I had luck enough to travel along the Nile River to the Temple of Dendera, where these photographs were taken during a restoration project. The temple dates from Ptolemaic times — in the few hundred years before Christ — and was built beside an oasis to worship Hathor, goddess of many realms including Sky and Sun, Love and Sexuality, Women and Fertility, among other domains. At Dendera Hathor shows up as a cow/human hybrid wearing a corona of woven sunbeams, or has sunrays like gold ingots showering her head, as in the painted relief above on the ceiling of the temple.

In conservative traditions a phrase like spiritual rage makes no sense at best. It is a blasphemy at worst unless we change the words. Righteous Anger sounds better and has the sense of divine moral authority behind it. You can study the religious art depicted above and below, the architecture, the calligraphy and sculpture ancient men damaged and desecrated then burned, and choose your own expression.  I will stick with Spiritual Rage.

Much excited energy was needed to gouge stone this badly. You had to bring tools and accomplices; you needed a way to stabilize yourself thirty or more feet off the ground; you had to bring plenty of food to this isolated location. The violators obliterated Hathor’s face on dozens of sculpted columns. Images of lesser gods were symbolically disemboweled. Our first image above shows the goddess suffered a violent rhinectomy, then was defiled by smoke when the vandals set fire to the temple. Who were these destructive fanatics?

They were Early Christians, my Egyptian mentor told me. He said they had deep love for the One God and a strong antipathy toward idolatrous pagan beliefs.