Khepri

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.

Khepri's fullest role in Egyptian religious literature comes not from any myth told about him in isolation but from his place inside the sun god's nightly journey, as recorded in funerary compositions painted on royal tomb walls from the New Kingdom onward. The Amduat, literally that which is in the underworld, divides the night into twelve hours and follows the sun god's barque through each one as it passes drowned regions, fiery pits, and the great serpent Apophis, who must be repelled before dawn; in the twelfth and final hour the aged sun, having entered the body of the sky goddess Nut at dusk as the exhausted Atum, is reborn from her at the eastern horizon specifically in the form of Khepri, the beetle god whose name plays on the verb to come into being, so that the entire nightly ordeal culminates in Khepri's emergence rather than merely returning the sun to its dawn appearance.

A related composition, the Litany of Re, inscribed in royal tombs of the same period, addresses the sun god through seventy five distinct names and forms, cataloguing Khepri among them as one identity within a single, multiple bodied deity rather than a separate god standing apart from Ra. Read together, the two texts show that Khepri's importance to the Egyptians lay less in an independent cult, which he never really had, than in his function as the technical term, almost a piece of theological vocabulary, for the precise moment of solar rebirth, a transformation these funerary books insisted every dead king would undergo as surely as the sun itself.