Khepri Tattoo Meaning

The rising sun, becoming, self-creation, and the dawn rolled up out of the earth.

Khepri is the Egyptian god of the rising sun — the scarab-headed deity who rolls the sun up over the horizon at dawn, the morning form of the sun god, whose name means 'to become' and who embodies self-creation, emergence, and the daily rebirth of the sun out of the darkness. To carry Khepri is to carry the rising sun, becoming, and self-creation — the scarab god who rolls the dawn out of the earth, the sun reborn each morning, the divine principle of emergence and the perpetual self-creation of the one who is always coming into being.

In Egyptian mythology Khepri is the morning manifestation of the sun god Ra — the sun in its dawn form, distinct from Re-Horakhty (the midday sun) and Atum (the evening, setting sun). Khepri is depicted as a scarab beetle, or as a man with a scarab for a head, and his great task is to push the sun across the sky just as the dung beetle rolls its ball of dung across the ground: Khepri rolls the rising sun up over the eastern horizon and propels it on its daily journey, the divine dung-beetle pushing the great solar disc through the morning sky.

This striking image arose from the Egyptians' observation of the scarab beetle (Scarabaeus sacer), which rolls a ball of dung across the ground and was seen to emerge, seemingly self-created, from the earth and from the dung balls in which it laid its eggs — young beetles appearing as if born spontaneously from the matter itself. To the Egyptians, the beetle rolling its ball was the perfect earthly image of the sun being rolled across the sky, and the beetle's apparent self-generation from the earth was the perfect image of the self-creating, self-renewing dawn. Khepri is the scarab who rolls up the sun and the dawn out of the earth. The Egyptian Khepri is the scarab who rolls the sun at dawn — the morning manifestation of the sun god Ra (distinct from Re-Horakhty the midday sun and Atum the evening sun), depicted as a scarab beetle or scarab-headed man whose task is to push the rising sun up over the eastern horizon and across the sky just as the dung beetle rolls its ball, an image arising from the Egyptians' observation of the scarab (which rolls its dung-ball and seemed to emerge self-created from the earth and dung-balls), the perfect earthly image of the sun rolled across the sky and the self-generating dawn.

The dung beetle (Scarabaeus sacer) rolls balls of dung in which it lays eggs — the larvae emerge from the dung ball apparently spontaneously, as if born from the earth itself, which the Egyptians interpreted as self-creation (ḫpr.w, 'he who has come into being'). The scarab's navigation is remarkable: research published in Current Biology (2013 CE) demonstrated that dung beetles navigate at night using the Milky Way — they are the only known insect to navigate by the galaxy. The heart scarab (placed over the heart of the mummified body) was inscribed with Book of the Dead Chapter 30B: 'O my heart of my mother, O my heart of my different ages, do not stand against me as a witness...' — the instruction to the heart not to speak against its owner in the judgment. Khepri's name derives from the Egyptian verb ḫpr (kheper) — 'to become, to come into existence' — making him ontologically the god of process rather than state, of emergence rather than presence.

Khepri across cultures

Related symbols