A name and a job. Nothing else survives — and that is the finding, not a gap in our work. Arrives with the Book of the Dead.
Sepa
the lord the seven Shining Ones follow
Overview
He appears in chapter XVII of the Book of the Dead — the chapter that keeps stopping to explain itself — inside a plea to the gods who erase sin:
Destroy ye all the faults which are within me, even as ye did for the seven Shining Ones who are among the followers of their lord Sepa. Anubis appointed their place on the day [when was said], "Come therefore thither." [budge-1895]
He is a lord with a following, and the following is seven. The dead man's argument is precedent: you cleaned them, so clean me. Sepa is named only as the one they belong to.
Anubis assigns their place, which puts the group inside the funerary machinery rather than outside it — someone had authority over where these seven stood, and it was not Sepa.
What the chapter does not do
Chapter XVII glosses almost everything it says. It asks "What then is this?" immediately afterwards and identifies the lords of right and truth as Thoth and Astes, the holy ones behind Osiris as the four sons of Horus, and the followers of Hetep-se-khus as Sebek in the waters [budge-1895].
It never glosses Sepa. The one figure in the passage a reader would most need explained is the one the commentary walks past.
The centipede
The census calls him a centipede god who protected against snakebite. That is the standard modern identification — spꜣ, the centipede, a real Egyptian deity associated with Heliopolis and with venom.
Nothing in this archive says so. No centipede, no snakebite, no Heliopolis. The eight hits give a lord, seven followers, and Anubis. The identification is very likely right and it is not attested here, which is the whole distinction this reference exists to keep.
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-1895] | *Papyrus of Ani*, **BD ch. XVII**, lines 86–88 | "the **seven Shining Ones** who are among the followers of **their lord Sepa**"; **Anubis appointed their place** |
[budge-1895] | *ibid.*, the interlinear transliteration | the same clause word by word — *aakhu VII apu amiu-khet en neb-sen **Sepa*** |
[budge-1901v3] | *Book of the Dead* III, index | "**Sepa, 100**" — **a numbered page, unread** |
Sources
[budge-1895]— Budge, The Papyrus of Ani. Public domain, archived. Carries the clause twice, in translation and in transliteration, which is why the reading is secure even though the name appears once.[budge-1901v3]— Budge, The Book of the Dead III (1901). Public domain, archived. Page 100 is unread.
Open questions
- Read BD III p. 100. A numbered page in an archived volume. **The cheapest outstanding
- Who are the seven Shining Ones? Aakhu — the transfigured dead. **Seven of them, as a
- Why does Anubis appoint their place and not Sepa? The sentence gives Sepa possession and
- Test the centipede. A lexicon would confirm spꜣ and settle whether the census's gloss
- Re-run the other C169-style dismissals. If one false-positive note concealed a real god,
- the others should be checked rather than trusted — that is the finding here, and it is
Cite this entry
Research grade: ○name-only — A name and a function in a spell list. That is all that survives.
"Sepa", The Egyptian God Corpus,
graded name-only, retrieved 2026-08-10.