Gate Deities | Egyptian Gods Groupings

Knife-wielding demons seated before "gates" of the underworld. According to the New Kingdom Book of Gates,
the Book of the Dead, and other texts, each underworld portal was guarded by at least one such demon.
Tomb of Sennedjem. Deir el-Medina. Western Thebes.

The Egyptian conception of the underworld included many gates, portals or pylons which must be passed by the sun god on his nightly journey, by the deceased king as part of the sun god's entourage (or fused with the god), and by the deceased who must pass these barriers in order to reach the place of afterlife existence. Different versions or accounts of the netherworld gates were preserved in the various funerary texts with over 1,000 deities depicted, but in all cases the barriers were guarded by minor Egyptian gods who would allow only those who knew their secret names - and thereby had power over them - to pass.

On the walls of the royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings twelve pylons or gates were commonly incorporated into the funerary texts - such as versions of the Book of Gates - inscribed during the New Kingdom. Although each gate was depicted as an architectural feature, it was named as a goddess and protected by a fire-spitting serpent and by its own guardian deity. The fifth gate, for example, is termed "she of duration", its serpent is called "flame-eyed" and its resident deity is "true of heart". In the funerary papyri composed for nobles and others there is more variation. In Chapter 144 of the Book of the Dead, for example, seven gates are mentioned, each with its own god, a doorkeeper and a herald. Thus the seventh gate is watched by the god "sharpest of them all", the doorkeeper "strident of voice" and the herald "rejector of rebels". In other texts there are 21 gates known as the "secret portals of the mansion of Osiris in the field of reeds", each of which is given a number of names or epithets and guarded by a zoo-anthropomorphic deity usually seated and holding a large knife. The names of the gates are mixed in nature, being sometimes fearsome and sometimes innocuous as with Gate 14 "mistress of anger, dancing on blood" or Gate 3 "mistress of the altar". The guardian deities are usually given terrifying or repulsive names such as "swallower of sinners" or "existing on maggots" in order to heighten their threatening effect - although in some cases they are unnamed in the texts, adding to the number of Egyptian deities known to have exited but impossible to catalogue.

The following shows the 12 gates as depicted in the royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings:

Gate     -     Representative Deities     -     Features of the area
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1 - The gods in the entrance, the 4 weary ones - 4 cardinal points
2 - Apophis, 2 enneads  -  Lake of fire
3 - Goddesses of the hours, Osiris, Horus  -  Lake of life, lake of uraei
4 - Gods of space and time, Osiris - Throne of Osiris
5 - Osiris, Apophis, 12 restraining gods - Circular lake of fire
6 - Osiris, the blessed and punished dead -  Stakes of Geb
7 - Lords of provision in the West - Fields of provisions
8 - Fire-breathing serpent, sons of Horus, ba souls - Waters of the drowned
9 - Deities with nets, Apophis - Area leading to "emergence"
10 - Apophis, face of Ra, goddesses of the hours - Area of restraint of Apophis
11 - Gods who carry the blazing light, baboons of sunrise - Area directly before dawn
12 - Isis, Nephthys, Nun, Nut, the reborn sun - The primeval waters from which the sun emerges

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