Hu ḥw

There is a line in the Book of the Dead, chapter clxix, addressed to a dead person:

Hu is in thy mouth.

Four words, and they mean two entirely different things at once. Egypt knew that and did nothing to resolve it, because the double meaning is the god.

Meaning one: you will be fed

Hu is the divine food — the stuff the gods and the blessed dead live on in heaven. So the sentence is a promise of provision. You have arrived, and there is something to eat.

Egyptian funerary religion worries about food constantly and practically. The whole mortuary cult existed to deliver bread and beer to people who had died; the underworld books have gods whose entire office is provisioning. Hu is in thy mouth belongs to that anxiety, and answers it.

Meaning two: what you say will happen

Hu is also authoritative utterance — the spoken word that does not describe a state of affairs but creates one. The pronouncement of a god. The command that takes effect because it was said.

So the same four words also mean: you now have the power of effective speech.

Why one god holds both

Because taste and speech share an organ.

That is the whole of it, and it is the kind of observation Egyptian theology was extremely good at. The mouth is where food goes in and where the word comes out. One opening, two functions. So one god.

Budge, cataloguing him, admits he often cannot tell which sense a given passage intends — "in some passages it is difficult to decide whether the hu mentioned in the texts refers to the god of the sense of Taste, or to the divine food hu."

That reads at first like a translator's apology. I think it is a finding. The ambiguity is probably not a defect in the writing or in our understanding of it. It is the point: nourishment and utterance are the same event happening at the same place, and the language does not separate them because the Egyptians did not.

Taken, not asked for

The oldest attestation of him says something startling, and it is worth quoting exactly. From the Pyramid Text of Unas:

[Unas] hath taken possession of Hu and hath gained the mastery over Saa.

The dead king does not pray to the god of effective speech. He takes possession of him.

This is the operating logic of a great deal of Egyptian funerary literature and it is much stranger than the pious version. The dead are not supplicants working their way up a hierarchy. They are equipped. They arrive knowing the names, holding the formulae, in possession of the faculties — and the texts buried with them are, in the most literal sense, the equipment.

Hu is what you acquire in order to be obeyed.

Born from blood, present at a birth

Two details about him sit oddly together.

His origin: he came into being from a drop of blood that fell from Ra when the creator mutilated himself. Sia, understanding, came from the same blood. Speech and perception are a by-product of an injury, arriving together, unplanned.

And his most surprising appearance: Budge records that Hu was present, along with Amen, Thoth, Nekhbet, Wadjet and Sia, when Isis gave birth to Horus in the papyrus swamps of the Delta.

Six gods at that delivery, and two of them are speech and understanding.

Now — the entire subsequent plot of Egyptian mythology is a lawsuit. Horus grows up to spend eighty years arguing his claim to the throne before a divine tribunal, and he wins it by argument rather than by force. It is a case about legitimacy, decided by speaking.

So the presence of authoritative utterance at the birth of the plaintiff is either a very good piece of narrative construction or a coincidence. No source I have says which, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it is hard to unsee.

He wears his name

The image is minimal. An ordinary man with the hieroglyph that spells Hu sitting on his head. Sia wears his sign the same way. The god of Sight wears an eye; the god of Hearing wears an ear.

No animals, no crowns, no attributes to memorise. For four gods who are functions of a mind and a mouth rather than things in the world, there is nothing available to draw — so they wear the writing instead.

The gap I cannot close

There is a doctrine standing just behind Hu and Sia that I can see the shape of and cannot yet cite.

The Memphite theology holds that creation happens in two steps: the god conceives in the heart and utters with the tongue, and what he pronounces comes into being. Thought, then word, then world.

That is Sia and Hu exactly — perception and utterance, in that order, riding together in the boat of the sun. The doctrine is written on a slab called the Shabaka Stone, and it is not among the sources this reference has read.

So what you get here is the two gods, clearly attested from the Old Kingdom onward, doing precisely what that doctrine describes — and an honest note that the text stating it has not been checked. Getting hold of it is the largest single thing owed to this entry.