Every night, an enormous serpent lies in wait in the Duat where the solar barque must pass, and tries to stop the sun from being reborn. He is called Apep in Egyptian and Apophis in the Greek form. He has no cult, no temple, no offerings, no parents and no story of origin worth the name. He is not a fallen god. He was never inside the order at all.
That distinction is worth insisting on, because English-language accounts reach for "the Egyptian Satan" almost automatically and the comparison misleads in a specific way. Satan, in the traditions that produced him, is a created being who rebelled — evil is a defection from good. Apep is isfet, the disorder that creation was carved out of and that presses against it permanently from outside. He cannot repent, cannot be redeemed and, crucially, cannot be finally destroyed. He is defeated every single night and he is back the following night. Egyptian cosmology is not a story with an ending; it is a maintenance schedule.
What happens in the twelve hours
The New Kingdom underworld books — the Amduat, painted in full on the walls of Thutmose III's tomb, and the Book of Gates, with its own division into gated hours — chart the sun's night voyage in detail, and the confrontation is a fixed episode. In the Amduat's seventh hour the barque is halted where the waterway has dried up, and the serpent must be subdued before the journey can continue; the crew hack at his coils, and the goddess Mehen, a protective serpent, coils around the sun god's shrine to shield him. Elsewhere it is Set who stands in the prow with a spear, the only god violent enough for the job — the strength that is a liability in the succession myth being exactly the asset required here.
Other executioners appear in other texts. A Book of the Dead vignette shows the Great Cat of Heliopolis, associated with Ra himself, cutting the serpent's head with a knife under the sacred persea tree. In the Book of Gates he is fettered and pinned by chains held by rows of deities and by the sons of Horus.
He is drawn as a colossal snake, sometimes so long the artist coils him back on himself repeatedly along a register, frequently pierced with knives, bound with ropes, or shown chopped into segments. Where the serpent's name is written in a funerary text, the scribe often mutilates the hieroglyph deliberately — knives drawn through the snake sign, or the determinative cut in half — so the written word cannot act. Egyptian writing was understood to be efficacious, and a dangerous name on a tomb wall was a dangerous thing in the tomb.
A ritual manual for killing him
The Book of Overthrowing Apep survives principally in the Bremner-Rhind Papyrus, a Ptolemaic manuscript in the British Museum that also preserves the Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys. It is not a myth. It is a liturgical handbook with rubrics: make a figure of the serpent in wax, or draw him on new papyrus in green ink, write his name on it, wrap it, spit on it, trample it with the left foot, strike it with a stone spear, bind it, and burn it in a fire of bedja plant. Then repeat.
The rubrics specify performance daily, and at particular hours, and on particular festival days, in the temple. Read plainly, this is the state religion assigning trained personnel to a permanent nightly task of cosmic defence, funded and calendared. The Egyptian universe is not self-sustaining; it requires labour.
The papyrus also names other beings to be destroyed alongside the serpent, including the enemies of the king — the ritual doubles neatly as political sorcery, and the categories of cosmic enemy and state enemy are not kept apart.
When he wins
He does, briefly. Thunderstorms, unseasonal darkness and above all solar eclipses were interpreted as the serpent momentarily swallowing or gripping the barque, and the noise and ritual response to such events fit that reading. It is a satisfying explanatory system: the sun's occasional failure is not a flaw in the design but evidence that the enemy is real and that the nightly work matters.
The name in the historical record
A Hyksos king of the Fifteenth Dynasty was named Apophis, and the Egyptian sources on the wars of liberation make nothing explicit of the coincidence, though the resonance for a Theban audience would have been hard to miss. In the modern record the name has been reused for a near-Earth asteroid identified in 2004 and named after the serpent by discoverers who had the Egyptian association in mind; it briefly carried the highest impact-risk rating ever assigned before further observation ruled out a collision for the foreseeable future. It is a rare case of an ancient antagonist getting a scientifically apt namesake.
Stargate SG-1 used the name for a recurring villain and made him a humanoid alien, which has probably done more than any other single source to fix the Greek form Apophis in English usage.
Questions about the serpent
Was he worshipped by anyone, ever?
There is no evidence of a cult, and this is one of the few clean negatives in Egyptian religion — no temple, no priesthood, no offering formula, no personal names compounded with his. Egyptian religion was capable of honouring dangerous gods, as the long official career of Set shows, but the serpent falls outside the category of things one can have a relationship with. Modern occult groups that invoke the name are not continuing anything.
How is he different from other Egyptian serpents?
Egypt has a lot of snakes and most of them are protective. The uraeus on the king's brow is Wadjet, spitting fire at enemies. Mehen coils around the sun god as a shield. Renenutet is a cobra of the granary and the harvest. Nehebkau is a serpent who joins the ka to the body. The Egyptian pattern is that snake form signals concentrated power, and the direction that power is pointed varies entirely by figure. Apep is not "the snake god"; he is the one snake that is aimed at everything.
Did the Egyptians think the sun might actually fail?
Their texts behave as though the outcome were genuinely at stake, which is why the ritual existed, and the language of the spells is anxious rather than triumphant. Whether an individual Egyptian priest believed the sun would fail if he skipped a night is unanswerable, but the institutional posture is unambiguous: order is contingent, it is defended, and the defence is somebody's job. That premise is what makes Ma'at the central term of the whole religion rather than a pious abstraction.