Who Is Taweret in ‘Moon Knight?’ An Explanation of the Egyptian God’s Origins
I want her to be my mom, my sister, and my best friend all at once.
This post contains spoilers for Moon Knight Episode 4.
Moon Knight episode 4 is a wild ride. Steven, Marc, and Layla find Ammit’s tomb and go exploring, only to be confronted by Arthur Harrow, who shoots Marc in the chest. When Marc wakes up, all four of them are in a psychiatric hospital, with Harrow posing as a doctor. That’s when things really go off the rails. In a hallucinatory string of events (which is possibly a literal dream sequence, or even the afterlife), Marc and Steven find that they’re no longer sharing a body, and try to escape the hospital only to find…a hippo-headed goddess blocking their path.
Luckily, she actually seems really nice?
Who is this hippo-headed gal pal? What’s her deal? Here’s everything you need to know about Taweret, the real-life Egyptian Goddess the MCU character is based upon.
Taweret, Goddess of Childbirth and Fertility
It seems like there’s no better mother than a hippo. While male hippos are known to be aggressive and violent, female hippos have a reputation for being fiercely protective of their babies. Because of this behavior, the ancient Egyptians came to regard female hippos as a protective figure for mothers, and eventually, Taweret emerged as a patron goddess of mothers and childrearing. Although her head is that of a hippo, she also has the arms and legs of a lion, the tail of a crocodile, and human breasts. She’s traditionally depicted standing with the sign sa, which means “protection.”
However, Taweret never had the same organized cultus as other gods. Instead, she was more of a household deity, venerated in private and used in protective amulets. One common tool was a wand carved from hippopotamus ivory, which Egyptians used to protect newborns.
On a broader scale, Taweret was seen as one of the maternal goddesses protecting the Egyptian people as if they were her children. Weirdly, she may have also had a funerary function, since statues depicting her likeness have been found in tombs. Scholars have speculated that those statues represent rebirth after death. One spell states that deceased kings nourish themselves with her milk as they ascend to Heaven.
What Role Will Taweret Play in Moon Knight?
Unlike Khonshu, Taweret has never appeared in Marvel comics, so we’re treading new ground here! However, she has already made a brief appearance in the series. In episode 1, Steven’s boss calls a box of plushies hippos, and he corrects her, saying that the plushies are Taweret, not hippos. (Side note, I now desperately need a Taweret plushie. I’ve never needed anything so bad in my entire life.)
So what might Taweret be doing here? Since reviewers only had access to the first four episodes of Moon Knight, we’re all now in completely unexplored territory. What follows is pure conjecture.
Remember that in episode 3, Khonshu told the gods to return to Earth, and they all ignored his demands. That means that they’re all still chilling in the Overvoid. But what if one god did answer Khonshu’s call? It’s possible that Taweret decided to trust Khonshu and come check out the situation.
This would make sense because, as the goddess of fertility, Taweret is Ammit’s polar opposite. The two are even inverted versions of each other, with Ammit having the legs of a hippo and a crocodile’s head, and Taweret having a crocodile’s tail and hippo’s head. If Taweret and Ammit have some sort of connection or tension between each other, then it makes sense that Taweret would be the one to figure out what Ammit was up to. As a protective goddess, she would naturally want to come to humanity’s aid.
It’s also possible that Marc and Steven died of that gunshot wound, and Taweret is there to greet them in the afterlife. If that’s the case, then her next move would most likely be to bring them back to life, just as her real mythological counterpart was responsible for rebirthing dead Egyptian kings.
In any case, we can already tell that she’s going to be a valuable ally to Marc, Steven, and Layla. Even though she only utters one word—”Hi!”—her delivery makes her out to be much kinder and more humble than the other gods and goddesses we met in Episode 3. Sure, she may turn out to be a bit bumbling, as her shyness seems to suggest, but Steven is bumbling, too, and he’s doing all right for himself!
We’ll have to wait until episode 5 to find out. In the meantime, episode 4 is now streaming on Disney Plus.
(featured image: Minneapolis Institute of Art)
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