Hapy
- Not to be confused with Hapi, the Nile River god
Hapy (in ancient Egyptian: ḥpy) is one of the four sons of Horus, along with Imsety, Duamutef, and Qebehsenuef.
Hapy has the head of a baboon. In a funerary context, he was responsible for protecting the lungs of mummified people. As ruler of one of the four cardinal directions, Hapy was associated with the north.
He is ruled over by the Egyptian goddess Nephthys.
Name
Egyptologist James P. Allen translates Hapy's name as "He of Haste."
The name of Hapy may have originally incorporated the Egyptian grammatical dual ending (-ty or -wy), using an additional w that was later lost. For this reason, the Egyptologist John Taylor argues that Imsety and Hapy were originally two male and female pairs of deities.
Canopic jar
Canopic jars were containers used by the ancient Egyptians during the mummification process, to store and preserve the viscera of their soul for the afterlife. Each of Horus's sons were responsible for protecting a particular organ, was himself protected by a companion goddess, and represented a cardinal direction.
Hapy protected the lungs, which were extracted from the body, mummified separately, and placed inside his jar. In some later tombs, these jars were merely symbolic and did not contain the actual organs.
Role
Although Hapy is most prominently found in funerary context as a canopic jar, he is possibly more closely associated with the Egyptian decans. Dutch Egyptologist Maarten Raven argues that the four sons originated as celestial deities, given that the Pyramid Texts frequently connect them with the sky and that Horus himself was a sky deity.
All four sons of Horus are connected with specific decans, ruling over them in some capacity, although the precise nature of their connection is not presently understood by scholars.
According to Cult of the Stars by occultist Travis McHenry, Hapy rules over the following decans:
Geographically, both Hapy and Duamutef were linked with the Lower Egyptian city of Buto.
In an exceptional portrayal, in the wall decoration in WV23, the tomb of Ay from the late Eighteenth Dynasty, the four sons are portrayed as fully human, with Imsety and Hapy wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt.