Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained. In today’s video,
we’re going to discuss Apophis, the chaos serpent, the baleful bane of life itself,
the most powerful monster in all of Egyptian mythology.
So great was his power that it took the combined strength of many gods to overcome him, and so
great was the threat he posed that his victory would unleash absolute destruction, bringing
about the end of the Egyptian gods and, more broadly, of the universe itself, returning every
mote of matter and particle of energy back to the infinite chaos from whence everything first came.
Alright, let’s get into it.
There’s a strong argument to be made for Apophis being the most powerful monster
in all of Mythology. By comparison to him, the odious objectives and appalling aspirations of
other monsters are provincial. When we talk about the most powerful monsters, we’re talking about
monsters who have either killed gods or who, at least, have god-killing power. For these paragons
of destruction, the goal is to wreak havoc, functioning as forces of nature, compelled to
destroy as natural disasters are compelled to destroy. The same is true for Apophis,
but to a much greater extent. Where other monsters endeavor to simply kill gods or to become the new
king or queen of the cosmos, Apophis endeavors to unravel the very fabric of reality. He isn’t
out for blood or for a crown but to disintegrate creation, unmaking it and returning its elements
back to the waters of nun, the ancient Egyptian conceptualization of chaos, a boundless body of
water in which all of the potential for creation exists in an undifferentiated state of primordial
homogeneity. Capturing this, the world sliding back into chaos, is the image of a sandcastle
that’s buffeted by waves and eventually returned to the sea by the rising tide.
Apophis was depicted as a great serpent and sometimes as a colossal crocodile. He was
an incarnation of disorder and destruction - the supreme incarnation of disorder and
destruction - and the arch-nemesis of Ra, whom Apophis fought ad nauseam, the two of them meeting
in the underworld each night and battling for the fate of all creation. The eyes of Apophis were
especially perilous, and his terrible roar was said to be deafening, able to resound throughout
the entire underworld. The movement of his body shook the earth, causing earthquakes,
and the hidden sandbanks in the Nile that were so treacherous to ships were equated with his coils.
Medieval dragons are thought to perhaps be modeled after a hybrid representation of Apophis that
conflated both his snake and crocodile forms, and the python, which could unhinge its jaw to
swallow large prey whole, is thought to have been a principal inspiration for Apophis, in terms of
both appearance and action, the latter being to symbolically swallow and destroy the world by
killing Ra. There was a plethora of fierce and frightening phenomena associated with Apophis,
including thunder, earthquakes, darkness, disorder, storms of every kind, and chaos.
Depictions of Apophis varied, sometimes shown as a coiled serpent, but most often
shown under attack by Ra and his supporters. Mau, the divine cat, the guardian of the tree of life,
and one of the manifestations of Ra, was commonly shown, knife in paw, cutting Apophis to pieces.
To understand Apophis is to understand the reason he exists, which is to bring
creation to an end and return everything back to chaos, so to begin unpacking this,
we’re going to begin by looking at how the ancient Egyptians conceptualized chaos;
and to shed light on this, here is a passage from ‘Egyptian Mythology: A guide to the Gods,
Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt’ to get us started:
“Before creation there was a state of chaos that contained the potential for all life.
This inchoate state was imagined as a dark watery domain of unlimited depth
and extent. Elements and qualities of chaos could be personified as gods and goddesses.
Some of these deities had to change or die to begin the creative process. The origin of the
universe was an intellectual problem that came to fascinate the Egyptians. Texts that allude
to the unknowable era before creation define it as the time “before two things had developed.”
The cosmos was not yet divided into pairs of opposites such as earth and sky, light and
darkness, male and female, or life and death. The Egyptians speculated that the primeval substance
was watery and dark and had no form or boundaries. These primeval waters, known as the nu or the nun,
continued to surround the world even after creation and were thought of as the ultimate
source of the Nile. When personified as a deity, Nun could be called the father and mother of the
creator, because the creator was thought of as coming into existence within the nun.”
The undifferentiated elements of chaos were sometimes personified as deities,
as was the case with the Ogdoad, a group of eight primordial deities (four male-female pairs) who
embodied the eight constituents of chaos. As well, creator deities such as Amun and Atum
were sometimes conceptualized, before creation commenced, as snakes swimming the waters of Nun;
and in like manner, so too was Apophis sometimes described or depicted as swimming the waters of
Nun both before the world had risen up from chaos and after the world had slid
back into chaos. Pertaining to this, here is another passage from Egyptian Mythology:
A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and traditions of Ancient Egypt:
“The serpent may have been considered an appropriate form for the spirit of
the creator because of its undivided body or because it periodically renewed itself
by shedding its skin. When creator gods such as Amun or Atum are spoken of as serpents,
they usually represent the positive aspect of chaos as an energy force,
but they had a negative counterpart in the great serpent Apophis.
Apophis represented the destructive aspect of chaos that constantly tried to overwhelm all
individual beings and reduce everything back to its primeval state of “oneness.”
So, even before creation began, the world contained the elements of its own destruction.”
Something that’s always struck me as interesting are the parallels between Norse mythology and
Egyptian mythology - and probably the mythologies of many other civilizations - in how they
integrated the cyclical nature of creation and destruction into the overarching framework of
their respective beliefs. In Norse mythology, Ragnarok is the cataclysmic conflict that brings
about the end of the world; however, rather than being a permanent end, it is the punctuating event
of the current age, the next age subsequently emerging from the remnants of the old.
Similarly, the ancient Egyptians viewed the universe as an incessant sequence of beginnings
and endings, of death and renewal - something like an unbroken series of cosmic breaths,
each inhale raising the world from chaos and each exhale returning the world to chaos. In fact,
the ebb and flow of the Nile, marked by inundation (flooding season) and recession (dry season),
was viewed - and was likely the original inspiration - as a microcosm of the world
emerging from and then diminishing back into the waters of chaos.
Before we continue,
I’m going to quickly underscore the most important points covered thus far:
The waters of nun, a dark and boundless body of water, is how the ancient Egyptians conceptualized
chaos. The world is cyclically risen from chaos and returned to chaos in a perpetual process of
creation and destruction where each creation is followed by a destruction and vice versa;
Apophis is the main manifestation of Isfet, disorder and disharmony, which is the antithesis
of Ma’at, order and harmony. Where gods like Amun and Atum create the world, and where Ra,
the sun incarnate, sustains the world, every fiber of Apophis’ being and every second of
his existence is bent towards destroying the world, returning it to the waters of nun,
back to the undifferentiated chaos from which it once emerged. The world being destroyed,
though, doesn’t usher in a permanent end, instead harbinger to an intermediate period of pure chaos,
the next creation eventually taking place at some future time.
Apophis dwells in the underworld, what the ancient Egyptians called the duat. Every night,
Ra would journey into the underworld, his entry coinciding with the setting and disappearance
of the sun, and every night Ra and Apophis would fight each other in the underworld,
each fight a dramatic duel between order and chaos, between creation and destruction.
The sun, which Ra personified, sustained life, so if Apophis were to defeat Ra,
the main power maintaining the universe would be extinguished, ending life, creation itself, even,
returning everything back to the waters of nun, thus fulfilling Apophis’ all-consuming objective.
The sun arcing across the sky each day was simultaneously seen through two lenses,
as both a physical journey from East to West and as symbolizing Ra’s life cycle, from the newly
born rising sun to the elderly setting sun. Each morning the sun was born from the womb of Nut,
the sky goddess. The dawn sun was a nascent sun, a child. Later in the day, at noon,
the sun reached its zenith, and here, at its peak position and potency, the sun was a mighty falcon.
And finally, the end of the day brought the setting sun, an old man - then twilight,
to dusk, to nothing. The sun as an old man was commonly connected to Atum, the creator,
who was syncretically fused with Ra as Atum-Ra, the great creator and sustainer. Atum being
identified with the setting sun ties into how the ancient Egyptians believed the world would end,
which is that the creator would grow weary in his old age, lose the will to maintain the universe,
and let everything slide back into chaos. (This is something we’ll cover in greater detail later
in the video.) The disappearance of the sun and the falling of night was seen as the death of the
sun - every dusk a death just as every dawn was a birth - and so Ra’s daily arc across the sky gave
way to his nightly journey through the underworld, which was a time of revival, suffusing shadow with
radiant light and shining new life into the denizens who dwelt down in the chthonic dark.
Though the underworld was perilous, riddled with challenges that had to be negotiated and rife
with dangers that had to be conquered, the most difficult and desperate of which was the nightly
confrontation with Apophis, Ra’s nightly journey through the underworld was a time of profound
renewal for him, explaining how the evening sun, old Ra, and the sunset, the symbolic death of Ra,
were followed each day by the rising sun, the symbolic birth of Ra, and the morning son,
young Ra. Most important to facilitating this transformation was Ra’s nightly union with Osiris,
the lord of the underworld, the two of them temporarily fusing to create the syncretic
deity Ra-Osiris. In this way, Ra was the soul that rose each morning to arc across the sky
and grace the land of the living with its light, and Osiris was the body that the soul returned to
each night to be revitalized and restored. Now to explain Ra’s nightly battle against
Apophis, here is a passage from The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt:
“The Solar barque was attacked [each night] by the great serpent whose terrifying roar echoed
throughout the underworld… It was said that each night Apophis hypnotized Ra and the entourage
who sailed with him except for the god Set who resisted the serpent’s deadly stare and repulsed
him with the thrust of a great spear. The serpent was also said to hinder the passage of the solar
barque by means of its coils which are described as ‘sandbanks’, and also by gorging the waters of
the underworld river in order to attempt to strand the barque of Ra. Other deities and the dead
themselves were also involved in the cyclic defeat of the great serpent in the various stories, most
notably in the Book of Gates, by Isis, Neith and Serket and by various deities, some in the form of
monkeys, who successfully capture the monster with magical nets. He is then restrained by deities,
including the earth god Geb and the sons of Horus, and his body cut into pieces - only to
revive the ongoing cycle. In some versions of the myth the sun god was in fact encircled or
swallowed by the serpent who later disgorged him as a metaphor of rebirth and renewal.”
Despite Apophis best efforts, and despite the eventual end of the world being viewed
as an inevitable event, it doesn’t look as though the ancient Egyptians believed that
it would be the terrible power of Apophis that would see the world returned to chaos.
Certainly, he posed a perpetual threat - a dire one, at that - and certainly,
he did possess the power to do so - this evidenced by the multitude of gods working in concert that
were needed to overcome him each night; however, in the end, weariness rather than wickedness is
what unmakes the world: the weariness of the creator, losing the will to sustain life, just
as old man eventually loses the will to cling to life, rather than the wickedness of the destroyer
vanquishing order through the demise of the sun god and thus engendering a return to chaos.
We’re going to wrap the video up by delving into how the ancient Egyptians actually believed
the world would end, and to start off this closing segment, here is yet another passage
from ‘Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt’:
“The end of the world will come about because of quarrels among deities or rebellions by humanity.
The creator will become weary, and the world will return to the dark primeval waters from
which it came.” In Book of the Dead spell 175, Atum complains to Thoth about “the children
of Nut,” a term that can refer to the fourth generation of the Great Ennead [Osiris, Set,
Isis, and Nephthys] or to the gods in general. The children of Nut are accused of making rebellion,
war, and carnage and of dividing up the wholeness of creation. Thoth, who was in charge
of fixing the length of all creatures’ lives, decrees that their years will be cut short.”
According to another account, the story of the shipwrecked sailor, a Middle Kingdom story, nearly
every serpent deity perishes by fire. Of them, none survives save the great serpent, one of the
forms of the creator, and the Eye goddess, also called Maat, the creator’s daughter. The sailor
is warned that when the great serpent departs, the sea will consume the “island of spirit”, an image
that brings to mind the primeval mound, and so, the universe, slipping back into the waters of Nun
This sentiment is echoed in Coffin Texts spell 1130, in which the creator recounts the gifts
he bestowed on humanity, then going on to explain that after ages and ages,
after millions of years have come and gone like the rising and setting of the sun, he and Osiris,
the lord of the underworld, will become one. With this union, these two gods coalesced into one,
the barrier separating life and death will cease to be, bringing about a cataclysm.
And continuing in this vein, in spell 175 from the Book of the Dead, Atum states that,
after millions of years have passed, he will put an end to everything he built, returning
creation itself back to the watery abyss, to the deep dark of the fathomless and ineffable.
Though the world - creation itself, even - is doomed to destruction, a grim fate prophesied
by the creator, made incontrovertible and inevitable by his utterance, this,
as said, will not be a final end, but the most recent end before the next beginning;
for the ancient Egyptian view of time was cyclical: as the world was destined to end,
so was it destined to begin anew, an eternal process of birth and death.
And that’s it for this video. If you enjoy the content,
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