What are we all going to do when TikTok finally goes away and takes all of its insane brainrot memes along with it? Over the years, the app has provided countless weird, off-putting, and hilarious trends that hearken back to the early earliest days of the internet, when random equalled funny. Now, it seems we’ve come full circle, with the Eye of Rah meme being the latest addition to TikTok’s unique and absurd content.
What is the Eye of Rah?
The viral meme began receiving widespread attention in January 2025. Videos that follow the trend more often than not feature a photoshopped image of a man with a single eye the center of his face, like a cyclops, along with a single red dreadlock pointed upwards on top of his head. The resulting image is simultaneously hilarious and kind of off-putting.
The image was given the label “Eye of Rah” and has since been used in all kinds of absurd fast-paced edits with an abundance of filters and effects like this one.
Usually, the Eye of Rah meme features alongside a bunch of other memes like the “I bought a property in Egypt” meme, which is maybe what has made it such a success, there’s something in these videos for everyone to laugh at.
The origin of the meme
The picture featured in the meme is obviously photoshopped (duh), but where did the original come from? Luckily it’s not too hard to find out. The man in the photo is TikToker Rashad Bowens (@eyeofrahoffical), and even with his face being heavily edited, it’s pretty easy to identify him. Bowens became popular on the app as he would often react to viral trends, stitching other videos and gaining quite the following.
But Bowens wasn’t responsible for the Eye of Rah memes, in fact, the original edited image came from an account by the name of “Jeremiah Springfield.” Jeremiah took a viral clip of Bowens from 2022 in which he reacts to a reaction of a cucumber being aggressively salted, and created the iconic image in December 2024.
Trends move fast on TikTok, and in less than a month, the meme was all over the app with hundreds, if not thousands of others putting their own spin on the Eye of Rah. Bowens himself reacted to the meme and seems to be going along with the joke, changing his name on TikTok, (he was originally known as @lilbotheme) and posting his own videos with photoshopped versions of his face.
As for why people collectively decided that this image should be called the Eye of Rah is a bit of a mystery. Obviously it alludes to the myth of the Egyptian Goddess and mother and daughter of the sun god, (Egyptian mythology is confusing but interesting). According to an article from Dexerto, TikTok user @zketchum may have been responsible for the name as they commented “Eye of Ra.” The comment has received over 20k likes and the name stuck.
Like most things that go viral on TikTok, the Eye of Rah is sort of an enigma. On a platform filled with strange and wacky content, why this particular trend took off is hard to explain. We can chalk it up to it’s absurd nature, which has a great deal of appeal to much of Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
Published: Jan 8, 2025 10:44 am