The Four Sons of Horus

Four gods stand on a lotus in front of Osiris in the most reproduced image in Egyptian art. They also sit on the court that judges the dead, they are the arms and legs the dead walk in on, and — most familiarly — they are the lids of the four jars that hold a mummy's organs.

They are the sons of Horus, and they are the tidiest system in Egyptian religion.

The scheme

Four gods, four directions, four organs, four heads, four goddesses. Egyptian theology is rarely this systematic, and the completeness is worth noticing: this is a scheme somebody designed, not one that accumulated.

They start as the pillars of heaven

The oldest thing said about them has nothing to do with embalming.

Budge describes "the gods who grasped as sceptres the four pillars of heaven, which eventually became the four cardinal points" — and names them as Imsety, Hapy, Duamutef and Qebehsenuef [budge-1904]. Before they were jar lids they were the props holding the sky up at its corners.

In the Pyramid Texts they are already "the children of Horus" and already busy on behalf of the dead king: summoned to bring him the boat of the Eye of Tem on the Lake of Kha, exhorted "to protect his life by their magical power and amulets," and — at Pepi I line 672 — the king "is said to become one of these four gods" [budge-1904].

Three of the four carry Old Kingdom line references in Budge's roster: Imsety at Teta 60 and 197, Duamutef and Qebehsenuef at Teta 60. Hapy does not, which is the one asymmetry in an otherwise rigid set (see his entry's open threads).

The dead person is made of them

This is the part that reframes the whole group, and it is easy to miss because the canopic jars are so famous.

Budge: "the two arms of the deceased were identified with Hapi and Tuamutef, and his two legs with Amset and Qebhsennuf; and when he went into the Sekhet-Aaru they were his guides and went in with him, two on each side" [budge-1904].

Two arms and two legs. When the dead walk into the field of reeds, the four gods are both the escort and the limbs doing the walking. They are not attendants standing by the body. They are distributed through it.

"Who is in me"

Each son is paired with a goddess, and each goddess speaks a protection formula in the first person [budge-1904]:

Isis: I conquer the foe, I make protection for Amseth who is in me. Nephthys: I hide the hidden thing, and I make protection for Hapi who is in me. Neith: I pass the morning and I pass the night of each day in making protection for Tuamutef who is in me. Serqet: I employ each day in making protection for Qebhsennuf who is in me.

Note the phrase that recurs: who is in me. The goddess is not standing beside the jar. She is the jar, and the god is inside her, and the organ is inside him. Protection is arranged in layers, like the coffins.

And each formula is characteristic. Isis fights. Nephthys hides. Neith keeps watch by day and night. Serqet works. Four goddesses, four different theories of how to keep something safe.

Budge adds 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.

Two unresolved problems

This corpus does not tidy these away.

The heart. Duamutef is assigned "the heart and lungs" [budge-1904]. But the heart was normally left inside the body during embalming — it is the organ that gets weighed, and removing it would be unthinkable. Either Budge's assignment is loose, or the theological scheme and the mortuary practice diverged. The archived sources do not settle it.

The heads. Budge gives the four heads — man, ape, jackal, hawk — from the judgment scene of the Papyrus of Ani, which is New Kingdom. Early canopic sets are all four human-headed. So the animal heads are a development, and Budge describes only the developed form. Getting the date of that change would explain why Imsety is the odd one out: he may simply be the original form the other three moved away from.

Where else they turn up

• At the Balance. The "sovereign chiefs" attending the weighing of the heart

are "Mestha, Hapi, Tuamutef, and Qebhsennuf, the children of Horus" [budge-1904].

• On the lotus before the enthroned Osiris in the judgment scene, the lotus

sometimes shown "with its roots in a lake, or stream, of water, which flows from under the throne of Osiris" [budge-1904].

• In the seventh hour of the night, where a serpent "bears on its back the

heads of the four Children of Horus" [budge-1904].

• Beneath the bier of Osiris [budge-1904].
• In the funerary boats — twenty-nine were dedicated to a list of gods

beginning with the four [budge-1904].

• With Set, who Budge says "was accompanied by the four children of Horus"

[budge-1904] — a passage the archived scan breaks off mid-sentence.

• As the Souls of Pe and Nekhen — see

that page, where the four are split two and two between the two predynastic capitals.

Sources

• [budge-1904] — Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vols I–II. Public domain, archived in sources-texts/. Budge caveat applies (04-BIBLIOGRAPHY.md); the material used here is line references, chapter numbers and reported scene descriptions, which is his strongest register.
• [sethe-1908] — Sethe, Die altägyptischen Pyramidentexte (1908–22). Public domain. Verify the Teta and Pepi I loci.
• [wilkinson-2003] — Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses. In copyright; cited only.

Open threads

• Serqet has no entry in this corpus and is absent from the 497-name census. She is one of the four canopic goddesses. Unlike the Ogdoad case this looks like a genuine census gap; confirm and add her.
• Date the shift from four human heads to man/ape/jackal/hawk, with objects.
• Resolve the heart-in-jar problem against a modern account of canopic practice.
• Establish whether Hapy genuinely lacks a Pyramid Text line reference.
• Recover the broken Set passage.
• Explain the ape–small-viscera and scorpion–liver pairings if any source can; neither is accounted for here.