Serqet srqt

Overview

Serqet is a scorpion goddess whose name appears to mean "she who causes to breathe."

That is the whole of her, in one contradiction. The scorpion's sting closes the throat — Egyptian medical texts treat scorpion envenomation as a breathing emergency — and the goddess named for the animal is named for the remedy. She is the sting and the release from it.

She is one of the four goddesses of the canopic jars, she speaks in the Book of the Dead, and she is a named character in the Metternich Stele.

Correction, 2026-07-29. An earlier version of this entry claimed Serqet was absent from the 497-name census and carried a census-omission chip. That was wrong. She is on the census — under the spelling Serket, in the moderate tier — and the corpus consequently generated a second stub, which was researched into a full entry before the collision was noticed. The two have now been merged here, and serket is a pointer to this page. Chip removed. See finding C130.

Attestation history

Old Kingdom. Budge quotes a passage from the text of Unas in which a series of gods are told to uncover themselves: "…that Unas may see you as Horus seeth Isis, as Nehebu-kau seeth Serqet, as Sebek seeth Net (Neith), and as Set seeth Netetthab" [budge-1904].

Two cautions on that citation. First, Budge gives the line as 599 in one place and 597 in another, quoting the same passage — the discrepancy is his. Second, and more importantly, Serqet appears here only as the object of somebody else's seeing. The passage is cited by Budge in his treatment of Nehebkau, not of Serqet. It establishes that her name was current in the Pyramid Texts and pairs her with a serpent deity; it does not tell us anything she does.

The canopic four. Budge sets out the protection formulas of the four goddesses who guard the Four Sons of Horus and the organs in their jars. Serqet's is the plainest of them: "I employ each day in making protection for Qebhsennuf who is in me" [budge-1904].

Note the construction, as on the other three: who is in me. The goddess is the jar.

He also records that these same four "shot forth flame and worked protection on behalf of the god Nu when he was seated on his throne" [budge-1904] — so the team that guards a dead man's liver had previously guarded the primeval water.

The Metternich Stele. Serqet is a speaking character in the great magical narrative of Isis and the stung Horus. Isis has hidden her son in the papyrus swamps; he is found and stung; she puts her nose to his mouth to see whether he is breathing, finds poison in the wound, and cries out. Then:

Then came Nephthys shedding tears, and she went about the Papyrus Swamps uttering cries of grief, and the goddess Serqet said, "What is it? What is it? What hath happened to th[e child]?" [budge-1904]

A scorpion goddess arriving at the scene of a scorpion sting, asking what has happened. The narrative uses her as the specialist called to the emergency.

Iconography. Budge reproduces a coloured plate, "The goddess Serqet" [budge-1904].

A correction, made 2026-07-29. An earlier version of this entry attributed to Serqet a form "in the shape of a serpent with human legs and arms, and sometimes with wings also," carrying "vases containing food for the deceased." That description is Nehebkau's, not hers — it sits a few lines above the Unas quotation in Budge's text, in a passage about the food-providing serpent goddess of Henen-su. The two were conflated because the Unas passage names them in the same breath. Removed.

What the texts say

The name is the argument. Srq is "to breathe, to cause to breathe." A scorpion sting is, in Egyptian medical terms, an interruption of breath — the Metternich Stele narrative turns on exactly that, with Isis checking her son's mouth for air.

So the goddess is not named for the poison. She is named for what she can undo. This is the dangerous-animal-recruited pattern the corpus keeps meeting — the cobra of Wadjet on the royal brow, the hippopotamus of Taweret in the birth chamber, the crocodile of Sobek — but Serqet is the most explicit case, because the recruitment is written into the name.

She works, where the others fight, hide and watch. Set the four canopic formulas side by side and each goddess has a different theory of protection: Isis conquers the foe, Nephthys hides the hidden thing, Neith keeps watch by day and night, and Serqet employs each day. Hers is the least dramatic and the most administrative — she simply puts in the hours.

Why the liver, though? Nothing in the archived sources explains why the scorpion goddess is assigned the liver and gall bladder rather than any other organ. Recorded as unexplained rather than rationalised.

She binds Apep with her body. The strangest image of her is in the Book of Gates material. Apep is held by a chain gripped by four beings and "a mighty hand called the 'hidden body'" — and "on the chain, near Apep's head, is stretched out the scorpion-goddess Serqet" [budge-1904]. Budge repeats it: Apep is "fastened by the neck with a chain (along which is stretched the scorpion goddess Serqet)" [budge-1904].

She is not holding the chain. She is lying along it. Elsewhere in the same material the monster Neha-hra "is seized by Serqet and Her-tesu-f, and held in bonds, and is transfixed to the ground by six knives" [budge-1904].

The teeth. The Papyrus of Ani assigns each part of the deceased's body to a god, and Serqet gets the biting ones: "The teeth of Osiris Ani, triumphant, are the teeth of Serqet" [budge-1895]. Budge places her also in Book of the Dead chapter xxxii, where "she appears as a friend of the deceased" [budge-1904].

The swallow. In a Book of the Dead formula the deceased says "I am a swallow, I am a swallow, I am the Scorpion, the daughter of Ra," which Budge takes to show "that the swallow was connected with the Scorpion-goddess Serqet" [budge-1904]. The filiation to Ra is not otherwise prominent in her file.

Absorbed into Isis. Budge's 1895 glossary goes further than his 1904 text and calls Serq "a form of the goddess Isis" [budge-1895]. That is a Late Period flattening rather than a description of her origin, and it is not adopted here — but it explains why Isis is sometimes shown with a scorpion on her head.

She is also listed at Dendera — "The goddess Serqet, in the form of a woman" [budge-1904] — and appears as no. 127 in Budge's Names of Osiris list [budge-1904].

Iconography

A woman with a scorpion on her head, the tail raised over her. Occasionally the inverse — "a scorpion with a woman's head surmounted by disk and horns" [budge-1895].

In the Papyrus of Ani she is drawn as a scorpion holding the shen ring and the ankh [budge-1895] — eternity and life, carried by the animal that takes both.

The serpent-with-human-arms form once given here was Nehebkau's and has been removed; see the correction note above. It survived two earlier passes in this section and in the attestations table after the note declaring it removed had already been written. A correction is not made until every copy of the error is gone — logged as finding C131.

In the canopic arrangement she stands at the west side with Qebehsenuef, the hawk-headed son.

Cult and practice

No temple or festival is recorded in the archived sources. Her practice is funerary — the canopic shrine, where she stands with Isis, Nephthys and Neith at the four corners — and magical, in the healing spells against venom for which the Metternich Stele is the great surviving monument.