Anubis

Anubis (Inpu in Egyptian) is one of the oldest funerary deities of the Egyptian pantheon, and his parentage varies according to the source and the period. In the Pyramid Texts (Old Kingdom) he figures as a primordial funerary deity and son of Ra. The Coffin Texts (Middle Kingdom) present him as son of the cow goddess Hesat or the feline Bastet. The well-known parentage that makes him son of Osiris and Nephthys belongs to the late Greco-Roman tradition, systematized by Plutarch in his work De Iside et Osiride: according to this account, Nephthys conceived him from Osiris and, fearing her husband Set, abandoned the newborn; Isis found him, raised him and took him as guardian and ally, thus being his adoptive mother and never his biological progenitor. In variants of this same tradition, Set (husband of Nephthys) figures as father. From his earliest appearances, Anubis is linked with royalty, the protection of the necropolis and the rites that shield the deceased against the forces of chaos in the underworld.

Anubis guides the souls through the Duat and presides over the weighing of the heart, the central scene of the judgment of the dead according to the Book of the Dead (Spell 125). Before Osiris, he places the heart of the deceased on one pan of the scale and the feather of Maat, symbol of truth and cosmic order, on the other. If the heart proves lighter than or equal to the feather, the deceased is declared righteous and gains access to the realm of Osiris; if it weighs more, Ammit, the Devourer, consumes it. As protector against the predators of the underworld, Anubis guarantees the integrity of the process and justice in the transition to eternal life, preserving cosmic balance.

Anubis is the patron of embalming and mummification. According to the Osirian myth, after the murder of Osiris at the hands of Set, Anubis embalmed his body together with Isis and Nephthys, performing the first mummification and restoring wholeness to the dismembered god. This act made him the divine model of the embalmers: the priests who directed the mummification wore a jackal mask to embody the god during the ritual. He is credited with mastery of the techniques that preserve the body for eternity, an indispensable condition for the survival of the deceased in the afterlife.

Anubis is depicted as a man with the head of a black jackal, or as a jackal couchant on a shrine, with the flail resting in the crook of his arm. The black does not refer to the animal's coat, which is not black: it evokes the dark, fertile earth the Nile laid down in its floods, and also the colour a body takes on after treatment with natron. Anubis's black therefore means regeneration and rebirth, not death.

His own emblem is the imiut: a headless animal skin tied to a pole and set in a jar. It appears in burials from the Old Kingdom onwards and belongs to no other god, unlike the was-sceptre and the ankh, which accompany almost the whole pantheon. The imiut is hard to look at and hard to explain, and it is precisely the symbol that sets him apart.