Egyptian

The sun at dawn, in the form of a scarab beetle rolling it up over the horizon — one of the three daily aspects of the sun, and a pun on the word for coming into being.

Embalmer and psychopomp, who leads the dead to the scales — the office Western tradition eventually gives to Michael and to Azrael.

Son of Osiris, who contends eighty years with Set for the throne. Every living pharaoh was understood to be his incarnation.

The great magician who reassembles Osiris and tricks Ra into surrendering his secret name. Her cult eventually reached as far as Roman Britain.

Set's wife who sides with her sister Isis against him, and mourns Osiris at the head of the bier.

Murdered by Set, reassembled by Isis, and installed as judge of the dead. He is the earliest fully developed dying-and-rising sovereign we have.

Murderer of Osiris and defender of the sun-barque — a god who was worshipped as a royal patron for two millennia before being recast as the enemy.

The hundred-headed monster who nearly unseats Zeus, identified by the Greeks with Set and echoed in Revelation's dragon.

Two Egyptian lions facing opposite ways — yesterday and tomorrow — with the sun passing between them each night.

Waits beside the scales in the Egyptian judgment to eat the hearts that fail the weighing — annihilation rather than torment, which is not the same as hell.

His name means 'the hidden' — a god defined by being concealed, who nonetheless became the supreme state deity of the New Kingdom.

The Egyptian chaos-serpent, who attacks the solar barque every night and every night has to be driven off again. Chaos here is a permanent condition, not a defeated enemy.

The god who made himself out of the waters and then sneezed and spat the next two gods into being.

The gentler face of the lioness — Sekhmet's rage domesticated into a household guardian, and the object of the rowdiest festival in Egypt.

A grotesque dwarf god who guards bedrooms and births by pulling faces and making noise — shown facing the viewer, which Egyptian art almost never does.

The earth as a male god lying on his back — an inversion of the usual arrangement, since in Egypt the sky is female and the ground is not.

The annual Nile inundation as a god: a fat, breasted figure who is neither male nor female because he is not a person but a season that fed a country.

Goddess of love and music who is also the one who meets the dead at the desert edge — and who, in the Sekhmet story, is the same goddess pacified.

Magic itself as a god — the power that makes the gods effective, present at creation before anything was made.

The frog-headed goddess of childbirth, whose amulets were worn by pregnant women and whose animal multiplied across Egypt every year as the water went down.

The Egyptian god who shapes each child and its ka on a potter's wheel before birth — creation as a manual trade rather than a word or an act of will.

Moon god of the Theban triad, sent abroad in one famous text to drive a spirit out of a foreign princess.

Both a goddess and the principle of order itself — the feather against which every heart is weighed.

One of the oldest gods in Egypt, patron of fertility and of the desert roads out of Coptos, whose festival opened the harvest with the king cutting the first sheaf.

One of the oldest deities attested in Egypt, a weaver and a warrior who is called on to arbitrate when the gods themselves cannot agree.

The featureless water that was there before anything, still lying outside the created world and underneath it.

The Egyptian sky-goddess, who swallows the sun each evening and gives birth to it each dawn, so the inside of her body is the night sky the dead travel through.

Creates by thinking a thing and then speaking its name — a theology of creation by word that predates Genesis by a long way.

The sun, who sails the sky by day and the underworld by night, fighting off Apep at every crossing.

Sent by the Egyptian sun-god to destroy humanity, and stopped only by being tricked into drinking beer dyed red. Her priests were physicians: she sends pestilence and she lifts it.

Goddess of venom and therefore of its cure — her priests were the physicians who treated stings and bites.

The Egyptian god of air, who holds Nut off Geb with his own body — the reason there is a gap between sky and earth at all.

The crocodile as a god — feared as a killer and honoured as the power of the river that made Egypt possible.

Shu's twin and counterpart in the Egyptian ennead, moisture to his air. When she left Egypt in a rage the land dried out until she was coaxed home.

Forty-two Egyptian judges of the dead, each responsible for exactly one offence, addressed by name and told 'I have not done it'.

Four gods, four jars, four organs: liver, lungs, stomach and intestines, each with its own guardian and its own compass direction.

The cobra goddess of Lower Egypt, worn on the king's forehead as the uraeus that spits fire at his enemies, and half of the pairing that made a king ruler of both lands.

'Opener of the ways' — goes ahead of the army and ahead of the dead, clearing the road before either has to walk it.

A single living bull, identified by its markings, kept at Memphis as the visible body of Ptah and buried in a granite sarcophagus with royal honours when it died.

Scribe of the gods, who records the weighing of the heart — an office matching Metatron's almost exactly, and the seed of the whole Hermetic tradition.

The sun-disc of Akhenaten's reform: for about twenty years the only god Egypt was permitted, worshipped without an image, and erased almost completely afterwards.

Consort of Amun and mother of Khonsu, completing the triad that ruled Thebes at the height of Egyptian power.

The cobra goddess of the harvest, honoured at the threshing floor and the granary, who also gives a newborn its name and its share of fortune.

A composite of the three most dangerous animals in Egypt, arranged to frighten off whatever threatens a woman in labour.