The Night Voyage: Ra’s Journey Through the Duat

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Every evening, the sun dies.

It sinks into the western horizon, into the body of the sky goddess Nut, into the Duat, the underworld. And every night, the Egyptians said, the sun god must make a perilous journey through the twelve hours of darkness, so that he can be born again at dawn.

The books that tell this journey were painted on the walls of the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings: the Amduat, “that which is in the underworld”, the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns. They are among the most extraordinary religious texts ever created.

Into the Night

At sunset, Ra boards his night barque. His form changes: he becomes ram-headed, a form often called the “flesh” of Ra, the sun in its dying aspect. Gods crew the boat. Sia, divine perception, and Hu, divine utterance, travel with him. Others tow the barque through regions where there is no water.

Hour by hour, the barque passes through regions of the underworld, each with its own gate, its own guardians, its own inhabitants. The blessed dead cry out with joy as the light passes over them and they breathe again for a moment. The damned are punished. Strange beings line the banks: serpents with legs, gods with knives, mummies in their shrines awakening at the sun’s touch.

Apep

Deep in the night waits the enemy: Apep, the immense serpent of chaos, whose coils lie across the path of the barque. Apep has no beginning and no end. He wants to swallow the sun and drown creation in darkness forever.

Each night, the gods fight him. In some versions Set stands at the prow of the barque, spearing the serpent. Isis speaks words of power. Apep is bound, cut, defeated, but never destroyed. He will be there again tomorrow night.

The Union at Midnight

At the deepest point of the night, something extraordinary happens. Ra, the sun, meets Osiris, lord of the dead. The two gods merge. In the tomb of Nefertari a striking image shows a ram-headed mummy with inscriptions: “This is Ra who rests in Osiris” and “This is Osiris who rests in Ra.”

The living sun and the dead god become one. It is the secret of the night: renewal comes from union with what has died.

Rebirth

In the final hours, the sun is renewed. In the twelfth hour of the Amduat, the barque is drawn through the body of a giant serpent, entering at its tail and emerging from its mouth, transformed. Ra emerges as Khepri, the scarab beetle, the god of becoming, pushing the new sun up over the eastern horizon.

Dawn breaks. The world is created again.

Your Night Voyage

Every seeker has made this journey. The descent into darkness. The hours when nothing is clear. The encounter with the serpent of chaos, whether fear, despair, addiction or old patterns that keep returning. And, if we persevere, the mysterious union at midnight, when we meet what has died in us and are renewed by it.

This is the Great Work. The alchemists’ nigredo is the sunset, the twelve hours are the stages of purification, and the rubedo is the dawn. You can explore the first stage in Nigredo in the Desert.

• What hour of the night are you in right now?
• What is your Apep, the chaos that returns again and again?
• What in you has died, that you might rest in it, and be renewed?

Remember that Ra never travelled alone. Gods crewed his barque, towed it, defended it. The night is survivable in good company.

Kristina, writing from Fayoum, described driving back across the desert cliffs “when it was pitch black… now that was an experience”. Sometimes the only way through the night is to trust the journey and keep moving toward the dawn.

A Practice: The Twelve Hours

Ra’s night voyage passes through twelve hours. This journalling practice helps you map your own passage through a dark season.

1. Draw twelve boxes on a page, one for each hour of the night.
2. In the first box, write when your current dark season began, your sunset.
3. In the following boxes, note the stages you have already passed through: shock, grief, confusion, small lights along the way.
4. Mark the box you are in now. Name your Apep, the chaos that keeps returning.
5. In the middle of the page, write what has died in you that you might rest in and learn from, your Osiris.
6. In the final box, describe your dawn: what you sense you will become, your Khepri.

Seeing your darkness as a voyage rather than a dead end can bring enormous relief. The night has a shape. It has companions, guardians and a destination. And as the ancient Egyptians affirmed every morning when the sun rose, the dawn always comes.

Read More on the Blog

• Nigredo in the Desert
• Luxor Temple and the Valley of the Kings