Illustration by Patrick Hambrecht
By
Professor Jason Gildow
Apep was the Epyptian god of evil, an immense snake who nightly attempts
to devour the sun, only to be defeated at dawn eternally, until the last dawn.
The last dawn of the Egyptians is described in Plate Ten of the Papyri of Ani,
the Egyptian Book of the Dead. This same plate of the Papyri contains a hymn to
Apep, a curious anomoly when one considers that Apep is incarnate evil and
hymns are reserved for the praise of kindly deities. The juxtaposition of the
Egyptian Apocalypse with the only extant hymn to Apep is not coincidental. The
two are commentaries upon each other, and they reveal the vestigial remains of
a Snake-Sun cult that is older than the Egyptian Old Kingdom.
The hymn to Apep in Plate Ten of the Papyri of Ani describes Apep as
having one head that is Horus and another that is Maat. After this assertion
there follows the statement that Horus also has two heads, one that is Maat and
another that is wickedness. Ani combines these two statements by explaining
that Truth follows wickedness, and the workers of good and evil follow these
Ideals in an endless cycle within the symbol of the two-headed god that is both
Apep and Horus. The end of this hymn is the declaration that Horus is the god
of the region and that Thoth is working in the name of Horus to defend the
faithful from the growing armies of the "Slaughtering Knives" that
represent the onslaught of the final dawn that Ani is prophecizing. The
remainder of the narrative in Plate Ten details the conflict and
conflagarations of the end times in which Osiris returns.
The symbol of the composite god that is both Apep and Horus and is
beyond the dualistic conflicts of good and evil is a representation of the sun
as a snake, an image of the brightness of the sun casting at tracer tail of its
path through the sky like a slinking cosmic snake. The paths and courses of the
sun, moon and stars were the basis of early Egyptian religion, and the symbol
of the sun as a giant burning serpent blazing above the earth was most likely
the most ancient of Egyptian worship.
This ancient cult of Apep was amalgamated with countless subsequent
cults in Egypt that separated the entities of the sun and snake, and then
further distinguished one as good and one as evil. The downward mythic
displacement of Apep from a central creative deity to the incarnate evil of the
pantheon eradicated the cult of Apep which had grown very ancient and had lost
most of its political power. By the time of the Theban Age when Ani wrote his
Papyri, Apep had become associated with the slaughterer of the sun. hut in
homage to his literary antecedents Ani inserted a brief fragment of the Apep
cult tradition by showing that the sun and snake are but two heads of one deity
that is central to the pantheon.
The clerical Apep tradition in Egyptian is not readily seen beyond this
section of Ani, but its influence in Greek mythology is quite profound. The
name Apep translates as "destroyer," and the original Sun-Snake god
must have been envisioned as a destroyer of his enemies, the precise phrase
that is used in Plate Ten of the Papyri, but the meaning of his name was
convoluted over time to indicate that he was a destroyer of goodness. The name
of Apollo in Greek also translates as "destroyer," and another Greek
name based on this same word is Apollyon, the destroyer from the pit in
Revelation 9:11. These names are all the same, and the indicate different
versions of the same basic character.-
Apollo is called a destroyer because he gained his powers of prophecy
through the destruction of the ancient Python who ruled Delphi. In Greek
mythology. Python is always cast as a non-intelligent monster, yet he is the
ancient protector and god of the Pythoi, the oracles of Delphi, who eternally
kept the title of "Pythoness."
Here is the remainder of the Egyptian Apep cult in ancient Greece where
it was transplanted in a very early age, most likely at the time when Apep's
cult was on the decline in Egypt. Apollo was a regional Greek deity who
overcame and gained the mythic heritage of the ancient Eyptian Python, but he
took on the form of the Python and even its name, because "Apollo" is
a Greek translation of "Apep." As Ovid shows us in ^Metamorphoses,
Apollo is also the Greek version of Horus, and this equation turns us back to
Ani where he demonstrates that Horus and Apep are but two heads of the same
Sun-Serpent.
The final two Greek incarnations of Apep are Apophis and Apollyon.
Apophis is a generic terrible destroyer in the Olympian mythos, and Apollyon is
the same character but in the Christian setting of the Revelation of St. John.
These characters are a synthesis of Horus and Apep because they are more human
than serpentine, but still they represent terrible destructive powers. The
connection between Apollyon and the Armageddon is the same as Apep and the end
times described in Plate Ten of the Papyri. The confusion between the serpent
as the slayer of the sun and the serpent as the sun itself is an ancient
dilemma, but all of these diverse threads of the same tradition originate from
one primordial cult of the Sun-Serpent, by whatever name he was originally
called.