WEPWAWET — THE WOLF WHO OPENS THE WAY
Egypt sent a wolf in front of everything that mattered.
Before the army marched, the wolf’s standard went ahead of it. Before the god’s boat sailed to Abydos, the wolf cleared the river. Before the dead man entered the next world, a wolf was asked to open the road. His name says exactly what he did: Wepwawet, the Opener of the Ways.
THE OPENER OF THE WAYS
The name comes from a word meaning “to open,” and the Egyptians used it literally. Wepwawet was the god who went first. Wherever there was a path that might be blocked, by an enemy, by a gate, by death, he was the one asked to clear it.
He is shown as a man with the head of a wolf, standing, often carrying a mace or a bow. Some of his images give him grey or white fur, which makes him easy to tell from his southern cousin Anubis, the black jackal. Sometimes he appears simply as a canine on a standard, a pole carried at the head of a procession, with no body at all.
He was not a gentle guide. He was a war god. The road he opened was the road a fighting man needs.
THE WOLF AT THE HEAD OF THE ARMY
The oldest pictures of Egyptian kingship already put him in front. On the Narmer Palette, made around 3100 BC to celebrate the unification of the Two Lands, a row of standards is carried before the king. One of them, a canine on a pole, is generally read as Wepwawet. He leads the king’s procession before the first dynasty has even been named.
The same idea runs through the New Kingdom. Egyptian armies marched with divine standards at their head, and Wepwawet’s was one of them. Kings of the period describe him as the god who goes before them into battle and opens the way through the enemy’s ranks. A wolf at the front of an army is an old idea. Egypt made it a god.
THE CITY OF WOLVES
His home was Asyut, in Middle Egypt, where the cliffs of the western desert come close to the river. The Egyptians called the city Zawty. The Greeks, who arrived later and saw a wolf god everywhere they looked, called it Lycopolis: the City of Wolves. The name stuck for more than a thousand years.
The hills behind Asyut are full of tombs, and in them archaeologists have found a vast number of mummified canids, offerings to the god. For a long time they were called jackals. In recent years, genetic studies have shown that the animal the Egyptians knew as the golden jackal is a separate African species, now called the African golden wolf. So the Greeks were right. The god of Asyut was a wolf.
THE ROAD TO ABYDOS
Every year Egypt held a festival at Abydos in honour of Osiris, the murdered king whose tomb was believed to be there. At the heart of it was a procession: the god’s sacred boat carried out of the temple, across the desert to the place of his burial. And at the head of that procession went Wepwawet.
A Middle Kingdom official named Ikhernofret, sent by King Senusret III to renew the Abydos festival, left a stela describing what he did. He says he celebrated the Procession of Wepwawet, when the god goes out to fight for his father Osiris, and that he drove back the enemies of the sacred boat. The wolf was not only guiding the procession. He was clearing it by force.
It is a memorable picture. A murdered god’s boat crosses the desert, and in front of it a wolf with a mace makes sure nothing stands in the road.
THE ROAD THROUGH THE DUAT
The last road was the one the dead had to walk. In the Pyramid Texts, the earliest religious writing we have from Egypt, the dead king is led by those who know the way. Wepwawet is among them, asked to open the paths of the sky for the king as he climbs toward the stars.
In later periods the dead of every rank called on him. He was the one who went ahead into the dark, into the gates and the hours and the guardians of the Duat, and made the road passable. Later he and Anubis were increasingly merged, the guide of the dead in both of their forms, but Wepwawet kept something Anubis did not: the weapon in his hand.
WHAT THE DESIGN CARRIES
The back print is the warrior. A wolf-headed figure in ivory ink, bare-chested and heavily muscled, a gold-tipped mace laid across his shoulder, gold bands on his wrist, the dark red of the cloth at his waist. Behind him is a huge ochre sun, brushed on in rough strokes. He is not rushing. He is walking ahead, and the sun is behind him, as it was behind every road in Egypt.
The front is his mask reduced to a mark: two tall ears in sand-gold brushwork, two small white eyes, a thin dark-red line running down the centre like a path. Seen from the front, you are looking at what comes first. Seen from behind, you are looking at who is walking ahead.
WHAT WEPWAWET ACTUALLY MEANS
Most of Egypt’s gods ruled something: a river, a sky, a season. Wepwawet ruled a direction. He is the idea that there is a way, that it can be blocked, and that somebody has to go first and open it.
That is not a small thing. Every journey worth making has a stretch where the road is not yet there. The Egyptians’ answer was a wolf at the front with a weapon in his hand, who walked ahead so that others could follow. Whatever you are walking into, someone had to open it first, and the Egyptians made that someone a god.
THE NEOLITHIC CONNECTION
Wepwawet walks in front of the rest of our Egypt Mythos collection. Lighter Than The Feather carries the judgment at the end of the road, and The Seventh Hour carries the night crossing, where the way has to be cleared by force. Guardian of Venom carries Serqet, who guarded the dead on the same road, and Sobek — Lord of the Nile carries the river that was the road of the living.
The stories are here too: Anubis and the weighing of the heart, Ra and Apep, Meretseger, Khnum and the Nile.
— Neolithic Store