Mehen

Mehen, "the Coiled One," is the protective serpent god of ancient Egypt who wraps his coils around the sun god Ra as he travels through the underworld each night, guarding him against the chaos serpent Apep.

The Story

In Egyptian belief, the sun did not simply set. Each night the sun god Ra entered the Duat, the underworld, and sailed through its twelve hours toward rebirth at dawn. The journey was dangerous, above all because of the chaos serpent Apep. Ra did not travel unprotected. Wrapped around him in the cabin of the sun boat was another serpent, Mehen, whose name means "the Coiled One."

Mehen is a rare example of a giant serpent on the side of order. Where Apep threatens to swallow the sun, Mehen surrounds and shelters it, forming a living shrine of coils. In the royal underworld books of the New Kingdom, such as the Amduat and the Book of Gates, Ra is shown as a ram-headed figure standing inside Mehen's coils as the boat passes through the darkness.

Appearance and Powers

Mehen is drawn as a huge snake bent into loops or arched over the sun god like a canopy. His power is protective: the coil is a barrier that chaos cannot cross. In the Coffin Texts, spells written inside Middle Kingdom coffins around 2000 BCE, the dead hope to join Ra inside Mehen's protection and share in the sun's daily rebirth.

Origins and Sources

Mehen is also the name of one of the world's oldest known board games. Mehen boards, carved as a snake coiled into a spiral with its head at the center, have been found in Egyptian burials from around 3000 BCE, and the game is shown and labeled in the tomb of the official Hesy-Re from the Third Dynasty. Players moved lion-shaped pieces and marbles along the coils. The game fell out of use in Egypt after the Old Kingdom but survived longer elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. The Egyptologist Peter Piccione has argued that the game and the god were connected, and that the journey along the coils toward the center reflected the soul's passage through Mehen to rebirth.

Legacy

Mehen is far less famous than his enemy Apep, but he shows that Egyptian serpents were not all evil. Like the cobra goddess Wadjet on the pharaoh's crown, he is a protector. His coiled form also belongs to the same world of ideas as the Ouroboros, whose oldest known image appears on a shrine of Tutankhamun among the underworld texts that also feature the sun's serpent guardians. For other Egyptian serpents, see Apep.

Related

• Apep: Apep, called Apophis by the Greeks, is the giant serpent of chaos in ancient Egyptian religion who attacks the sun god Ra's boat every night in the underworld and must be defeated again each day.
• Ouroboros: The Ouroboros is a serpent or dragon eating its own tail, a symbol of eternity and endless cycles first found in ancient Egypt and later central to Greek alchemy and Western esoteric art.
• Nāga: Nāgas are serpent beings of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain tradition, often cobras or half-human figures with cobra hoods, who live in underwater or underground kingdoms, guard treasure, and control rain and water.
• Aido Hwedo: Aido Hwedo is the rainbow serpent of Fon religion in Benin, who carried the creator Mawu as the world was made and now lies coiled beneath the earth, holding it together.
• Famous Dragons
• Ouroboros
• The History of Dragons

Sources and Further Reading

• Peter A. Piccione, "Mehen, Mysteries, and Resurrection from the Coiled Serpent," Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 27 (1990)
• Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, trans. David Lorton (Cornell University Press, 1999)
• Geraldine Pinch, Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt (Oxford University Press, 2004)

Cite this entry: “Mehen,” Draconika Encyclopedia of Dragons, https://www.draconika.com/dragons/mehen.