Hra-f-ha-f ḥr=f-ḥꜣ=f

His name is not a name. It is a description of how he is standing.

"He whose face is behind him." A figure facing one way with the head turned fully back — looking at where he has come from, or at whoever is behind him, and in either case not at where he is going.

You do not need a picture. The name is the picture.

The ferryman who will not just take you

If you have run into this god before, you met him as the boatman.

The scene is a standing feature of Egyptian funerary literature: the dead person arrives at water, needs to cross, and finds a ferryman who is under no obligation to help. He is surly. He asks questions. He will not push off until the dead person can name things correctly — the parts of the boat, the ropes, the mooring-post, himself.

It is one of the most human moments in the whole tradition. Not a monster, not a judgment, not a devouring. A guy with a boat who wants you to prove you know what you are talking about.

I should say plainly that that dialogue is not in the books read here. It is real, it is well known, and it is somewhere in the Book of the Dead — chapter 99 is the likely place — but it is not in the material this entry was built from. So it sits here as context rather than as evidence, which is a distinction worth keeping.

What is here is older and plainer

He turns up in the Pyramid Texts, which puts him in the Old Kingdom, and the passage he appears in is worth quoting because of the company he keeps.

The dead king is being taken west. Wepwawet opens a way for him. Shu bears him up. The souls of Heliopolis make him climb the steps so they can present him to Nut, who stretches out her hands to him, just as they did for Osiris when he arrived.

And then: O Hra-f-ha-f, Pepi hath journeyed on to Sekhet-Aar, he hath come forth from Uart.

Look at the grammar. Everyone else in that passage is doing something — opening, bearing, presenting, reaching. He is the one being spoken to.

That is exactly right for a ferryman. The others are the machinery of the journey. He is the person you have to talk to.

He is also one of the forty-two

He sits in the hall of judgment as the twenty-seventh of the forty-two assessors — the row of gods the dead address one at a time, denying a specific sin to each.

Which means he does two quite different jobs. He is the awkward crossing you have to negotiate, and he is one of the faces in the row you have to answer to. If those are the same idea, it is a good one: the god named for looking backwards sits among the judges who ask you what you have done.

A posture with a distribution

Here is the thread I cannot close, and it is the most interesting thing on this page.

The reversed-head position — face turned fully back — turns up all over the Egyptian underworld books. Two gods in the third hour of the night grasp a sceptre with their heads turned behind them. In the twelfth hour, twenty-four figures haul the sun's boat through a serpent, and every one of them is looking back at it.

And it is absent from other hours. Not rare — absent. The second, fourth, sixth, seventh and tenth divisions do not use it at all.

So the posture means something specific, and the pattern of where it appears has been sitting in the working notes for this reference for a long time with no explanation attached.

Then there is a god whose actual name is that posture.

I want to be careful here, because this is precisely the kind of connection that feels conclusive and proves nothing. A resemblance is a lead, not an answer. It is entirely possible that the ferryman's backward face and the hauling gods' backward faces are two unrelated uses of one obvious idea.

But it is the best lead the question has had, and it took a long time to notice — which is what happens when you have been tracking a picture across a dozen scenes without checking whether anyone was carrying that picture as a name.