Mythology

Khepri was the form of the sun god which represented the solar disk rising on the eastern horizon. As such he was one of the three forms or aspects of the solar deity who was ‘Khepri in the morning, Re at midday and Atum in the evening’, though it is impossible to know whether the god originally functioned in this carefully delineated role or whether he was accorded the position when, at some point, he was fused into the Heliopolitan cult of the sun. The name of the god in its earliest known occurrences, kkeprer, is simply that of the scarab or dung beetle {Scarabaeus sacer) which the Egyptians visualized as a symbol of the god due to the beetle’s habit of rolling a ball of mud or dung along the ground in. a manner suggestive of the god pushing the solar disk across the sky. The female scarab beetle also lays her eggs in a similar ball from which the young eventually emerge as though spontaneously. The biology of the insect thus seems to underlie the name of the god as Khepri suggests the Egyptian verb kheper. ‘develop’ or ‘come into being’. As the ‘developing one’ Khepri was the god of the first sunrise at the dawn of creation, and was thus linked with Atum as Atum-Khepri. To some extent Khepri also represented the sun in a general way and he could be linked with the solar god Re, though his identity as the morning sun remained primary and his essential mythological role was that of raising the sun from the horizon into the body of the sky goddess Nut. The god could therefore be said to be swallowed by Nut each evening and to travel through her body in the night hours to be reborn each morning. As a god who was constantly reborn Khepri was also directly associated with the concept of resurrection. In this regard it has been suggested that the underground tunnels of the insect take the same form as the vertical shaft and horizontal passage found in Old Kingdom mastaba tombs, and that the pupae of the insect resemble the bandaged mumm' of the deceased, though there is no indication that the Egyptians themselves recognized such similarities, for these types of embellishments to the lore of the scarab were recorded by Classical writers such as Plutarch and Horapollo.