Ra sends her to punish humanity and she cannot stop. The lioness goddess of Egypt — “the Powerful One” — is loosed at a target with no external reference kept outside the sending. She is two-point: a will, an object, and nothing else. And she runs. The slaughter has no off-switch, no boundary wall, no gatekeeper to close what was opened. Heaven halts her only by a trick: a lake of beer dyed red as blood, which she drinks for gore until she sleeps and the world is spared.
The magic chapter calls this the oldest telling of the runaway-agent problem. An agent launched without a bound reference cannot be recalled — the same structure as the unbounded golem, the familiar that reverses the leash, the model loosed on an underspecified reward. The beer-lake is not a principled solution; it is a one-time reset at enormous cost. The off-switch the tradition knew would have been the seal, the diet, the bound — the third point held outside the loop before the sending, not after.
The Sekhmet frame carries an explicitly interpretive layer; the Witness flags it as such and does not claim it as apparatus. What it illustrates — that two-point agency with no external invariant is structurally unrecallable — holds independently of the mythology.
Sources. The “Destruction of Mankind,” embedded in the Book of the Heavenly Cow (New Kingdom royal-tomb text, attested from Tutankhamun’s shrine onward) — Ra looses Sekhmet, then halts the slaughter with the red-dyed beer. Search: Sekhmet Destruction of Mankind red beer Book of the Heavenly Cow.
Appears in: Magic, and the Failure at the Gnats