Property of Sekhmet

Many interesting abstracts for the CRE 2023 conference in Basel, including one entitled Death is Only the Beginning: Non-Existence – A State of Existence or Total Annihilation? (p 83) by Kristine Reinhold, which asks how we should understand what happens to the damned. "The attestations will be presented in thematic groups, including: existence in a state of anti-life, where one is deprived of the features of life, non- existence as total annihilation, and a state of non-existence characterized by existing in the darkness, without the potential to come forth." I hope this is eventually published and I can get my hands on it.

More from CRE 2003:

And from CRE 2022, Conception of the Doors of Heaven in Ancient Egyptian Religion (p 24) by Mennah Aly; The study of ex-votos: new perspectives on the cult of Bastet/Boubastis and its diffusion in the Mediterranean (p 36) by Emanuele Casella; The One She-Cat of Pakhet: Towards a New Type of Animal Cult? (p 48) by Romain Ferreres; The Libyan Political and Social Impacts on Ancient Egypt within The Third Intermediate Period (p 107) by  Marwa Soliman; and Late Twentieth Dynasty Yellow Coffins of Akhmim: Towards the Identification of a Corpus, Workshop, and Individual Artisans by Jaume Vilaro Fabregat.
https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/download/9781803275833


And CRE 2021: Being annihilated or being satisfied in the Duat. About the dynamic of the sw.wt in the New Kingdom Books of the Underworld (p 17) Mariano Bonanno: "... as one of the elements with greater mobility, the shadow is a first-order component to preserve the integrity of the deceased. That is why a deceased (or a god) with a “powerful shadow” or who can keep it in the Hereafter, guarantees to join the crew of the disk and therefore regenerate. On the contrary, with the annihilation of the shadow, the condemned are executed and included among those that do not exist." And The Beginnings of a Consumer Society: Beer Production in Predynastic Egypt (p 34) by Nisha Kumar; Red images in the Amduat of Thutmose III (p40) by Jordan Miller; Near Eastern deities in Egyptian magical texts of the New kingdom: Some methodological considerations and a case study on Anat and the servant of Hauron (p 78) by Joachim Friedrich Quack.

And CRE 2019: Not to see isefet: Symbolic links between eyesight and bwt in the Coffin Texts (p 5) by Apolinário de Almeida, Ana Catarina: "Bwt is the most regularly used verb to introduce isefet in the Coffin Texts, yet another verbal form can be found closely associated with bwt, often showcasing a parallel or causal relation with it, which is n mAA (not to see)... an akh has no limits to its eyesight and finds no obstacle (IV117): he who sees will never die, while the dead mwt are conceived as blind. Those who exist see and can be seen."; “Father of the Fathers and Mother of the Mothers” in the religious hymns of the New Kingdom (c. 1550-1069 BC): Creator’s non-gender binarism or expression of an all-encompassing deity? by Borges Pires, Guilherme; Spell 125b of the Book of the Dead [the judges] by El-kemaly, Radwa; Anat in LBA Egypt: Some preliminary remarks on the audience, agents, and importance of a foreign deity in a new land by Huwyler, Jacqueline M.; The Book of the Twelve Caverns in the tomb of Petosiris (Tuna el-Gebel) by Méndez-Rodríguez, Daniel Miguel; It has not been seen until today: Some myths from the texts of the outer sarcophagus of Iufaa by Míčková, Diana: "... and text about Tutu and his group of protective demons connected with the new year, mentioning also their connection to the fight of Ra and Apophis, as well as the personified eye of Ra."; Where do you come from, Bastet? by Pubblico, Maria Diletta / Vittori, Stefano; The demon-deity Maga: Geographical variations and chronological transformations in ancient Egyptian demonology by Rogers, John; A dangerous seductress? Re-reading the Tale of the Herdsman by Serova, Dina; An unpublished 21st Dynasty coffin set in the Nicholson Museum, Sydney University [!!!] by Smith, Danielle; and Litany of the Underworld. Forms of Osiris represented in the inside of some XXIst Dynasty coffins by Haładaj, Dagmara.

CRE 2018 has papers on Apedemak, "the dreadful aspect of Nu[n]", catfish-headed gods, mummiform demons on Third Intermediate Period coffins, gender differences in the CT, Illustrations of Temple Rank on 21st Dynasty Funerary Papyri, and Being the son of a Goddess: The claim for legitimacy of the bubastite kings.
Partial contents: https://www.archaeopress.com/Archaeopress/Products/9781789692143

ETA: Amunet in Thebes - how Hatshepsut developed the cult of the feminine form of Amun, 17th Current Research in Egyptology, Kraków, 4-7 May 2016

I've had a long break from Egypt; well, here I am again. I'm at the library, looking at an electronic version of the book Daemons and Spirits of Ancient Egypt, hoping to summarise the substantial section of Hepet-Hor -- the variously represented goddess who protects Osiris, Ra, and the deceased, with whom I fell in love a few years ago.

Hepet-Hor was basically invented during the 21st Dynasty, at the beginning of the Third Intermediate Period. She's depicted with a snake head, or a lioness head plus a crocodile head, or with three heads. She appears on coffins and papyri (and sometimes tomb walls) in the context of the Book of the Dead, The Litany of Re, and the Amduat.

(Isn't it extraordinary! We have access to the approximate moment that a god is created for the first time, out of the imagination of one or more humans.)

She's often depicted guarding the door to a mound on which Osiris sits in judgement, along with other guardians, such as a huge snake. The mound represents the Primeval Mound; Osiris is resurrected inside it. Osiris may be shown unified with Ra, via an extra falcon head. Alternatively she might lead the deceased, or stand by the scales. In one papyrus she's shown holding the sun-god aloft. In another (belonging to Khonsu-Renep, Piankoff and Rambova Plate 11) she's one of a number of seated mummiform gods, "witnessing the birth of Re-Osiris".

Graves-Brown suggests Hepet-Hor is actually wearing a croc headdress, which might explain its odd angle. She might be seen brandishing knives and/or snakes.

Hepet-Hor ("Embracing Horus") might also be called "Embracing the Duat", "Embracing Osiris", "Lady of the West", amongst other titles; she may be given the names of goddesses such as Serqet, Sekhmet, and Dechty. There's a similar goddess named Saryt.

ETA: Just leaving myself a note about an abstract from the 2023 Basel CRE conference: Towards a Synoptic Edition of Book of the Dead Spell Sources from the 21st Dynasty (p22). "The goal is to better understand variability within the funerary compositions, and to shed light on key evidence regarding their transmission and editorial practices."

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Piankoff, Alexandre and Natacha Rambova. Mythological Papyri. New York, Pantheon, 1957.

More on my obsession with the yellow coffins and papyri of the Twenty-First Dynasty, and their rich repertoire of religious symbols.

The coffins were made out of wood, covered in plaster, sometimes modelled into shapes, such as hands and breasts. Every bit of space was jammed with symbols. The coffin was typically covered in orange varnish, and the decorations might be gilded. Men got a blue-and-yellow headdress, women a plain blue one, sometimes with the vulture-headdress. Usually a winged figure, typically Nut, spread protective wings over the body. The most usual set-up was an inner and an outer coffin, with a "cover-plate" over the mummy.

ETA: Kathlyn M. Cooney writes that there are about 900 of these coffins around the world -- about 300 in Egypt, and the others in North America or Europe. (There are at least 2 in Australia too.)

The papyri are different in their sizes, contents, and where they were placed -- most commonly, between the mummy's legs, but also elsewhere else on the body (wherever an amulet might be placed), or in a wooden figure of Osiris next to it. (It occurs to me that there must be a ton of papyri which are still inside unwrapped mummies; perhaps a future technology will be able to read them without disturbing the mummy.)

Why so much variation in the decoration of the coffins, and the contents of the papyri? Goff's explanation is that, for the workshops that produced funerary papyri, "it was a matter of pride with them to introduce variants" into the patterns available to them, "and to shuffle pictures and texts so that their works of art were individual". (p 124)  [clients could also choose] [coffins didn't reproduce contents of accompanying papyri] 

Why did funerary papyri stop being large sheets of text with some illustrations, and become long bands of illustrations with some (or no) text? Because papyrus was expensive! The practice of shortening the Book of the Dead had already begun in the New Kingdom; after the Amarna period, pictures start to dominate. (There was no standard BD, with different papyri containing different selections of chapters, and some chapters being added late in the Book's history.)

Alexandre Piankoff discusses what he calls the principle of pars pro toto, where a part of the Book of the Dead (or another text) could stand for the whole thing -- a chapter could be replaced by a summary, or by its vignette or illustration. One vignette could illustrate two or three chapters. An incorrect or muddled version of the text would still do the job.
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Cooney, Kathlyn M. "Coffin reuse: Ritual materialism in the context of scarcity". in Proceedings of the First Vatican Coffin Conference. Vatican Museum, Vatican City, 2017. pp 101-112.

Goff, Beatrice L. Symbols of ancient Egypt in the late period: the twenty-first dynasty. The Hague; New York, Mouton, 1979.

Piankoff, Alexandre and Natacha Rambova. Mythological Papyri. New York, Pantheon, 1957.

Discussing the various forms in which Hepet-Hor appears on Twenty-First Dynasty papyri and coffins, Beatrice L. Goff remarks: "Artists of the Twenty-first Dynasty were ingenious in devising variations while retaining a clearly discernable form... It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that they reflected upon the implications of such similarities and variations. They were concerned to meet present needs; and a papyrus or sarcophagus was felt to be more satisfying if the designs were in some way uniquely adapted to a particular person while at the same time conforming to a pattern. There is never any attempt to explain the significance of the derivations from but conformity to an accepted pattern." (p165) That fits the mental picture I have of the Egyptians, who were enormously uninterested in what a fan might call "canonicity". I wonder how imagery was fitted to the individual? "Give Fred a lot of snakes, he likes those." (If there was an explanation, I wonder what form it would take? Marginal notes, like the ones added to the text of the Book of the Dead?)

I'm compiling a list of attestations of Hepet-Hor. Goff mentions some of her forms which I haven't encountered yet: a deity with two snakes for a head; a male form, "That porter of the West"; a hare-headed guardian at the Lake of Fire; one with a hippo head with a snake in its mouth, guarding a form of Re.

ETA: Hepet-Hor appears in the Lexikon der ägyptischen Götter und Götterbezeichnungen under a number of names: Ḥptt, "the Embrace"; Ḥptt-wrt, "the Great Embrace"; Ḥptt-bı͗k, "she who embraces the falcon"; Ḥptt-bı͗k-ntry, "she who embraces the divine falcon"; and Ḥptt-m-dw3t, "the embrace in the underworld". These are different readings and translations than those given by the authors I've been reading (of which much, much more later), most conspicuously the reading of "falcon" for "Horus".

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Goff, Beatrice L. Symbols of ancient Egypt in the late period: the twenty-first dynasty. The Hague; New York, Mouton, 1979.
Leitz, Christian (ed). Lexikon der ägyptischen Götter und Götter bezeichnungen. Dudley, MA, Peeters, 2002-3.

While the men were out hunting, Stone Age women created a future (Paramus Post, 16 May 2018). A review of The Invisible Sex by James M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page.

Stephen Quirke's book has been sitting about on my shelves for long enough; it's time to actually read it, and post some notes here as I go along.

The first chapter of Exploring Religion in Ancient Egypt is devoted to blowing up any preconceptions the reader brings to the subject, down to whether we can meaningfully apply terms like "religion" to Ancient Egypt. We tend to get a homogenised view of Ancient Egypt, which was a huge country with different borders at different times, made up of multiple geographic regions (floodplain, marsh, oasis), with people of different ages, genders, and stations in life. Quirke is inviting us, when we read that "the Ancient Egyptians said/did such-and-such", to ask which Ancient Egyptians, and where, and when.

Quirke opens by commenting on modern religion: when we declare our faith, we're declaring which religion we've chosen from the selection available. (An atheist or agnostic is making the same choice.) He writes, "... a human group may instead express itself without reference to any contemporary or earlier other society or way of expression." (That phrase will give you a quick taste of Quirke's writing, which is not the easiest going.) Actually, I'm not sure of this, but I don't think the idea of mutually exclusive religions actually gets going until the early Christians refuse to worship deified Roman emperors. Quirke suggests the influx of foreign religious ideas in the Late Period and Graeco-Roman times brings Egypt somewhat closer to the modern model of competing faiths. In the ~2600 years before that, the only religious alternative was Atenism - which lasted just 12 years.

Quirke repeatedly warns against a homogeneous view of the Ancient Egyptians. Nomads, shepherds, and farmers, people on islands and people at the margin of cultivation, were all differently affected the annual Nile flood - which itself was unpredictable. The peasantry included people with no, some, or lots of land. Rich Egyptians only packed their tombs with "full-house inventories" at two times in history, around unification and "the period of greatest military presence in western Asia, circa 1450-1300 BC" - at other times they were supplied as if for a single journey; girls and infants might be buried with amulets and jewellery, "as if for puberty or childbirth rites they did not live long enough to see".

A table reminds us how few temples have survived - most of them Ptolemaic or Roman from Upper Egypt, where they were made from durable local sandstone. The limestone temples of Lower Egypt were literally burned to make lime for plaster. (Abydos survived by dint of being buried in the sand.) So our information on religion from temples is strongly filtered by historical contingency. Quirke mentions other sources of information, such as the remains of mudbrick temples and votive offerings.

"One of the most deeply rooted modern assumptions pervading accounts of ancient Egyptian religion is the opposition between official cult and personalized practice," writes Quirke (italics in original). He attacks this binary, pointing out that, for example, royalty, the nobility, and commoners all resorted to the same healing amulets and spells.

Discussing the images and names of the gods, Quirke suggests that the multiple representations of each god, and the splitting and combining of gods, allowed the ancients to focus on a specific aspect of the divine. He mentions the multiple Horuses, Amun, Ra, and Amun-Ra, and the "four forms of Anubis", matching the cardinal directions or four steps in embalming. Gods might even split off because of an architectural detail, such as a space created by symmetry which could be filled by a new deity - so Tasenetnefret, the quality of being a good sister, splits off from Isis to become "an independent deity receiving offerings of her own". These multiple images are matched by the multiple epithets and descriptions of gods in religious texts. Quirke also discusses the lack of long narratives about the Egyptian gods, even suggesting that "myth" may be a "confusing" term to use for Egyptian religion. (Or is this another artifact of what happens to have survived - given the number of narratives we do have, in magical / healing papyri, for example?)

Finally, Quirke ponders whether the idea of a "priest" is even applicable to Ancient Egypt, where the temples were staffed on a rotating basis byt people who had other jobs the rest of the time.

So that's got us softened up for what's to come!



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Quirke, Stephen. Exploring Religion in Ancient Egypt. Wiley, London, 2015.

Somewhere - and I am determined to find it again - I read that Apophis has one redeeming feature: that when it comes time for the cosmos to end, he's involved in the necessary process of destruction. That gives him a positive cosmic role, much as Set has a positive role in warding off Apophis's nightly attacks on the sun god. I mentioned this idea on Tumblr, provoking a great deal of alarm and warning that Apophis is strictly off-limits, which has only prompted me to start a little research project on the wriggly fucker. :) ETA: Eventually I figured out what I'd misremembered: Atum destroying creation and turning into a snake in BD 175.

Assmann, Jan. "The Iconography of the Solar Journey". In Egyptian solar religion in the New Kingdom: Re, Amun and the crisis of polytheism. London ; New York : Kegan Paul International ; New York : Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1995.

Apophis takes a thorough beating each time he attacks the sun-god, with numerous gods participating. In The Book of the Day, the fight is on at noon and through the early afternoon (the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth hours). The battle is, naturally, referred to in language that "presupposes" the good guys win: "It is not the struggle that is represented here, but the state of the enemy defeated and harmony restored." The sun-god himself doesn't engage; Apophis is fought off with Isis's magic and Set's spear (or by Thoth's knife). The sun-god's protective uraeus spits fire at it, which Assmann connects to the noon heat of the sun and to sacrifice. The victory is less like a show of force, writes Assmann, and more like the execution of a judgement.

The place where the battle takes places is called the "sandbank", which Assmann connects to the Egyptian word for midday: "standstill". Apophis, as snake or turtle, has swallowed up all the water, leaving the solar barque high and dry; Seth stabbing Apophis forces him to vomit up the water so that the boat can be on its way. This "sandbank of Apophis" was also used as an expression for drought and famine: the stranding of the barque symbolises not just the daily battle, but any crisis which threatens life ("famine, disease, sickness, snake bite, uprising, war etc.") Hence spells which treat a scorpion sting or what-have-you as a cosmic disruption. There are also spells against Set' disruptive activities which invoke the same image of the stranding on the sandbank.

The victory is followed by general jubilation; Assmann quotes a celebration from the Book of the Dead of Nedjmet, and remarks that "Overcoming the obstacle of the sandbank means the salvation of Nedjmet."

Borghouts, J. F. The Evil Eye of Apopis. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 59 (Aug., 1973), pp. 114-150.

Another standstill is prompted by Apophis's hypnotic gaze. In the Coffin Texts (and in the Book of the Dead Chapter 108), when the solar barque comes in the evening to the mountain of B3ẖw, it encounters a thirty-cubit long snake (somewhere in the vicinity of 150 metres. Whew!). "A standstill comes about among the crew / and a great bewilderment (sgw.t) during the course." Boasting of his great magic, Set counters Apophis's gaze: "You who see from afar, / just close your eye!" (In Behind Closed Eyes, Kasia Maria Szpakowska describes this moment thus: "he was commanded to cease his malign gawking"). Borghouts notes that this is amongst the earliest examples of Set's positive role as the sun-god's protector. Also, he suggests that what's happening here is Apophis's attempt to steal or harm the Eye of Re with the use of his own eye. He discusses various other texts and spells which refer to the serpent's "face" (gaze) and to blinding him.

Discussing an image of Wnty (a frequent name for Apophis) in the form of a crocodile in the tomb of Ramesses IX, Borghouts notes that he's more usually associated with the tortoise and the scorpion. This crocodile figure vomits up the Eye of Re. Strikingly, this seems to be a positive role for Apophis: "The crocodile rather represents divine being, a kind of equal of Re, and the latter rejuvenates himself passing through its body. It looks like Re meeting his other, chaotic counterpart, but without feelings of enmity; is it the depth and the primeval surroundings meeting-place which annihilate the contrasts?" The serpents W3mmty, equated with Apophis, has a positive role, guarding the resting-places of the gods. The Nḥb-k3w and Ḏsr-tp serpents are ambiguous, sometimes equated with Apophis, at other times beneficent.

Finally, the ritual game where pharaoh hits a ball before a goddess has been interpreted as deflecting Apophis's eye! Significantly, it's done before Hathor, Tefnut, and Sekhmet - the Eye of Re.

Faulkner, R. O. The Bremner-Rhind Papyrus: III: D. The Book of Overthrowing 'Apep. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Dec., 1937), pp. 166-185
-- The Bremner-Rhind Papyrus: IV. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Jun., 1938), pp. 41-53

I can't write a better introduction than Faulkner's: "The main purpose of these texts is the magical protection sun-god in his daily course across the sky from the attacks of the storm demon ʿApep... but they are secondarily directed to the protection of Pharaoh, the earthly representative of the solar divinity, from his foes also, 'whether dead or alive'." Significant passages, and the names of malevolent creatures, are written in red (though so is the name of Set, who acts as the sun-god's defender). Spells spit on, trample, spear, bind, stab, and set fire to Apophis; he is burned in effigy (drawn in green ink - interesting) both to ward off his attack on the barque and to prevent thunder-storms (I wonder if this signifies some connection with that other cosmic enemy, Set?). 

Quite a lot of telling Apophis to fall down, fall on his face, etc, which I suppose suggests the serpent is rearing up to attack. Sekhmet does a lot of burning, as do Wepes (Wepset?) and Pakhet, amongst others. In fact, Apophis is so comprehensively annihilated that it's surprising he keeps coming back for more. Given that so much of the spells is directed not at Apophis, but at the foes of pharaoh, I wonder if Apophis in fact symbolises those enemies -- and with the king of Egypt the lynchpin of cosmic order, those enemies must be constantly "annihilated" -- thoroughly defeated.

(Also in this papyrus: Re tells the story of creation, including his generation of Shu and Tefnut, their returning to him his Eye (or the Eye returning them to him, in a variation), and the creation of humanity from his tears.)

Morenz, Ludwig D. On the Origin, Name, and Nature of an Ancient Egyptian Anti‐God. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 63, No. 3 (July 2004), pp. 201-205.

As it turns out, Apophis doesn't even turn up until the First Intermediate Period (as far as we know); the earliest attestation we have comes from a Ninth Dynasty tomb which mentions "the sandbank of Apophis". The practice of "mutilating" his name begins later, with the Coffin Texts (where it is apparently inconsistent), in which he increasingly appears during the Middle Kingdom. (Morenz suggests he might have been around before this in popular religion, and was incorporated into elite theology at this time.)

Apophis was not referred to as a god, and did not receive cult (and was therefore not represented by statues, though of course he routinely appears in art, eg tomb paintings). He dwelt in water (compare similar Ancient Near Eastern water monsters, such as Leviathan). His name, ʿ3pp, means something like "great babbler": he makes noise, but it is "anticommunication", just roaring or meaningless shouting. "Apophis is just noisy," remarks Morenz. (Interestingly, he also notes that the language of the gods was transcendent, something "transhuman".)

Pinch, Geraldine. Egyptian Mythology. Oxford University Press, 2002.

"Apophis was first mentioned in the twenty-first century BCE. A much later creation myth explained that Apophis sprang from the saliva of the goddess Neith when she was still in the primeval waters. Her spit became a snake 120 yards long." (This is the creation myth from Esna.) ETA: According to Mpay Kemboly, it was Re's spit, not Neith's.

Jan Zandee's Death as an Enemy gives numerous examples of Apophis being restrained and/or punished.

I'm reading this book partly for a writing project and partly for the frivolous reason that one of my Kpop boys visited the Pacific island of Pohnpei as part of a "survival" reality show*. Apparently Pohnpei was the inspiration for R'yleh. This frippery aside, the introduction gives an overview of Western anthropology's changing attitude to the complex and sophisticated cultures of "nonliterate, technologically less sophisticated" peoples, which I found very helpful.

Despite the Romantic interest in the "noble savage" in the late Eighteenth Century, it wouldn't be until the early Nineteenth Century that scholars started to properly study what they called "primitive societies". The predominant idea was that societies should naturally progress from "primitive" to complex ones like our own (just as evolution was misunderstood as natural progress from simple to complex creatures). Herbert Spencer thought "primitive" societies had somehow got stuck; Lewis Henry Morgan, "laying the foundations for Marxian anthropology", thought early societies were "egalitarian communities distinguished by free and open access to the production, distribution, and consumption of goods", but became politicised, resulting in "stratification, exploitation, and inequality". (Now that particularly interested me because it's an idea I've come across a number of times in descriptions of early societies, such as Mesopotamia.) Franz Boas, by contrast, held that each society was unique, operating on its own laws, rather than by some universal principle.

Anthropologists began to accumulate large amounts of information about various cultures and to ponder how each one thought. Émile Durkheim, for example, argued that the meaning of religion wasn't the relationship with the supernatural, "but in the reaffirmation of human beings united, in part, by a strong system of belief". (That tallies with studies of evangelical religion in the US which found that adherents did not have a deep understanding of their denomination's theology - belief or faith was not what held their church together.) Claude Lévi-Strauss "believed the logic of mythical thought to be as clear and orderly as that of modern society".

Similarly, the peoples of the Pacific were not helpless, simple people destroyed by the arrival of Westerners, but "manag[ed] quite effectively the forces of change brought to their islands from the outside." Hanlon in particular mentions a book by Alan Moorehead called The Fatal Impact which I think must have influenced science fiction to some extent - the story of death and destruction "when the large, technologically advanced civilizations of the West collided with the small, primitive, technologically backward societies of the Pacific Islands." (Of course, H.G. Wells had set the precedent for alien invasions in 1897 with War of the Worlds, but surely this book confirmed the common idea that contact between the advanced and the less advanced must always be disastrous for the latter.)

* The show, still running, is "Law of the Jungle". Being a Korean show, everyone cooperates and looks after each other, instead of engaging in metaphorical death-matches as you might expect from a Western reality series.

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Hanlon, David. Upon a Stone Altar: a History of the Island of Pohnpei to 1890. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1988.

Back to Egypt shortly.

Mesopotamian religion involved ritual performances, such as recreations of mythical battles, such as the fight between Marduk and Tiamat from Enuma Elish. But in this chapter by Thorkild Jacobsen, it was the Sacred Marriage Drama, and related fertility dramas, that interest me.

What else is death like? Like being bound or imprisoned: "Man cannot move any more and go where he wants." Spells protect the deceased from being fettered, tied, shut up, or waylaid. Sleep: more spells guard against tiredness and sleep. (Man, I could use some of that.) To be "snatched away" or stolen.

The next section is entitled "The realm of the dead as a place of darkness". "It is a dark place," writes Zandee, "where the light of the sun does not penetrate." A lament describes it as "deep and dark", without doors, windows, or light. "The sun does not rise there, but the dead lie in the dark all days." Various words for "darkness" crop up in spells, including kkw, familiar from the name of the primal gods Kek and Kauket. Demons lurk in the darkness.

Fire and darkness seem to be linked: in the Book of Two Ways, there is "the place of a spirit, which has fallen into the fire, which enters darkness"; in the same text there's the "gate of darkness, which is shut by a fiery door, on which the word śḏ.t, flame, is written. The [gate] is black, the door is of a red colour." But "[t]he dead overcomes the darkness to be with Re in heaven", and gods may light his or her path. "In the tombs of the kings the darkness is the residence of the king. They revive temporarily, as long as Re shines there." But Osiris's enemies "never catch sight of the sun".

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Zandee, J. Death as an Enemy According to Ancient Egyptian Conceptions. (Studies in the Histories of Religions, Supplement to Numen, V). Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1960.