Babi

Also Known As: also Baba, Bꜣbꜣ; Greek Bebon; the name is usually read “bull of the baboons,” meaning chief of the baboons
Region/Culture: North Africa
Mythos: Egyptian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He is the bolt on the double doors of the sky, the eater of entrails at the reckoning of the dead, and the source of the potency that a corpse needs if it intends to go on being a body.
Role in Mythos: He is the unbiddable appetite built into the machinery of the afterlife, useful to any dead person who can harness him and lethal to one who cannot.
Relation to Humans: The dead deal with him in two opposite ways, either warding him off with a formula that names his colours aloud or claiming his body as their own in order to pass the ferry and to copulate in the other world. Among the living he turns up in a medical papyrus as the owner of seventy-seven dogs, which is a compact way of saying that he is the thing that bites you.

Cut into the west wall of the exit corridor in the pyramid of Unas at Saqqara, in small tidy columns that a lamp would have picked out one at a time, a line waits for a dead king to read it. The phallus of Babi is drawn back, and the double doors of heaven open. That sentence is roughly four and a half thousand years old. It still works the way a key works.

Opening the sky was his first recorded job, and it tells you what kind of god the Egyptians thought they were dealing with. Babi is the hamadryas baboon: a heavy male in a silver cape of shoulder fur, with a pink face, a bare rump the colour of an old bruise, and a bark that carries a mile across dry ground before dawn. Egyptians knew the animal properly. They watched the troops come down to the water at first light, watched the big male take the best of everything and keep it by threat alone, and they built a god out of precisely that behaviour. His name reads as “bull of the baboons,” which in practice means the one no other baboon argues with.

The Pyramid Texts are not sentimental about him. In one utterance the king puts him on like a coat and becomes “Lord of the night sky, Bull of the baboons.” In another the speaker only wants him gone: get back, Babi, red of ear and purple of hindquarters. The grievance in that spell is small and entirely in character. He has taken a portion of sacrificial meat that belonged to a goddess, and the remedy on offer is to say his name and his colours out loud and hope he backs off.

By the Middle Kingdom he had spread through the plumbing of the afterlife. A man lies in his coffin at Asyut with the netherworld ferry painted around him on the boards, and the spell will not let him board until he has named every part of the vessel correctly. The mast is Babi. So is the mooring post, so are the oars, so is a good deal of the rigging. Getting the names right is the fare, and a passenger who fumbles them is left on the bank.

The same boat can catch him. Elsewhere in the Coffin Texts the mast belongs to a crew of netherworld fishermen who drag their nets for souls, and the dead man has to work out whether he is riding the boat or being caught by it. This is the pattern with Babi everywhere. He is not on anyone’s side. He is a quantity of raw force lying about in the landscape of the dead, and the spells are instructions for picking him up without losing a hand. One spell charges an amulet so that the owner’s own phallus becomes Babi’s and he can copulate after death. Another states flatly, my protection is Babi. A third, blunter than either, calls itself a spell for becoming Babi in the realm of the dead.

Then there is the hall where the heart goes on the scales. The Book of the Dead has the deceased ask the gods to rescue him from Babi, who lives on the entrails of the elders on the day of the great reckoning. Not the entrails of sinners. The elders, the senior gods, which is a considerably more alarming diet and puts him closer to the four baboons who squat with braziers at the lake of fire than to any tidy notion of divine justice. Elsewhere the same book seats him on the great council at Naref alongside Shu, Re and Osiris, and calls him the first son of Osiris. He judges and he eats, and nothing in the text separates the two functions.

His temper is documented. When the Ennead had been arguing for eighty years over which of Horus or Seth should have the throne of Osiris, and the sun god said again that Horus was still a child, the council of thirty went up like dry grass. Baba turned on Re and told him his shrine stood empty. It was the one thing nobody was allowed to say. Re went into his pavilion, lay down on his back and refused to get up, which is the sun declining to continue, and the gods threw Baba out of the room. It took Hathor standing in her father’s doorway and lifting her dress to startle a laugh out of him and get him upright.

He picked the wrong fight once more and did not survive it. In Papyrus Jumilhac he appears as a red dog with yellow eyes, accusing Thoth of stealing the gods’ offerings. The Ennead throws the charge out for lack of witnesses. Baba keeps repeating it anyway, so Thoth waits until he is asleep, anoints his phallus with a writing reed and lays a spell on it, and the next time Baba takes a partner he swells and cannot withdraw. Thoth then summons the Great and Small Enneads to come and look. Re pronounces him guilty. He is handed to Thoth, who kills him on a sacrificial block, and the papyrus offers the whole episode as the reason a dog is cut for Thoth in ritual. A god was destroyed with a pen.

The living met a smaller, meaner version of him. Papyrus Geneva has Isis warning the child Horus to keep away from Babi, who is out on the land with seventy-seven dogs at his heel. Horus is bitten on the lower leg. His mother treats the wound with a plant called sryw that has been kept in jars standing in the sun, and the same plant is then fed to the dog, which dies while the boy recovers. Stripped of its divine names, that is a prescription for a dog bite with a spell wrapped round it.

His powers all run off the same engine. He unbolts and bolts the sky, he supplies the dead with a working body and the nerve to use it, he protects those who claim him, and he takes his share of the great at the reckoning whether or not anyone has invited him. His limits run off it too. A formula spoken aloud will drive him back. His appetite is his own indictment, since it is the theft of a goddess’s meat that gets him named in a warding spell and a sexual grudge that gets him executed. He talks himself out of the council of the gods in a single sentence, and when he finally does bring a true accusation nobody believes a word of it, because of who he is. Late Greek writers folded him into Seth outright: Plutarch reports that Typhon was called Seth, Bebon and Smu, and that Manetho held Bebon to be Typhon himself, though others made him only one of Typhon’s companions. What the Egyptian texts never do is offer a way to be rid of him. The safest arrangement they could devise was not to escape Babi but to become him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Babi in Egyptian mythology?

Babi, also written Baba, is the Egyptian god of the hamadryas baboon, whose name is usually translated “bull of the baboons,” meaning the dominant male. He appears from the Pyramid Texts onward as the bolt on the doors of the sky, as a devourer at the judgement of the dead, and as the source of sexual potency in the afterlife. The Book of the Dead also calls him the first son of Osiris and seats him on the divine council at Naref.

What does Babi do to the dead?

Babi both threatens the dead and equips them. The Book of the Dead has the deceased beg the gods to rescue him from Babi, who lives on the entrails of the elders on the day of the great reckoning, while the Coffin Texts supply spells for claiming Babi’s protection, for taking his phallus as one’s own, and for becoming Babi outright in the realm of the dead. Which of those two things happens depends entirely on whether the dead person knows the right words.

Why is Babi shown with an erection?

Because the Egyptians built him out of the observed behaviour of male hamadryas baboons, whose sexual display and genital marking are conspicuous. His phallus is the door-bolt of the sky in Pyramid Texts utterance 313, the mast of the netherworld ferry in the Coffin Texts, and the model for the deceased’s own organ in an amulet spell that lets the dead copulate after death.

What happened between Babi and Thoth?

In Papyrus Jumilhac, Babi appears as a red dog with yellow eyes and accuses Thoth before the Ennead of stealing the gods’ offerings, an accusation nobody accepts. Thoth retaliates by anointing the sleeping Babi’s phallus with his writing reed and cursing it, so that Babi swells during intercourse and cannot withdraw. Thoth summons both Enneads to witness his humiliation, Re declares him guilty, and Thoth executes him on a sacrificial block.

Is Babi the same god as Seth?

Not originally, but they were merged late. Babi and Seth share a profile of aggression and untamed sexual force, and by the Roman period Greek writers used the name Bebon for Babi in a Sethian context. Plutarch records that Typhon, the Greek name for Seth, was called Seth, Bebon and Smu, and that Manetho identified Bebon with Typhon himself while others made Bebon merely one of Typhon’s companions.