The Enemy

This is the fifth in a series of posts. The story so far:

This is a slightly difficult post for a technical reason. In Egyptian thought, mentioning someone or something, saying or writing their name, is a way of giving them life. And I’m gonna have to mention the enemy by name in this post. But it’s okay. I’m educating, and education is the best defense against evil. (If you doubt me, look at America nowadays.) Also, the Egyptians themselves depicted and named it, as you’ll learn.

The Opposite of Ma’at

The opposite of ma’at is called isfet (again, there are a few ways to transliterate the Egyptian to English)¹. As ma’at is “truth, justice, and the Egyptian way things ought to be”, isfet is “falsehood, injustice, and the way the Egyptians would not want things to be”.

Isfet means disorder, whether politically or cosmically. Isfet means “to do wrong, to sin, to do evil, to lie.” By the Greco-Roman period it came to mean “uncleanliness”.

Which brings us at last to the personification of isfet. I don’t like to name it, but the Egyptians did give it a name and even depicted it in tombs, complete with its name. But it always appears restrained by gods, or stabbed with knives, or things of that sort. It is never depicted calm and happy and free as the gods or the deceased is shown. For example, here we see an image of Atum (the creator) himself, at right, holding off the enemy with a staff. The enemy, as you can see, is depicted as a giant snake.

But notice something about the hieroglyphs which show their names:

The glyphs in the upper left of this detail are Atum’s name, spelled tm in Middle Egyptian², from the word “complete, finished”, showing his perfection as the one present at the beginning and end of all things.

The glyphs in the lower right, however, are the name of the enemy. Notice how even its name is “restrained”, with Atum’s staff going across the last glyph as though to erase it. The name is spelled, in Middle Egyptian, ꜥꜣpp. It is often simply written in English letters as Apep.³

That paragraph and footnote are the last time you’ll see it written coherently form me (in any alphabet). I’ve seen Kemetic folks write it in several ways to avoid giving its name in a cohrerent form; remember, to the Egyptians, when you say something’s name, you give it a little bit of existence and power.

A/pep (to show that its head has been cut off)
A/p/e/p (to show that it has been hacked into pieces)
a/pep, a/p/e/p (removing the capital letter, to say it doesn’t even deserve to be recognized as a proper noun)
various euphemisms such as “the uncreated”, “the nonexistent”

These may be reminiscent of the way Jewish people omit one of the letters in writing the name of the Supreme Being, except it’s for the opposite reason: the Jewish practice is to show reverence, while the Kemetic practice is to render the name harmless and impotent.

If you look at the photo of a/pep being restrained by Atum above, you’ll note there’s a few places in the snake’s coils where the painting appears to be defaced. I cannot say this for certain, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the painting was made and then intentionally defaced, as if to say “Yes, a/pep exists, but he’s also been mortally wounded.”

So there you have it: we’ve identified the enemy. Entropy, that which constantly “consumes” the universe, has an Egyptian name and image.

Notes

The Egyptians of King Tut’s time likely pronounced it somewhere between “a saw fa” and “a sofa”, but the sort of standardized Egyptological way of saying it sounds rather like if one were to say “is Fett”, speaking of the Star Wars characters with that name.
In Middle Egyptian, probably pronounced “ya-TA-moo”. Egyptologists today usually pronounce it like “a tune”, but with an -M at the end instead of an -N.
We’re actually not sure how it was pronounced in the Old or Middle Kingdoms: we can’t even reconstruct several of the vowels. We do know how it was written and pronounced by the Coptic period. The Copts spelled it aphoph and it was pronounced, at least at one point, “ah pope”. The Greeks called it Apophis, which was eventually pronounced “ah PAW fiss”.