Harpocrates was Horus the Child — the form of Horus as the divine infant in his mother's arms, depicted as a naked child with the sidelock of youth, sucking his finger or holding it to his lips in a gesture that the Greeks of the Hellenistic period, mistakenly, took to indicate enjoined silence. (The gesture was, in fact, a conventional Egyptian sign for childhood: the babe sucking his finger. The Greeks read it as the god of secrecy enjoining silence upon his initiates, and the mistaken interpretation was widely propagated; the iconography of the "finger to the lips" gesture as meaning "hush" entered Western tradition through this misreading.) Harpocrates was, in his Egyptian context, simply the child Horus in his mother's lap — the same Horus elsewhere depicted as the falcon-headed avenger, but in his vulnerable infant form, requiring his mother's protection against the scorpions and snakes of the marshes where she hid him from Set. The standing mother goddess holding the divine child became, in the Hellenistic and Roman world, one of the central images of the cult of Isis, and is among the iconographic prototypes — though by no means the only one — for the medieval Christian image of the Virgin and Child.