We could not trace this name to a source we trust. The page is the investigation.
Hermanubis Ἑρμάνουβις
the name that does not mean what it looks like
The myth, retold
The story as it is told
A warning before you read this, added after it was written. The ritual below is quoted from Budge, who attributes it to Plutarch. This project has since fetched Plutarch's On Isis and Osiris and the passage is not in it — no Hermanubis, no cocks. Where Budge got it is now an open question. I have left the page standing rather than quietly deleting it, because the idea in it is still worth meeting and because a corpus that hides its retractions is worse than one that shows them. Treat the sacrifice as unattributed.
Two roosters are sacrificed. One is white. The other is saffron.
The white one, we are told, stands for "the purity and brightness of things above."
You can guess what colour the other should be, and you would be wrong.
Not darkness — complication
The saffron cock, Plutarch says, is "expressive of that mixture and variety which is to be found in those lower regions."
Sit with that for a second, because it quietly refuses the arrangement we usually assume.
The obvious pairing is white and black: light and dark, good and evil, above and below. Almost every tradition that has come down to us reaches for it, and it is so familiar that we barely notice it is a choice.
Egypt — or at least the Egyptian priest who explained this ritual to a Greek visitor — chose differently. The world above is clear and simple. The world below is not its opposite. It is the mixed one, the varied one, the place where things are complicated.
That is not a moral distinction at all. It is closer to a distinction between a diagram and the thing the diagram simplifies.
What Plutarch does say
Since the cocks turned out not to be his, here is what the real text has, and it is better.
Anubis, Plutarch says, is the horizon.
Nephthys is everything beneath the earth and invisible. Isis is everything above it and visible. And the circle where those two touch — belonging to both, owned by neither — "has received the name Anubis."
Why a dog? Because a dog "can see with his eyes both by night and by day alike." The boundary between the seen and the unseen world is named for the animal that is at home in both.
I think that is lovelier than the thing I originally came here to tell you about.
The god with two names for two directions
The version below is Budge's, and carries the warning at the top of this page.
He is discussing Osiris as a kind of universal reason that runs through everything, top to bottom. When you are talking about how that principle relates to the world above, you call it Anubis. When you mean the world below, you call it Hermanubis.
Same thing. Two names, because the direction of attention has changed.
I find this a useful corrective. We tend to read polytheism as a crowd of separate beings with separate personalities, and a lot of Egyptian religion is not doing that at all. It is closer to a vocabulary for talking about one continuous thing from different positions — the way you might call the same person "my sister" or "the doctor" depending on what is relevant.
The name that lies about itself
Here is the puzzle, and it is unresolved.
Hermanubis looks completely transparent. It is Hermes plus Anubis. Both gods guide the dead to the underworld; Greek and Egyptian Egypt fused them; done. That is the standard explanation and it is a perfectly good one.
Except that Budge, giving the Egyptian behind the Greek, writes Heru-em-Anpu — which means Horus in Anubis.
Not Hermes. Horus.
If Budge is right, then the name is not a Greek invention at all. It is an Egyptian compound of an ordinary kind that Greek ears heard, misparsed, and tidied into something that made sense to them — Herm-anubis, obviously, look, it has Hermes in it.
I cannot tell you which is correct. Budge asserts the equation and does not argue for it, and Budge asserting something without arguing for it is exactly the situation where you check.
Why it would matter
Because it changes what kind of thing this god is.
If it is Hermes + Anubis, then Hermanubis was built — a deliberate fusion, like Serapis, who was designed more or less on purpose to give Greeks and Egyptians a god they could share.
If it is Heru-em-Anpu misheard, then nobody built anything. An existing Egyptian god just got a Greek-sounding name by accident, the way Sokar became Socharis — a title the Greeks mistook for a person.
One is an act of religious engineering. The other is a clerical error that lasted two thousand years.
They are very different stories, and they hang on a single etymology that has not been checked.
Overview
A Graeco-Egyptian compound god whose name contains a small puzzle.
Read as Greek, Hermanubis is transparently Hermes + Anubis — the two psychopomps, the Greek guide of souls and the Egyptian one, fused. That is the usual explanation and it is a good one.
But Budge, giving the Egyptian behind it, writes Heru-em-Anpu — Horus in Anubis [budge-1904]. Not Hermes at all.
Both cannot be the derivation. The entry records the divergence rather than choosing, and it is graded ◐ because the material is one passage of Plutarch arriving through Budge.
The attribution problem
Checked 2026-07-29, and this is now the entry's main finding. Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride has been fetched and archived in the Loeb (Babbitt) translation. It contains the word "Hermanubis" zero times, and contains no sacrifice of two cocks.
Everything quoted below is Budge attributing to Plutarch a passage that is not in De Iside as we have it. It may come from another work, from a section Budge does not name, or from an eighteenth-century translation with different content — Budge gives no citation. Until that is resolved, the material below should not be cited as Plutarch.
What De Iside does say about Anubis is given further down, and it is close enough to Budge's paraphrase to explain how the two could be conflated — but it is not the same passage and it names no Hermanubis.
What Budge attributes to Plutarch
Discussing Osiris as the "common Reason" which pervades both the higher and lower regions of the universe:
it is, moreover, called "Anubis, and sometimes likewise Hermanubis (i.e., Heru-em-Anpu); the first of these names expressing the relation it has to the superior, as the latter, to the inferior world." [budge-1904]
So the pair is a division of territory. One principle, two names, sorted by which half of the cosmos is in view. Anubis faces up; Hermanubis faces down.
The two cocks. Plutarch continues, and the detail is the best thing in the entry:
And for this reason it is, they sacrifice to him two Cocks, the one white, as a proper emblem of the purity and brightness of things above, the other of a saffron colour, expressive of that mixture and variety which is to be found in those lower regions. [budge-1904]
Read what the colours are actually doing. White is the obvious one — clarity, the world above. But the lower world does not get black. It gets saffron, and the reason given is not darkness or evil but "mixture and variety."
The world below is not the opposite of the world above. It is the complicated one. That is a considerably more interesting cosmology than a light/dark pairing would be, and it is the sort of thing that survives only because a Greek writer found the ritual odd enough to record the explanation he was given.
Where he sits. Budge adds, immediately after: "Strictly speaking, Anubis should be reckoned as the last member of the Great Company of the gods of Heliopolis" [budge-1904] — a placement for Anubis, not for Hermanubis, and worth keeping distinct.
What Plutarch actually says about Anubis
The archived text gives this, at § 44 [plutarch-de-iside]:
When Nephthys gave birth to Anubis, Isis treated the child as if it were her own; for Nephthys is that which is beneath the earth and invisible, Isis that which is above the earth and visible; and the circle which touches these, called the horizon, being common to both, has received the name Anubis, and is represented in form like a dog; for the dog can see with his eyes both by night and by day alike.
And: "Anubis is a deity of the lower world as well as a god of Olympus" [plutarch-de-iside].
Compare that with Budge's version. The structure is the same — one principle touching an upper world and a lower one — and the phrase "lower world as well as a god of Olympus" is recognisably behind Budge's "superior… inferior."
But the actual claim is different and better. Plutarch's Anubis is not one of a pair of names. He is the horizon itself — the circle where the visible earth (Isis) meets the invisible one (Nephthys), belonging to both because it is the boundary between them.
That is a genuinely elegant piece of allegory, and the dog explains it: the horizon is named for the animal that sees by night and by day alike. A creature at home in both conditions, standing for the line where the two meet.
No Hermanubis. No cocks. The Anubis-as-horizon reading is Plutarch's; the Anubis/Hermanubis division of labour and the white-and-saffron birds are not, on the evidence of the archived text.
The name problem
Two accounts, one entry:
1. Hermes + Anubis. Fits the Greek form, fits the function (both gods conduct the dead), and fits the period — Graeco-Roman Egypt produced exactly this kind of fusion, serapis being the designed example. 2. Heru-em-Anpu, "Horus in Anubis" — Budge's equation [budge-1904]. An Egyptian compound of a familiar type, which Greek ears could plausibly have assimilated to Hermes.
Reading 2 has the attraction that it explains the Greek as a mishearing of an existing Egyptian name rather than a deliberate coinage — which would make Hermanubis less like Serapis (built on purpose) and more like Socharis, the title the Greeks turned into a name in sokar.
Budge asserts the equation without arguing it. It is not adopted here.
The record
Every claim above traces to a row here. Source, exact place in that source, and what it actually supports.
| Source | Locus | Attests |
|---|---|---|
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, quoting Plutarch | Anubis for the superior world, Hermanubis for the inferior; both as names of the "common Reason" |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, quoting Plutarch | the two cocks — white for purity above, saffron for "mixture and variety" below |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, gloss | the Egyptian equated as **Heru-em-Anpu** |
[budge-1904] | *Gods of the Egyptians* II, index | Hermanubis at i. 493 and ii. 265 |
Sources
[budge-1904]— Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (1904), vols I–II. Public domain, archived. The Plutarch is quoted at second hand and in an old English translation.[plutarch-de-iside]— Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, Babbitt (Loeb) translation. Public domain, archived 2026-07-29. Searched: no occurrence of "Hermanubis"; no two-cocks sacrifice. The Anubis-as-horizon passage is at § 44.
Open questions
- ~~Fetch Plutarch~~ — closed 2026-07-29, and it broke the entry's central attribution rather than confirming it.
- Find where Budge's passage actually comes from. The two-cocks sacrifice and the Anubis/Hermanubis pairing are specific enough to be traceable. Candidates: a different Plutarch work, the Moralia elsewhere, Porphyry, or Squire's 1744 translation of De Iside, which Budge's generation used and whose content differs. Budge supplies no citation.
- Until then, the two-cocks detail should not be repeated as Plutarch anywhere in this corpus. It is currently quoted in the retelling for this entry, which carries the same warning.
- Settle the etymology. Is Budge's Heru-em-Anpu his own conjecture, or does he have a source? Check against a lexicon and against the Greek magical papyri, where the name is common.
- Find whether Hermanubis has any attestation as a cult — statues, dedications, a temple — as opposed to appearing in a Greek author's theological exposition.
- Get the two-cocks sacrifice from another witness. A single ritual detail in Plutarch may be local, misunderstood, or invented.
- Compare with serapis and hermes-trismegistus: three Graeco-Egyptian constructions, and it is worth asking on the rival creations page whether Hermanubis was designed or merely misheard.
Cite this entry
Research grade: ⚠audit — Attestation could not be verified. This entry is the audit.
This entry should not be cited as a description of a deity. It records an unverified name and the state of the investigation into it.
"Hermanubis", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded audit, retrieved 2026-08-10.