Anubis
Anubis (Anpu) In Egyptian mythology, Greek name for the jackal-headed god of the dead, called Anpu by the Egyptians. Although the jackal was known to prowl the ancient cemeteries as a scavenger, the early Egyptians turned him into a god who protected rather than pillaged tombs. According to one myth, Anubis was the son of the goddess Nephthys, who had tricked her brother, the god Osiris, into adulterously sleeping with her. Nephthys abandoned Anubis at birth, and he was found and raised by Osiris’s sister-wife, the goddess Isis. He accompanied Osiris on his conquest of the world, and when Osiris was murdered and dismembered, Anubis helped find his body and then embalmed it so well it resisted the influences of time and decay. Thus, it was said, the burial rites were invented. In another story, the wicked god Seth, disguised as a leopard, approached the body of Osiris. Anubis seized him and branded him all over with a hot iron. According to this myth, this is how the leopard got its spots.
Subsequently, Anubis presided over funerals and guided the dead through the underworld into the kingdom of Osiris. In his function as guide of the dead he assimilated the character of the earlier Egyptian god Wepwawet (he who opens the ways). Anubis’s cult continued during Greek and Roman times. According to Plutarch, the Egyptian jackal god was common to both the celestial and infernal regions. This dual role was reinforced in Roman times by Apuleius’s Latin novel The Golden Ass (book 11), which describes a procession of the goddess Isis in which Anubis appears with his dog’s head and neck, a “messenger between heaven and hell, displaying alternately a face black as night and golden as day.”
SOURCE:
Encyclopedia of World Mythology and Legend, Third Edition – Written by Anthony S. Mercatante & James R. Dow-Copyright © 2009 by Anthony S. Mercatante
