Apesh

Egypt made gods out of animals for two different reasons, and the difference matters.

Most of the famous ones were admiration. The falcon because it flies highest. The scarab because it rolls a ball of dung the way the sun gets rolled across the sky. The cow because she feeds you.

And then there is a much smaller group that got deified out of fear — and the tortoise is at the top of it.

Apesh is the tortoise-god. He is associated with darkness, with night, and with evil, and he was given a place among the stars alongside the other hostile things. He probably came up the Nile from Nubia. And people revered him, in the plain sense that they made offerings and said his name, because they were frightened of him.

Why a tortoise?

Nobody says. This is the honest and slightly maddening centre of the whole entry.

A tortoise is not frightening. It is slow, it is armoured, it minds its own business, and it is roughly the least threatening animal in the Egyptian landscape — there were crocodiles and hippos and cobras right there to be scared of instead, and Egypt was duly scared of all three.

But something about it read as an enemy of the sun, and the reason did not survive. What survived is the sentence people said about it.

"Ra liveth, the Tortoise dieth"

Five words. And they turn out to be a password.

The chapter they come from is called The Chapter of Forcing an Entrance into Heaven — which is a wonderfully blunt title — and the picture at the top of it shows the god Thoth opening four doors. The doors are the four winds: west, east, north, south.

The dead man arrives at each door in turn, and at each door he says the same five words, and then adds a different second line:

At the west door — pure is the body in the earth, and pure are the bones. At the east — sound is he who is in the chest. At the north — he is strong in his members, and Qebehsenuef guards them. At the south — the bolts are drawn, and they pass through his foundation.

Read them together and you can see what is being done. The claim at every door is the same claim — the sun god is alive, and the thing that opposes him is dead — and then the specific business of that particular door gets attached.

It is the structure of a password with a passphrase. Say the thing everyone knows, then say the thing only you know.

And the reason it is said four times rather than once is the reason anything gets said four times in Egyptian ritual: there are four directions, and you do not leave one of them unaddressed. A protection with a gap in it is not a protection.

Who owns which wind

There is a note attached to the chapter that assigns the four doors:

The north wind belongs to Osiris. The south to Ra. The west to Isis. The east to Nephthys. And each one of them, the text says, breathes into the dead man's nostrils as he goes through.

That is a lovely image and it is also a puzzle, because Egypt already had gods of the four winds — four separate deities, one per direction, with their own names. Here the same four quarters have been handed to the four biggest names in the funeral religion instead.

Two systems, same compass. Neither text mentions the other. Nobody here is going to pretend to reconcile them.

The instruction not to tell anyone

Then the chapter does something rare.

Egyptian funerary texts are full of promises about what happens to the person who knows a particular spell — he shall not be turned back at any gate, he shall eat bread beside the god, and so on. The whole genre is an argument for learning things.

This one says the opposite:

Let no one outside know it. Do not do this in the presence of any person except your father or your son, or yourself alone.

Your father, your son, or nobody. That is a text drawing a circle around itself and pulling it tight — and it is worth noticing because it means somebody thought this particular door-opening formula was dangerous in the wrong hands, or valuable enough to be worth restricting, in a way the hundreds of other spells were not.

And then the tortoise turns up on the other side

Here is the part that should stop you.

There is a different chapter, about turning yourself into a Bennu bird — the Egyptian phoenix — in which the dead man describes what he is made of. He says he made himself in the image of the creator-beetle, that he grew in the form of plants, and then:

"I am hidden in the likeness of the Tortoise."

Hidden in it. Safely. As a refuge.

So in one chapter the tortoise dies at every door so you can get through, and in another the tortoise is the shell you climb into to be safe. The same animal, in the same book, doing opposite jobs — and nobody involved seems remotely bothered.

That is not sloppiness. Egyptian religion did this constantly, with serpents most of all: the snake that eats the sun and the snake that guards the sun are both snakes, and both are correct. The tortoise is just a smaller, stranger example of the same habit of mind.