Maahes — sometimes written Mahes, Mihos or Miysis in the Greek — was a New Kingdom Egyptian deity worshipped most fiercely from the eighteenth dynasty onwards (around 1500 BCE). He was the son of either Bastet or Sekhmet, depending on which temple you asked: the gentle cat-goddess of Lower Egypt or the lion-goddess of plague and war from Upper Egypt. Either way, he inherited his mother's head. He is depicted as a powerful man with the snarling head of a lion, often crowned with the *atef* — the tall feathered crown of Osiris — and carrying a curved *khopesh* sword.
His titles tell you everything. He was "Lord of the Massacre," "Wielder of the Knife," "He Who Is True Beside Her," and most chillingly, "The Devourer of the Guilty." But he was also, in the same temple inscriptions, called "Helper of the Wise Ones," "Lord of Slaughter for the Innocent's Sake," and a guardian of sacred places against intruders. He was not a god of casual violence. He was a god of *judicial* violence — the divine executioner, the one Ma'at sent when the scales of justice had finished weighing.
His main cult centres were Taremu (called Leontopolis by the Greeks, the "city of lions") in the Nile Delta, and Per-Bast (Bubastis), his mother's city. Live lions were kept in temple precincts in his honour, fed and pampered, and any harm done to them was punishable by death. He was associated with the lotus, with the new moon, and with the protection of pharaohs in battle.
By the Ptolemaic period he had merged with the Greek god Apollo Mihos in some inscriptions, and travellers from across the Mediterranean came to consult his lion-oracles. Then, like much of the older Egyptian pantheon, he was slowly buried by the rising tide of Christianity and Islam, until he was known only to specialists in dusty museum collections.
Wear Maahes and you wear one of the most precisely calibrated gods in the entire ancient world — the lion who only kills when the verdict is in, and who guards everyone the verdict was meant to protect.