The Sun That Makes Itself Each Morning

Khepri is the ancient Egyptian god of the rising sun, of rebirth and of self-creation, shown as a scarab beetle or a man with a scarab for a head. His name comes from the verb kheper, meaning to come into being or to become, and it captures the idea at the heart of his worship: Khepri is the sun in the act of bringing itself into existence at dawn.

The Egyptians derived the image from close observation of the dung beetle, which they saw rolling its ball of dung across the ground and from which new beetles seemed to emerge, so that the insect became a natural emblem of a sun that pushes its disc up over the horizon and of life generating itself from apparently lifeless matter. In the daily scheme of the sun god, Khepri is the sun at dawn, Ra the blazing sun at noon, and Atum the aged sun at dusk, three names for the single luminary across its journey. Because the scarab stood for coming-into-being and rebirth, carved heart scarabs were placed on the bodies of the dead to help them live again, making Khepri's emblem one of the most common of all Egyptian amulets and one of the most hopeful.