Hathor's gentleness had a fierce counterpart. As the Eye of Ra, the sun-god's active, protective power sent out against his enemies, she could turn into the lioness Sekhmet, and the myth of the Destruction of Mankind tells how she nearly annihilated humanity in that form until she was tricked into drinking beer dyed red like blood and so pacified. This doubleness, the loving goddess who is also the raging eye, is characteristic of Egyptian thinking about divine power. In the funerary sphere Hathor was Lady of the West, who received the setting sun and welcomed the dead into the afterlife, so that a dead woman might herself become a Hathor. The Greeks identified her readily with Aphrodite, and her temple at Dendera, though largely of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, preserves one of the most complete pictures of any Egyptian cult.
The ceiling of a chapel within Hathor's Dendera temple once carried the so-called Dendera Zodiac, a sandstone relief planisphere combining Egyptian and Greek astronomical symbolism from the Ptolemaic period, the only complete map of the ancient sky to survive from Egypt. In 1821 a French engineer, working under authorisation obtained through complex and disputed circumstances, removed the entire ceiling block by force using saws and gunpowder and shipped it to Paris, where it remains displayed in the Louvre; the empty ceiling space at Dendera today, with only a plaster cast of the original in its place, is one of the more visible physical scars left on Egyptian religious architecture by nineteenth-century European antiquities collecting.