walls: the goddess Hathor in cow form nursing Hatshepsut as a small person. I knew Hathor, a cow goddess, symbolised motherly love among other things.
It hit me immediately in the heart. People looked at all the animals and asked
Which one is a great mother that we can have as a symbol for motherhood?
They saw the cow with her calf and chose her. Yet the way we (and the ancients) treat actual cows and their calves is horrendous—within the dairy, meat, leather, rodeo, transport, and other industries.
That contradiction, hypocrisy, and symbolic use of power all hit me at once. I called my mother over and told her what I felt. How they revered the cow as the perfect mother, while we tear calves from their mothers in dairy farms. We stood together and got a picture. I knew something was happening, though I didn’t fully understand it at the time.
Once I got back, it stayed in my mind. I couldn’t stop feeling it. That feeling birthed my book and mission:
To awaken people to the cognitive dissonances that suppress their views about animals.
To show how the same systems that exploit animals have exploited humans and the environment for millennia. And, relatedly, to (a) help bring animal activism into broader social justice advocacy and (b) show animal-only activists the intertwined contexts of oppression and liberation.
To demonstrate ancient lineages of animal activism. I want to uplift the voices of people across millennia who advocated for animals. To honor them and inspire future activists.
To use the book to support the movement, giving it to sanctuaries and grassroots groups to use in fundraising so that the book materially serves the movements, not just philosophically or artistically.
What can the reader expect to learn from reading the Lament of Hathor? How is it relevant to vegan, animal rights advocacy?
Here’s what a reader says:
The book has a clear message of advocacy for animals without ever feeling trite, saccharine, or ham-fisted. It is eloquent, beautiful, poetic, thought-provoking, and haunting. This book is intense and otherworldly; it truly accomplished a sense of traveling to another realm out of time and space as we know it.
Even the cover of the book tells the story. It features the circa 2,000 BCE sarcophagus of Queen Kawit, Priestess of Hathor and King’s Beloved Wife of Pharaoh Mentuhotep II. The engraving shows a mother cow crying. Her male calf is tied away from her milk, which a human takes from her. This is emblematic of present-day dairy practices that have been taken to further extremes.
On other funerary objects, Queen Kawit, Priestess of Hathor, is shown giving and receiving slaughtered cows, ducks, and other animal offerings.
Lament of Hathor illustrates how animal exploitation has been inextricably linked to and fed the growth of patriarchal imperialist civilisations, from reproductive systems to precious minerals; from grazing lands to the instruments of war.
We see Pharaoh Seti I capture people and cattle as spoils of war. He forces the conquered chiefs of Lebanon to chop down their famed cedar trees as tribute. On his temple wall, he depicts himself and his son Rameses II capturing a bull. He proclaims himself “a young bull, stout-hearted and sharp-horned, who cannot be subdued.”
We see horses and men dying in battle. We see donkeys suffering under the weights of war supplies and mined wealth. Like the laborers whose backs break in the mines alongside them. And all the while, there’s a Temple of Hathor at the mining camp. Even in the ancient Egyptian afterlife, the peasants and cows are forced to plow fields for the elites.
But Egypt was not unique in these systems and symbols of exploitation. In her lament, Hathor summons other cow deities whose mythologies reveal similar stories across cultures and time. The Zoroastrian Soul of the Cow lamented to the deity Ahura Mazda about human cruelty and called for a savior. The Hindu cow goddess Kamadhenu lamented to the deity Indra about plowmen beating her bovine sons. Hathor learns that Gilgamesh killed the Mesopotamian Bull of Heaven. And Mycenaean cultural imperialists killed the Minoan Bull and Minotaur.
She is joined by people who advocate for the animals. These include the Hebrew prophets Amos, Micah, and Zechariah and the Buddhist Indian Emperor Ashoka. Ashoka sent his stone edicts concerning animal and human rights to his subjects and neighbors, including Egypt, in the mid-3rd century BCE.
This is all strategically important for the activist for three reasons:
To understand how the historical roots and present-day forms of oppression ensnare humans, animals, and the environment.
To see that there have been people who resisted and advocated on behalf of animals across cultures as far back as we know.
To find inspiration and comfort within an ancient lineage of those who saw how the animals were being treated and fought back.
Lament of Hathor incorporates many ancient texts within the story. How and why do you utilize these works?
It is common within mythological and scriptural genres and oral traditions to incorporate pre-existing works. This puts later reformers and commentators in dialogue with their peers, and the people, societies, and cultures that predate them.
In Lament of Hathor, I do this for several reasons. First, to honor, uplift, and share our ancestral animal advocates’ words in their own voices to their times and ours. Hathor quotes a 12th-century BCE papyrus: “Give your attention to the chariot donkeys and to the men who are in the field as well.” One of Hathor’s priestesses quotes the Book of the Dead Papyrus of Nu directly: “That which is held in abomination to me is the block of slaughter of the god.” This mirrors the Hebrew prophets Amos, Hosea, and Micah, who speak on behalf of the god Yahweh to direct people not to kill animals as offerings. I hope to share these antecedents with contemporary and future readers.
Second, to subvert ancient texts and call out the ethical hypocrisies that existed then and now. The critic-reformer holds up a mirror to their times. By taking actual ancient source texts and subverting them, Hathor demonstrates incongruities in people’s treatment of some animals versus others, as well as of some animals and some humans. For example, the ancient Egyptian Negative Confessions is part of the afterlife judgment process. One must deny having done 42 prohibited things to continue towards an eternal rebirth in a heavenly setting. These include: “I have not taken milk from the mouths of children.” The Egyptian wisdom literature The Instructions of ‘Onchsheshonqy similarly admonishes: “Do not give your son to the wet nurse and so cause her to set aside her own.” Hathor points out that, like the human wetnurse whose children one should not deprive of milk, the starved and slaughtered calves should also be considered.
Third, to situate the work within ancient pasts. By using ancient texts, I hope to give the work the feeling of being an ancient document that might have been written back then. For example, Hathor cries out to the gods who have abandoned her, using their own lamentations. She echoes Isis’s cry to her murdered husband and brother, Osiris, “I call to you, weeping to the height of heaven! But you do not hear my voice” (from Plutarch’s The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys).
I hope that all of this leads to a work that would have fit in alongside other historical mythologies during ancient times. And that it speaks to people now and in the future, using durable mythological symbols and sources. What if such a document existed? We would be so excited to see this work of advocacy. Through the quilt-like nature of the book, I show that such advocacy did exist and create something that could have.
What are your hopes and fears for the future, including our relationship with animals and the Earth? What would you like to see accomplished in the short- and long-term?
The lamentation is one of the oldest forms of oral and written literature within Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Levant (and myriad forms globally). It is a raw, inconsolable expression of grief and rage at the destruction of a city-state, society, or the deaths or disappearances of loved ones or deities. In this sense, the book is fundamentally a Lament. Yet it also contains a message of fighting on despite despair. Whether we can win or have hope, we can fight anyway.
As some among us have always fought and some who succeed us will continue to fight. For those alive and dying today, those to come, and those who fought and suffered before us. I have hope when I wake up every day and see thousands of people around the world passionately advocating for the animals. Whether it is at their tables, in the streets, in the classrooms, in the legislatures and courtrooms, at sanctuaries, or in prisons.
Our economic-political systems are making the planet uninhabitable, including species extinction, ecosystem annihilation, interspecies climate refugees, and offensive wars. And so, ultimately, I despair. Despair can destroy us. Hope can delude us. But we can have both. Despite the woes and resignation, we can and must fight anyway as long as possible. In the community. At home and across the world. Now. And with a view toward eternity. Community and history can give us hope. Not that we will ultimately win, but that we are not alone in resistance. Though we’re outnumbered, countless people fought before us against even greater odds.
How can we give up when they fought with even less hope? For every heart we can touch, every animal we can rescue, every law we can pass, every community, every child, every field, every sea, and every sky. To increase our impact for animals in the short- and long-term, I believe we must continue to bring animal rights and liberation into the scope of other human and ecological justice causes and movements.
This reflects a historical pattern. Slavery abolitionism, black and women’s suffrage, and socialism were often common causes alongside anti-vivisection and animal rights among advocates of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and earlier. I hope to see a growing consciousness of how animal exploitation is fundamentally baked into the systems and institutions of oppression that so many are vocally opposed to. This will put advocates for animals into formal and informal positions of social, economic, and political influence in governments, institutions, and communities. And outside and beyond them.
Note: To learn more about Samuel Baca-Henry and how to obtain copies of the Lament of Hathor, please visit him on Instagram or at his website.