Sacred Texts: Ancient Egypt

The Book of Gates: The Book of Gates: Chapter XII. The Gate of Sethu. The Tenth Division of the Tuat.

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This is a scholarly description and translation of the Tenth Division of the Tuat, the ancient Egyptian underworld through which the sun god Ra journeys each night — drawn from what appears to be a commentary on the Amduat (or Book of What Is in the Underworld), a funerary text tradition concerned with Ra's nightly passage and rebirth. The text catalogs in exhaustive detail the gate guardians, processions, and divine figures Ra encounters: from the serpent Sethu who guards the entrance to the composite deity Horus-Set who strides over the twin bows of the Uraei, to the Star-gods who carry the "Face of the Disk" and the goddesses who cry out in greeting. The central dramatic action of this Division is the binding and suppression of the chaos serpent Apep, whose vast body is chained and restrained by sixteen male figures, the four sons of Horus, and various armed gods, so that Ra's boat may pass safely onward. Each figure and group is accompanied by translated speech — proclamations, hymns, and commands — that together frame Ra's journey not merely as physical movement but as a cosmological act of light triumphing over darkness, with each divine actor playing a precise ritual role in ensuring solar rebirth. The text is distinctively encyclopedic and processional in character, reading less as narrative and more as an annotated ceremonial register, and it is notable for the layered symbolic logic it reveals: gods embody astronomical phenomena (stars, hours, the celestial river), and the restraint of Apep is explicitly linked to Ra's capacity to illumine the hidden world and rise again at the eastern horizon.

The Book of Gates: The Book of Gates: Chapter XII. The Gate of Sethu. The Tenth Division of the Tuat.

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