The Twelfth Division

Source section: the Twelfth Division of the Tuat, whose gate is Then-neteru, in the Book of Am-Tuat Related: the Gods of the Qererts · the Tenth Division · the Sixth Division · the Fifth Division · the Fourth Division · the Seventh Division · the Second Division · the First Division · ra · khepri · nut · nu · shu · neb-amakh · the Third Division · the Eighth Division · the Ninth Division · the Eleventh Division

Overview

The last hour of the night has three names, and it is worth having all of them. The gate is Then-neteru. The city is Kheper-kekiu-khau-mestu. The hour is Maa-nefert-Ra [budge-1905].

The division is described as "the uttermost limit of thick darkness" — and it is the hour in which the sun is born.

What happens here is not a sunrise in any sense a modern reader would recognise. The boat does not sail out of the underworld. It is dragged through the inside of a snake.

The mechanism

This great god in this picture journeyeth along through this City by means of the faithful servants of this hidden image Ankh-neteru. His gods draw him along by a cord, and he entereth into his tail and cometh forth from his mouth, and cometh to the birth under the form of Khepera, and the gods who are in his boat [do] likewise. [budge-1905]

That is the rebirth. The sun-god and his entire crew are hauled in at the tail of the serpent Ankh-neteru and come out at the mouth, and what comes out is Khepera — the beetle, the god of coming into being. Compare khepri: the whole logic of that god is a thing that appears to generate itself out of what buried it.

Then two more sentences, both extraordinary:

He taketh up his place on the face of the hidden image of the horn (or, forehead) of the sky at the end of the thick darkness, and his hands seal up the Tuat. Then this great god taketh up his position in the Eastern Horizon of heaven, and Shu receiveth him, and he cometh into being in the East. [budge-1905]

His hands seal up the Tuat. The last act of the night journey is the god closing the door behind himself. And the one who receives him on the other side is Shu — the air, the gap between earth and sky. He is handed from the underworld into the atmosphere.

Born from Nut

The opening text places two gods in the Circle for the birth: Nut and Nu.

This great god is born in his form of Khepera in this Circle, and Nut and Nu are in this Circle for the birth of this great god when he cometh forth from the Tuat and taketh up his position in the Matet Boat, and when he riseth up from the thighs of Nut. [budge-1905]

And in the line above the whole scene: "he cometh forth into the pool of Nu, and he taketh up his place in the body of Nut" [budge-1905].

This settles something the nut entry argues from iconography. If the sun leaves the Tuat by rising from the thighs of Nut, then the Tuat is not a place beneath the world that the sky happens to sit above. The night journey has been taking place inside her. The twelve hours are a passage through a body, and the twelfth hour is the birth at the end of it. The coffin-lid paintings that put Nut directly over the corpse are making that argument by placement.

The towing crews

Twenty-four figures haul the boat, in two teams of twelve, and every one of them has their head turned backwards, looking at the boat [budge-1905].

Twelve gods draw it in through the serpent: Heku, Shemsu, Thena, Beq, Au-ankhiu-f, Sebehu-f, Aha-her, Amkhui, Neb-amakh, Seki (reading uncertain), Heq-nek-mu, Au.

Of them the text says something strange and rather beautiful:

The loyal servants of Ra who are in his following are the product of his hands, and they are born on the earth each day after the birth of this great god… They enter into this hidden image of Ankh-neteru in the form of loyal servants, and they come forth in the renewed forms of Ra every day. When they tarry upon the earth it is an abomination to them to utter the name of the god. [budge-1905]

They are re-made every morning along with the sun, and while they are on earth they are forbidden to say his name.

Twelve goddesses take over on the far side and tow him out through the serpent Ka-em-ankh-neteru: Stat, Kheru-utchat, Khet, Spekt-neter-s, Nebtamt, Neb-tchetta, Hehi, Ankhet-ermen, Kherit-tep, Hetep-em-khut-s, Uet-neter-s, Teser-abt.

Their job description is the gentlest thing in the Am-Tuat:

They tow this great god into the sky, and lead him along the ways of the upper sky. It is they who make to arise in the sky gentle winds and humid breezes, and it is they who order those who live upon earth to place themselves in the great boat in the sky. [budge-1905]

Twelve gods for the dark half, twelve goddesses for the sky. The handover is at the serpent's mouth.

The upper register

Twelve more goddesses, each standing upright and bearing on her shoulders a serpent which belches fire from its mouth: Nefert-khau, Khet-uat-en-Ra, Nebt-seshesh-ta, Nefert-her-tept, Seuatchet-atebui-pet, Hat-em-taui-s, Qat-em-sepu-s, Sekhet-em-khu-s, Haat-em-sepu-s, Khet-ankh-f, Pekt-em-ap, Nebt-ak-em-uaa-abt [budge-1905].

Note what this fire is not doing. In the Eleventh Division fire is punitive — pits of it, itemised by what they burn. Here it is carried on the shoulder like a torch at a procession.

Ankh-neteru

The serpent through which the sun is reborn gets its own description, and Budge's text is precise about a creature that ought not to be measurable:

This is the hidden image of the serpent Ankh-neteru, which is by his den in the Tuat, and he resteth in his place every day… [the space covered by] his forepaws and legs is one thousand three hundred cubits long; he liveth upon the sound of the rumblings of the earth. The servants who are loyal to his service come forth from his mouth every day. [budge-1905]

A serpent with forepaws and legs, thirteen hundred cubits of them, that eats earthquakes.

The C267 test — confirmed

The Third Division suggested that body, ba and shadow are described as integrated for the blessed and separated for the damned — that the itemisation of souls and shades is not bookkeeping but the punishment itself. That reading was marked testable against the remaining divisions (C267).

The Twelfth confirms it, by absence and by presence together.

By absence: the entire division contains no instance of hacking souls, of restraining shadows, of pieces, of destruction, of knives. It is the one hour with no punitive register at all — searched for the full vocabulary and it returns nothing.

By presence: of the beings in the final scene the text says they "are they who have their bodies, and they come forth in the following of this great god into heaven" [budge-1905].

So the hour with no punishment is also the hour that states its inhabitants are intact. The two halves of the prediction land in the same division. One confirmation is not a law — nine divisions remain — but this is the strongest form the test could have taken.

The name of the hour — and the set it belongs to

The hour-name given above is one of seven. Every division of the Am-Tuat is meant to close with a three-part formula — gate, city, hour of the night — and All twelve hours are named — see the Names of the Hours. The Am-Tuat gives the formula in only seven of its divisions, which led this reference to conclude twice that the rest did not exist (C400, then C414). They are all in the Book of Gates summary, listed consecutively (C417). A bounded negative should trigger a wider search, not a narrower footnote.

The seven are the Second, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth. They are collected on nebt-usha — the Eighth's hour, and the only one of the seven the census ever had, which is why she reached this corpus as "a goddess" with the fact that she is an hour stripped off.

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Primary attestations

Sources

• [budge-1905] — Budge, The Book of Am-Tuat (1905), vol. I, pp. 256–266. Public domain, archived in sources-texts/. OCR; several names carry Budge's own query marks (Seki, Kherit-tep, Khet-uat-en-Ra, Khet-ankh-f). Budge cites Lanzone, Domicile, pl. v for the division.

Open threads

• Ankh-neteru has forepaws and legs. Budge translates it without comment. Establish whether the Egyptian supports a limbed serpent or whether this is his rendering of something else.
• Why is it an abomination to utter the god's name while on earth? This is a named prohibition on a specific class of being and it is not explained.
• Every one of the twenty-four towers has their head turned backwards. The same posture appears on the two goddesses Seh and Ahau in the Third Division. Establish whether reversed-head posture is a convention with a meaning.
• Ka-em-ankh-neteru and Ankh-neteru — one serpent or two? The text tows the boat through the first and out of the second, but the names share an element and Budge does not distinguish them.
• Check the Matet Boat — named here as what the god boards on emerging — against the day-boat/night-boat pair.
• Recover Lanzone, Domicile, pl. v.

Art notes

• Historical plate: the boat inside the serpent, with the two teams of twelve hauling on the cord — Budge's plates carry the towing scenes.
• New art: the heads turned backwards. Twenty-four figures hauling a rope forwards while every face looks back at what they are pulling. It is the single most arresting compositional fact in the division and it is not a detail an illustrator would invent.