that she transforms from a relatively benign cat into a fire-breathing lioness, making Thoth jump. When the goddess is at last placated, the retrieving god escorts her back to Egypt. Her return marks the beginning of the inundation and the new year. Joachim Friedrich Quack points out that when Sirius reappears in the sky it first appears reddish before turning blue-white, and he suggests the Egyptians connected this change in color with the pacification of the eye goddess. The pacified eye deity is once more a procreative consort for the sun god, or, in some versions of the story, for the god who brings her back. Mehit becomes the consort of Anhur, Tefnut is paired with Shu, and Thoth's spouse is sometimes Nehemtawy, a minor goddess associated with this pacified form of the eye. In many cases, the eye goddess and her consort then produce a divine child who becomes the new sun god. The goddess' transformation from hostile to peaceful is a key step in the renewal of the sun god and the kingship that he represents. The dual nature of the eye goddess shows, as Graves-Brown puts it, that "the Egyptians saw a double nature to the feminine, which encompassed both extreme passions of fury and love." This same view of femininity is found in texts describing human women, such as the Instruction of Ankhsheshonq, which says a man's wife is like a cat when he can keep her happy and like a lioness when he cannot. Manifestations The characteristics of the Eye of Ra were an important part of the Egyptian conception of female divinity in general, and the eye was equated with many goddesses, ranging from very prominent deities like Hathor to obscure ones like Mestjet, a lion goddess who appears in only one known inscription. The Egyptians associated many gods who took felid form with the sun, and many lioness deities, like Sekhmet, Menhit, and Tefnut, were equated with the eye. Bastet was depicted as both a domestic cat and a lioness, and with these two forms she could represent both the peaceful and violent aspects of the eye. Yet another goddess of the solar eye was Mut, the consort of the god Amun, who was associated with Ra. Mut was first called the Eye of Ra in the late New Kingdom, and the aspects of her character that were related to the eye grew