Ma'at

Ma'at is at once a goddess and a principle — the Egyptian embodiment of truth, justice, balance, and the right order of the cosmos. Pictured as a woman crowned with an ostrich feather, she personifies the harmony established at creation, which the gods uphold and which every pharaoh was bound to maintain against the ever-threatening forces of chaos.

In the judgment of the dead, the heart of the deceased was weighed against Ma'at's single feather: only the soul as light as truth could pass into the afterlife. As a concept that fuses truth, justice, and cosmic order into one, Ma'at stands as the Egyptian kin of the Greek vision of a rightly ordered universe — the divine measure to which both the world and the soul must conform.