The Gate Deities of the Underworld

To reach Osiris the dead must pass seven Arits — halls or mansions — and then ten Sebkhets, pylon-shaped gateways. Every one of them is staffed, and every officer has a name.

Twenty-one guardians on the Arits, ten doorkeepers on the pylons. Thirty-one — which is exactly the number the aggregate census gives for this group, and the first time a census count has matched the source on the nose.

The names are extracted deterministically from the archived text by scripts/extract-arits.py; the machine copy is data/arits.json.

The seven Arits

Each Arit has three officers: a doorkeeper, a watcher, and a herald. The distinction is worth noticing — one opens, one observes, one announces.

⚠ = unresolved OCR in the scan; flagged in the data as requires_verification and not silently corrected.

Budge translates several of the names, and they are worth having:

• Sekhet-hra-asht-aru — "Reversed of face: of many forms"
• Ha-kheru — "The voice that travelleth," var. "The high-voiced"
• Qeq-hauau-ent-pehui — "Eater of his own filth"
• Se-res-hra — "Making to lift up his face"
• Aaa — "Great One"
• Khesef-hra-asht-kheru — "Repulsing the face, great of speech"
• Khesef-At — "Repulser of the crocodile"
• Ankh-f-em-fent — "He liveth upon worms"

The ten pylons

Chapter CXLVI gives ten gateways, each with a single named doorkeeper — and each introduced by a description not of the doorkeeper but of the gate itself, which is female.

Entries for all ten now exist, generated from data/arits.json by scripts/generate-gate-entries.py. Dashes mark what the scan lost to footnote debris; those fields are flagged requires_verification rather than filled in.

The first pylon is introduced like this:

Lo, the lady of terrors, with lofty walls, the sovereign lady, the mistress of destruction, who uttereth the words which drive back the destroyers, who delivereth from destruction him that travelleth along the way. The name of the doorkeeper is Neruit.

The gate is a she. The doorkeeper is an employee.

This is the reverse of the Arits. In chapter CXLVII the three officers are named first and the hall is barely described; in chapter CXLVI the gateway gets the sentence and the keeper gets the last clause. Something changes between the two chapters — the architecture stops being scenery and becomes the thing addressed.

And the gates are not passive. They devour with fire; they prevail with knives; one is "the blazing fire, the flame whereof cannot be quenched, with tongues of flame which reach afar"; another is "she who is loud of voice, she who causeth those to cry who entreat her." The seventh is the strangest and the gentlest: "the robe which doth clothe the feeble one, weeping for what it loveth and shroudeth."

A gate that is a garment, and grieves for what it wraps.

One guardian is a hippopotamus. At the fifth pylon the keeper is described as "the hippopotamus deity, with her fore-feet resting upon the buckle, the emblem of protection" — which is exactly the standing iconography of Taweret. Whether the gate is held by that goddess or by a figure in her form is not stated, and the entries do not assume it.

And the ninth is described with a measurement: "Lo, she who is chiefest, the lady of strength, who giveth quiet of heart to her lord. Her girth is three hundred and fifty measures; she is clothed with mother-of-emerald of the south."

Passing is a matter of knowing names

This is the mechanism, and the whole chapter exists to supply it.

Nothing is fought at these gates. No guardian is defeated, tricked or bribed. The dead person arrives, the officers' names are recited, and a short speech is made — and the speeches are not pleas but credentials, statements of what the speaker has already done:

I have brought unto thee the bones of thy jaws in Re-stau, I have brought thee thy backbone in Annu, gathering together all thy members there. I have driven back Apep for thee. I have poured water upon the wounds; I have made a path among you.

That is the fifth Arit. The dead man is not asking to be let through; he is reminding the gate that he helped reassemble Osiris.

The same logic runs through the Souls of Pe and Nekhen and every gate in the Aai: admission is by correct naming, and the funerary texts are, in the most practical sense, a phrasebook.

What kind of beings these are

The vignettes describe them, and they are not dignified.

Each Arit's three guardians sit at the entrance with animal heads — hare, serpent, crocodile at the first; lion, man, dog at the second; jackal, dog, serpent at the third; and so on. The first of each trio holds an ear of corn; the other two hold knives.

Corn and knives. Something to be given and something to be used, at every door.

And the names are frankly grotesque. "Eater of his own filth." "He liveth upon worms." These are not epithets of honour; they are descriptions of things you would not want to meet. Egypt did not staff the approach to Osiris with dignified attendants. It staffed it with creatures whose names tell you what they consume.

How this group came to be written

Worth recording, because it is the loop's method working.

This group sat in NEEDS_SOURCE for two batches. The census's own sample names — Qeq-hauau-ent-pehui, Khesef-At, Ankh-f-em-fent — returned zero hits against everything archived, because the archive held only the Negative Confession and none of the rest of the Book of the Dead.

Rather than record that as "no roster exists," it was recorded as "the roster exists and we have not fetched it." Budge's 1895 Papyrus of Ani was then downloaded from the Internet Archive, and all three sample names are in it, exactly where the census implies.

The distinction between unrecoverable and unfetched is what made the difference, and it is now documented as method.

Sources

• [budge-1895] — Budge, The Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani (1895), chs. CXLVII (the seven Arits) and CXLVI (the ten pylons). Public domain, archived in sources-texts/budge-1895-book-of-the-dead-ani-ocr.txt. Budge caveat applies (04-BIBLIOGRAPHY.md); the name-lists are transliteration and the glosses are his translation, so the names are firmer than the meanings.
• [naville] — Naville, Todtenbuch, cited by Budge for variants and for the supplied title of ch. CXLVII. Public domain; not archived here.
• [wilkinson-2003] — Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses. In copyright; cited only.

Open threads

• Resolve the two OCR-damaged names: the second Arit's watcher (Seqe—hra, probably Seqed-hra) and the fourth Arit's herald (Khesef-At, where the scan breaks). Both are flagged in data/arits.json.
• Write individual entries for the thirty-one. They have names, offices, positions and — for eight of them — translated meanings, which is more than several groups already written up. This page is the roster; the entries are the next unit of work.
• Get Naville's variants; Budge footnotes alternative spellings for many of the names and they are not captured in the extraction.
• The Cavern deities are still blocked. Chapter CLXVIII is not in the Papyrus of Ani — it belongs to the Saite recension. A different witness is needed, and NEEDS_SOURCE should stay set for that group.
• Establish whether the seven Arits and the ten pylons are two versions of one idea or two distinct stages of the journey. Budge prints them consecutively without comment, and the vignettes place the Arits in the upper register and the Sebkhets in the lower.
• Identify the female gates. Each pylon is described as a lady with attributes and a girth; whether these are named goddesses elsewhere is not established here.