Shai šꜣj

There is a moment in the Egyptian judgment of the dead that nobody explains, and I think it is the strangest thing in the whole scene.

The heart is on the scales. Anubis is checking the beam. Thoth is standing by with the palette, ready to write down the result. Forty-two judges are on the bench and the Devourer is waiting under the balance in case it goes badly.

And off to one side, near the pillar of the scales, stands a man doing nothing at all.

That is Shai. He is destiny — and Budge is specific about the original sense: "the deity who decreed what should happen to a man."

Not luck. Not chance. An allotment, issued.

He is not a witness

Here is what makes it odd.

The judgment is a moral audit. The dead person recites forty-two denials — I have not stolen, I have not lied, I have not tampered with the grain measure, I have not made anyone weep. Every one of them is about a choice. The whole apparatus is built to weigh conduct.

And standing in the same picture are Shai, and Renenet who is fortune, and Meskhenet who is the brick a woman gave birth on. The three things you did not choose.

They are not called. They do not speak. No text I have found says why they are there.

But they are in the frame, and Egyptian composition is not careless. A person's life is being assessed in the presence of the terms it was issued on.

I would not want to over-read this. The Egyptians did not leave us an argument about free will, and I am not going to invent one for them. What they left is a picture with both things in it.

"Lord of Shai"

Now the line that made me stop.

Rameses II — and this is Budge citing Maspero, so it wants checking — boasts in an inscription that he is "lord of Shai and creator of Renenet."

Read that again. Not favoured by destiny. Not blessed with good fortune.

Lord of destiny. Maker of fortune.

It is the most extravagant claim anyone in this corpus makes about themselves, and it is worth taking seriously as a statement about what these gods were understood to be. You cannot be lord of something that is not, in principle, subject to a lord. Rameses is asserting that the allotment can be commanded — and that he commands it.

Whether anyone believed him is a separate question. He built a great deal and lived to ninety, so he had an argument.

Thoth holds them

There is a smaller detail that I find more persuasive than the boast.

Shai and Renenet, Budge says, "are said to be in the hands of Thoth, the divine intelligence of the gods."

Destiny and fortune are not loose in the world. They are held — and held by the god of writing, reckoning and measurement. The same god who stands at the Balance with his pen, recording what the scales say.

That places fate inside the accounting system rather than outside it. In a lot of traditions destiny is the thing that overrules the ledger. Here it is an item in the ledger, in the hands of the accountant.

The god who became a word

Shai has a fate of his own, and it is a common one for this kind of deity.

Budge notes the drift: "subsequently no distinction was made between these deities and the abstract ideas which they represented."

The god thinned into the noun. Shai becomes ordinary Egyptian for a person's lot — the way we can say someone's fortune without meaning a goddess. By the Greek period he has been folded into the Agathos Daimon, the good spirit that attends a person, and the original decreeing god is mostly gone.

Which is a strange thing to happen to destiny: to be so widely believed in that you stop being anybody.

What he has no temple for

Nobody built Shai a shrine. There is no festival of destiny in the Egyptian calendar, no priesthood, no offerings that I can find recorded.

That fits. He is not a god you petition, because by the time you could ask, the decision has been taken. He is a condition of your life rather than a party to it.

So he stands near the pillar of the scales while your heart is weighed — present, silent, and entirely relevant.