Property of Sekhmet

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 awfully keen on Tutu (here he is in my Tumblr). I shall now bore for the Commonwealth on the subject. Or, to put it another way, here is a catch-all posting for this unusual Egyptian deity. :)

Tutu or Tithoes originated in Sais, came to prominence in the Late and Graceo-Roman periods, and was worshipped throughout the country. He started off as a vanquisher of Apophis, but became popular as the master of demons. He is most often depicted as a sphinx.

Tutu has power over the demons that cause disease and misfortune - a group with various titles: the Seven Demons of Neith, the ḫ3tyw (butcher demons) of Sekhmet, and the šm3yw (wandering demons) of Bastet. The demons, who may also be dispatched by Mut or Nekhbet, are also called šsrw "arrows" (from the bow of Neith), hbyw "messengers", or wpwtyw "messangers". They often appear as armed, animal-headed men. (Khonsu, the son of Mut, Nefertem, the son of Sekhmet, and Mahes, the son of Bast or Sekhmet, could also control their mothers' squads of demons.) Tutu may be depicted with these demons, and given titles such as ḥry šsrw "master of demons".

Tutu is frequently called '3 pḥty "great of strength", which is also the name of the first of Neith's demons. He's also called "who comes to the one calling him", which expresses his availability to the ordinary person who needs help. He's also called "lord of the Book" (of Life and Death), "who saves men from evil", and even "the divine demon".

Tutu is typically portrayed in the form of a sphinx, though he does also pop up in human form, especially in temples; and occasionally as a lion-headed man. As a sphinx, Tutu may be accompanied by a griffin, representing the Roman goddess Nemesis; with the Wheel of Fortune; and/or with a winged sun indicating his divine status - though his demonic nature was expressed by addition of weapons, snakes, or scorpions to his paws. Another goddess, Petbe, was equated with Nemesis and may have contributed Tutu's snaky tail: "In the Demotic 'Tefnut Legend',' writes Kaper, 'Petbe is described as a griffin, 'whose tail is that of a serpent'."

Tutu is often depicted facing out of images, like Bes - as Frankfurter points out, this gives him extra apotropaic power. He typically wears the tni crown (two ostrich feathers, sun disc, twisting rams' horns). His sphinx body may have a crocodile head emerging from the chest, an entire croc body slung under the sphinx, a lion's head joined to the back of the human head (and a crocodile or ibis head joined, in turn, to the lion), He may wear Roman soldiers' dress, including one example of a gorgoneion, and another of a lion's face in its place. A few sphinxes have wings - Kaper is reminded of the verb ḫsḫ, "be fast", which could be determined with a griffin or a sphinx.

Tutu's consort, Tapshay, Tapashay, or Tapsais, was worshipped alongside him and Neith at Ismant el-Kharab (ala Kellis, the only place Tapshay was worshipped, and the only temple dedicated to Tutu). She wears the red crown, Hathor's feathered crown, or both, as in this bronze statuette. Olaf Kaper speculates "she may have been a private person who was divinised after her death". (At Shenhur, Tutu was the consort of Isis of Shenhur.)

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Frankfurter, David. "The local scope of religious belief". in Religion in Roman Egypt: assimilation and resistance. Princeton, N. J. : Princeton University Press, c1998.
Kaper, Olaf E. The Egyptian God Tutu: a Study of the Sphinx God and Master of Demons with a Corpus of Monuments (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 119). Dudley, Mass. : Peeters, 2003.
Kaper, Olaf E. The God Tutu at Kellis: On Two Stelae Found at Ismant el-Kharab in 2000. in Gillian E. Bowen and Colin A. Hope (eds). The Oasis papers 3 : proceedings of the Third International Conference of the Dakhleh Oasis Project. Oxford : Oxbow, c2003.

Erik Hornung:

"Creation through the word is by no means associated with Ptah alone... the goddess Neith called the world into being through seven statements, which in a later magical text become the sevenfold laugh of the creator god. In the figure of Neith we confront a demiurge who represents more than a late, localized development... her close ties to the primeval cow Mehetweret link her with the early image of the celestial cow. If we consider Neith's important role in the Early Period, and her early incarnation as a beetle, we see that while she holds a central position in early cosmogonic conceptions, these are later eclipsed by others. The beetle Neith disappears, for instance, and gives way to the dung beetle of the sun god, the scarab Khepri."

Is this as unusual as I think it is - a female creator god who uses the abstract method of speech, rather than more concrete methods like birth or craft, to order the world?

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Hornung, Erik (trans. Elizabeth Bredeck). Idea into Image: Essays on Ancient Egyptian Thought. Timken Publishers, New York, 1992.

In her chapter for the Feminist Companion to the Bible, Lana Troy contrasts the Egyptian creation stories with the Biblical version of events. In the latter, gender only becomes "relevant" when human beings appear. In Egypt, however, says Troy, "the origin of all life, the source of both creators and creation, was not asexual, or presexual, but androgynous..." (p 239). (ETA: Englund remarks that the "absolutely homogenous" origin must contain "a potential heterogenity" to produce plurality; for the Egyptians, that heterogenity was the duality of gender, which was "only latent, only exist[ing] as a predisposition". (pp 20-21). I can't help thinking of the Big Bang - the tiny random flaws which gave rise to the large-scale structures of our universe, the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter, and most of all, the four forces which split apart from each other in those first fractions of a second.)

For example: Nun, the Father of the Gods, is a vast watery container, a sort of uterus; Nut, possibly his female counterpart, is the equivalent heavenly body of water through which the sun barque travels to be reborn each morning. The male creator deity Atum masturbates, swallows his semen, and spits out his children Shu and Tefnut; his hand becomes hypostastized as a goddess in her own right, and his mouth plays the role of a womb. Atum's Eye is also a female hypostasis, his "active element", which can retrieve Shu and Tefnut and return them to him. te Velde remarks that this female aspect of Atum or re is "carried over to Tefnut", Eye of Re (p 249); he connects the Eye's retrieval of the twins to the story of the Distant goddess, in which Shu or another god must in turn retrieve the sulking Eye of Re. Troy points out that the eye is womblike, a container of water whose tears produce the human race (p 263). Even in the Theban creation, where the waters of Nun are the god's semen, his semen becomes personified as a goddess!

OTOH, in the creation story from Esna, the creatrix Mehetweret appears to be solely female. Troy suggests this was conceivable to the Egyptians where male-only reproduction was harder to imagine. ETA: But Cooney - see below - quotes from an Esna hymn which describes Neith, aka Mehetweret, as "two-thirds male and one-third female". Also at Esna, Khnum not only "moulds" people, but also both begets and gives birth to them. (ETA: Englund: "All the gods of the Heliopolitan Ennead are hypostases of the androgynous Atum" (p 11).)

To come back to Troy, while male and female are both needed for the creation, they're not equal partners. She remarks, "Just as male fertility is incidental in the Esna version of creation, at Thebes the feminine reproductive mode is largely subsumed as an attribute of the male creator." (p 258) But the female aspect of the creator can also act independently, for example, in the conflict between father and daughter when the Eye returns to discover she's been replaced (resolved by the creator placing her on his forehead as the uraeus). (p 265)

One point which Troy makes which struck me as odd, however, was her suggestion that Seth and Nephthys "appear to reflect male and female characteristics in their most absolute form... The name Nephthys, in Egyptian Nbt-Hwt, 'Mistress of the House', suggests a personification of the womb", by parallel with Hathor's name, Hwt-Hr, "House of Horus", "referring to her role as his mother". But, as Troy notes, Set and Nephthys are childless (can you imagine how it might complicate the mythology if they weren't?!). Although later she is considered to be the mother of Anubis, surely Nephthys' most important role is as a sister, not a mother. te Velde points out that she is even "sometimes said to lack a vulva". (Pinch: "Perhaps because of her sham marriage, Nephthys is described in one of the Pyramid Texts [Utterance 534] as 'an imitation woman with no vagina.'" (p 171)) te Velde remarks that she "plays those parts in mythology that women without a husband filled in the Egyptian society, ie as a wailing-woman and nursemaid." (p 253) (ETA: Pyramid Text 1154 says of the king, "Isis has conceived (šsp) him, Nephthys has begotten (wtt) him."!)

Anywho, Troy concludes by pointing out that gender is "an indissoluble link between the divine and mortal worlds", something humans share with the gods. (By contrast, in the Bible, gender is "the culmination of the creator's labours", which is also "elevating".)

ETA: Bit more from my box o' photocopies. Kathlyn M. Cooney describes five Late Period / Ptolemaic bronze figurines of pantheistic deities, which combine not just human and animal elements, but male and female as well. "By combining numerous divine forms into a complex composite, these creative divinity figures incorporate as many magical and divine powers (b3w) as possible into one small statuette." Other than the creator gods, androgynous deities like this are rare (the ithyphallic Mut being one example). Cooney suggests such a figure combines "male potency for creation" with "female protection, as the catalyst and vessel for healing", and perhaps manifests the primal creator god "in visible form that is accessible to worshippers". (Another example would be Atum's parents in the Late Period Memphite Theology - Ptah-Nun, and Ptah-Naunet.)

ETA: Set's birth was "the beginning of confusion (hnnw)." :) (te Velde, p 252)

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Cooney, Kathlyn M. Androgynous Bronze Figurines in Storage at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. in D'Auria, Sue H. (ed). Servant of Mut : studies in honor of Richard A. Fazzini. Leiden, Boston, Brill, 2008. pp 63-69.

Englund, Gertie. Gods as a Frame of Reference: On Thinking and Concepts of Thought in Ancient Egypt. Boreas 20 1991, pp 7-28.

Pinch, Geraldine. Egyptian mythology : a guide to the gods, goddesses, and traditions of ancient Egypt. Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press, 2004.

te Velde, Herman. "Relations and Conflicts between Egyptian Gods, particularly in the Divine Ennead of Heliopolis", in Struggles of Gods. Papers of the Groningen Work Group for the Study of the History of Religions. Berlin, New York : Mouton, 1984. pp 239-257.

Troy, Lana. "Engendering Creation in Ancient Egypt: Still and Flowing Waters." in Brenner, Athalya and Carole Fontaine (eds). A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: approaches, methods and strategies (The Feminist Companion to the Bible, vol. 11). Sheffield, England, Sheffield Academic Press, 1997. pp 238-268.

Neith was one of the four goddesses who protected the canopic jars, along with Isis, Nephthys, and Serqet. She was also a protector of the royal house.

The click beetle (family Elateridae) has a body which resembles an Egyptian shield, which Neith is often depicted wearing as a headdress. A First Dynasty relief shows the heads and abdomens of two click beetles "incorporated into the symbol of the goddess Neith". Another First Dynasty relief shows one of these beetles holding the was sceptre. Elaterid beetles are brilliantly metallic in colour, and some are bioluminescent, reflecting Neith's association with the rising sun and as the "opener of the way" for souls in the underworld.

Neith was also associated with the fly, perhaps because of its association with the military.

ETA: Neith's recognition and influence dwindled over time, perhaps for political reasons; at first known throughout Egypt, later her importance was mostly limited to Sais. She was Khnum's consort at Esna.

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Kritsy, Gene and Ron Cherry. Insect Mythology. Writers Club Press, 2000.
Motte-Florac, Elisabeth and Jacqueline M.C. Thomas. Les "Insectes" Dans La Tradition Orale. Peeters Publishers, Belgium, 2003.
Shafer, Byron E. (ed) Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Pratice. Cornell UP, Ithaca, 1991.