Shezmu

The press groans, and what runs out of it is red.

At the grape harvest the sound is ordinary enough. Bare feet in the vat, the sticky give of split skins, the sweet fermenting reek climbing the estate walls, young men steadying themselves on ropes slung from the roof beams while they tread. Juice slides warm into the catch basin. Elsewhere in the same imagination another press is working, fed with something other than fruit, and the god who owns both machines does not appear to distinguish between them by temperament. He is doing one job in two directions.

Egyptologists call him the Wine-Press God, for want of anything shorter. Shezmu entered the written record around 2350 BCE, in the Pyramid Texts carved into the burial chambers of the late Fifth Dynasty, and he was still on the walls of Ptolemaic temples at Edfu and Dendera more than two thousand years later, which makes him one of the longest-serving minor gods in Egypt. His name travels with the sign of a press. Often the press alone was enough to write him.

His two natures were given two bodies. Making ointment he wears a lion’s head and carries the title lord of the laboratory, and on the east staircase at Dendera he stands in that form with jars of scented oil in his hands. A few paces away on the same wall he appears human-headed, carrying cuts of meat, and the label beside him runs to a small catalogue of violence: lord of the slaughterhouse of Horus, chief of the slaughterblock, who hacks up the oryx, wild of countenance, who overthrows enemies, mighty in his arm, who strikes down the rebel. In the earliest texts the knife is never far from his hand.

The Cannibal Hymn, utterances 273 and 274 of the Pyramid Texts, is where he does his most notorious work. The dead king rises as a hunter of gods. He lassoes them, and Khonsu cuts the throats of the great ones, and Shezmu joints the carcasses and sets them cooking so that the king may swallow their magic and their spirits and go into the sky carrying everything they had. The cauldron does the theology. Whatever divine power those gods held is rendered down, transferred, absorbed with the meal. The king eats the gods. That is the whole of it.

He is not only the butcher there. In another Pyramid Text the king likens his own crossing of the waters to that of Shezmu in his oil-press bark, a comparison that seems to mean he intends to crush whatever gets in his way. In a third the god brings grape juice to the dead king in his identity as Osiris, which is the friendlier half of the same relationship. Back in the world of the living, a harvest scene in the Saqqara mastaba of Ptahhotep shows youths throwing darts at some target now lost to us, and the caption calls the game shooting for Shesmu.

The Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom put him at the worst place in the underworld. Among the hazards the dead must talk their way past are nets and fish traps worked by netherworld fishermen, and the trick to escaping them is knowing the names of everything involved, down to the tackle. Shezmu is there with his knife and his cauldron, gutting and boiling what the nets bring up, and what the nets bring up is souls. One spell has the dead man save himself by naming the pot: it is the cauldron in the hand of Shezmu. The goddess of the beautiful West offers, as one of the sights of her country, Shezmu with his knives in his shape of Slaughterer. Elsewhere in the same corpus he is running an ordinary slaughterhouse and handing out the dead man’s rightful portion of meat, exactly as an estate steward would on earth, and one spell simply declares, my heart is Shezmu. The underworld runs a closed economy. Somebody eats, and therefore somebody is eaten, and he stands at the point where the two facts meet.

The image kept its force for a very long time. On a papyrus of the Twenty-first Dynasty his wine press appears loaded not with grapes but with human heads.

The other half of him never went away either, and in the end it won. On the Twenty-sixth Dynasty sarcophagus of the Divine Adoratrice Ankhnesneferibre he is recorded as the maker of fine oil for Ra. By the Greco-Roman period the manufacture of the best perfumes and unguents for the gods had become his principal business, and his name belongs to the temple laboratories where the recipes were kept. He also stood guard at the twelfth hour of the night at Edfu, Dendera and Philae, the hour before sunrise, and the Edfu text known as the Book of the Protection of the Body invokes him among its protectors as the one who overthrows his enemies. A god who spends his working life with knives is a useful thing to have on the door.

His powers all descend from the same instrument. He renders, extracts and separates: oil from seed, juice from fruit, magic from a god’s body, a soul from whatever it hoped to keep. He supplies, which is the same act seen from the receiving end, and he protects, because a butcher among demons is a demon’s problem. There is a proposal, impossible to settle, that the blood in his titles was always red wine, since the Egyptians poured it as the blood of the gods and the colour did the rest.

What he does not have is a life. No birth story, no consort, no cycle of adventures, no quarrel of his own with anyone. He works for the king, for Osiris, for Ra, for Horus, for whoever holds the offering list, and outside the moment when the press comes down he barely exists. His cult centre lay in the Fayum, and later shrines went up at Edfu and Dendera, but no myth belongs to him. He is a function that acquired a face, and then a second face when the first one proved too frightening to keep in the perfume workshop.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Shezmu in Egyptian mythology?

Shezmu is the ancient Egyptian god of the press, responsible both for the oils, perfumes and wine used in the cults of the gods and for the slaughter and dismemberment of gods and the condemned dead. He is often called the Wine-Press God because his name is written with the sign of a press. He was worshipped from the Old Kingdom until the Greco-Roman period.

Why is Shezmu associated with both wine and blood?

Shezmu operated the press, and the press produced both grape juice and, in the afterlife texts, the crushed remains of the damned. The Egyptians also poured red wine as the blood of the gods, so the two substances shared a symbolism, and it has never been settled how literally the blood in Shezmu’s titles was meant.

What does Shezmu do in the Cannibal Hymn?

In utterances 273 and 274 of the Pyramid Texts, the dead king hunts and eats the gods to take their power. Shezmu is the one who butchers the slain gods and cooks them in his cauldron so the king can consume their magic and their spirits. It is his oldest recorded role.

What did Shezmu look like?

Shezmu was shown as a man with a lion’s head holding a butcher’s knife, and in later periods as a lion. Egyptian artists used the two forms deliberately: he is lion-headed as the perfumer, called lord of the laboratory, and human-headed as the butcher of the slaughterhouse. He was rarely depicted at all, and his name is often written with an oil press instead.

Where was Shezmu worshipped?

Shezmu’s main cult centre was in the Fayum, with later shrines at Edfu and Dendera. His figure and titles survive on the east staircase at Dendera and in the temple of Horus at Edfu, where he also guards the twelfth hour of the night, a role he holds at Philae as well.

Related Entries

Osiris, Ra, Horus, Anubis, Atum, Hathor, Maat, Set, Sekhmet, Babi, Apep/Apophis, Mafdet, Dionysus