Sebegu (Mercury)

SEH-beg-oo

egyptian: Sbg

Definition

Sebegu (Egyptian Sbg, also written Sbgw, later Sbk) is the Egyptian name for the planet Mercury. Unlike the other planet-names, its meaning is completely unknown — it does not translate into anything. Mercury is the one planet the Egyptians tied to the god Seth, the unruly god of storms and disorder who, in myth, murdered Osiris. So where the three "Horus-planets" carry the name of the falcon-god, Mercury stands apart under Seth.

In Tradition

Egyptologists read Mercury's Seth-link as giving it a shifting, double-edged character. Because Seth was an ominous god, especially in the Late Period, Mercury in certain positions could be read as unfavourable. Many scholars note that Mercury's standing was not fixed: at one time of day it was Seth, at another a neutral "god," which they connect to the planet's habit of switching between the morning and evening sky.

In Practice

A caption attested from Ramesses VI onward calls Mercury "Seth in the evening twilight, a god in the morning twilight." Many scholars draw two readings from it. First, that the Egyptians had recognised Mercury's morning and evening apparitions as one body — a striking insight, since Mercury hugs the Sun and is easy to mistake for two stars. Second, that they treated its dawn-aspect as benign and its dusk-aspect as malign. That unease may show in the art: some images of Seth-Mercury were left unfinished or had the head mutilated, which scholars read as neutralising the god's harmful force, and Mercury could also be drawn as a Horus instead. The planet also has a funerary footprint: Book of the Dead spell 136a sends the deceased "to that stairway of Sebeg." By the Late Period Mercury was associated with Thoth, god of writing and reckoning; Thoth was in turn identified with the Greek Hermes, the strand behind the planet's later Mercury name.

Historical Origin

Mercury as Sbg / Sbgw is attested on the ceilings of Senenmut (TT 353, c. 1473 BCE) and Seti I (KV 17, c. 1290 BCE); the "Seth in the evening twilight" caption dates from Ramesses VI onward (Egyptian Astronomical Texts Vol III, pl. 62). The "stairway of Sebeg" appears in Book of the Dead spell 136a (Allen's OIM Saite Recension, p. 220); the Demotic ostracon Strasbourg D 521 makes Mercury "the star of Thoth." Treated by Quack in Brown (ed.), Interactions of Ancient Astral Science (2018).

Definition

In Tradition

In Practice

Historical Origin

Further Reading