This is not, strictly speaking, a story. It is a medical procedure with a story inside it.
The text survives in a Ramesside magical papyrus now in Turin and, in a fuller form, carved on a healing stela of the fourth century BCE, and its purpose in both cases is to be recited over somebody who has been bitten by a snake. Egyptian practitioners worked by precedent: if you can show that the venom was once defeated, and name the being who defeated it, you can compel the present case to follow the earlier one. So the narrative is a legal citation dressed as a myth, and the fact that it is also the best-plotted piece of surviving Egyptian mythology is, from the healer's point of view, incidental.
An old god with an unguarded mouth
Ra had grown old. The text says so without embarrassment — the god of the sun ages like everything else, his mouth trembles, and his saliva falls to the ground as he walks.
Isis is introduced as a clever woman, more devious in her heart than a million men, more discerning than a million gods, ignorant of nothing in heaven or earth. And what she wants is stated plainly at the outset: she had grown tired of the world of people and wanted the world of gods, and to have that she needed the one thing Ra had not given anybody.
She waited for the spittle. She took it up with the earth it had fallen on, kneaded the mixture in her hand, and shaped it into a serpent — a thing made from the god's own substance, which is exactly why it will be able to hurt him. She left it in the road at the fork where he walked each day when he came out to inspect the Two Lands.
The symptoms
He came out in procession with his retinue, and the serpent bit him.
What happens next is the part that makes the papyrus worth reading. Ra does not thunder. He screams, and the noise reaches heaven, and the Nine ask him what is wrong, and he cannot answer at first because his jaw is chattering and his limbs are shaking and the venom is going through him like the Nile going through a field.
Then he describes it, and the description is clinical: he is colder than water and hotter than fire, he is sweating and shivering, his eye is unsteady, he cannot see the sky, and water keeps running onto his face as if it were summer. Anyone who has seen a serious envenomation would recognise the list. And he says three things in sequence: I did not see it, my hand did not make it, and I do not know who did this.
He asks for the children of the gods, the ones who are effective with spells and whose knowledge reaches heaven. And Isis comes with her magic in her mouth and the breath of life in her hands, and asks him what the matter is.
The negotiation
Her diagnosis is a piece of theology delivered as bedside manner. A snake has bitten you, she says. Something you made has lifted its head against you. It can be driven out — but you must tell me your name, because a man lives when he is called by his name.
Ra answers with a recital of everything he is: the one who made heaven and earth, who knotted the mountains together, who made the water so that the Great Flood could come, who made the bull for the cow so that there would be pleasure, who made the horizon; who is Khepri in the morning, Ra at noon, Atum in the evening.
Isis waits until he has finished and then says, very simply, that his name was not in what he said, and that if he tells it the poison will come out — because a man lives when his name is spoken.
The venom burns hotter. It is stronger than fire, more violent than flame. And Ra gives in. He says: let Isis search through me, and let my name pass out of my body into her body.
Then he hides himself from the gods, and the barque of eternity is empty for a moment, and the name goes across. And Isis binds him with an oath first: that the name will be passed to no one except her son Horus, and that Horus in turn will be sworn to secrecy — the transfer conditioned so that the knowledge becomes an inheritance rather than a theft, and lands, in the end, exactly where the kingship does.
Only then does she say the words that end the episode: flow out, poison, come out of Ra. It is I who act, I who make the venom fall to the ground. Ra lives; the poison dies.
What the story is doing
Three arguments run underneath it, and none is hidden.
Names are constituent parts of beings. Egyptian thought divided a person into components — the body, the shadow, the ka, the ba, and the ren, the name — and the name is not a label but a piece of the entity. This is why cartouches were hacked out of monuments, why enemies' names were written on pots and smashed, and why the destruction of a name was a real and feared form of killing. Isis is not learning a password; she is taking possession of a piece of Ra.
Magic is a substance. Heka is a force in the Egyptian universe like heat or wind, personified as a god in his own right, available to gods and, under controlled conditions, to trained humans. The story establishes Isis as its supreme practitioner, which is precisely the claim the reciting healer needs to make, because the healer is going to speak in her voice.
The kingship is legitimate. The secret name ends up with Horus, and Horus is the living king. A spell for snakebite is also a small constitutional document.
The two objects it survives on
The Turin magical papyrus (Papyrus Turin 1993) is a New Kingdom collection of spells; the tale appears there as one item among many, with the practical rubric attached — instructions about what is to be recited, and over what.
The Metternich Stela is more spectacular. It is a cippus of Horus, a class of healing stela showing the child Horus standing on crocodiles and gripping snakes and scorpions, its surface densely covered with protective spells including this one. Cippi were functional objects: water was poured over the inscribed stone so that it ran across the words, collected, and given to the patient to drink. The same logic governed the practice of writing a spell in ink and washing it off into beer — the text is understood to be materially transferable.
This stela dates to the reign of Nectanebo II in the fourth century BCE, was found in Egypt in 1828, passed to the Austrian chancellor Prince Metternich as a diplomatic gift — which is how a piece of Egyptian medical equipment acquired a Habsburg name — and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Questions worth asking
What is the secret name?
It is never given, and that is not an omission. A name that could be written down would not be the kind of name the story is about; the whole point of the ren of Ra is that it is the one thing not in circulation. Later Egyptian and Greco-Egyptian magical texts, particularly in the Greek papyri from Roman Egypt, are full of strings of unpronounceable syllables claiming to be exactly such hidden names — an entire industry founded on the premise that this text sets up and refuses.
Does this make Isis the villain?
No Egyptian reader would have framed it that way, and the text does not. She is doing what an effective practitioner does — obtaining the means to cure — and the poisoning is presented as the necessary cost, on a god who is not destroyed by it. What she takes she immediately entails on her son, and the ancient audience for this spell wanted her to be as formidable as possible, because they were about to borrow her authority.
Is this the same aged Ra as in the story where he wipes out humanity?
They belong to the same theological picture: a creator who has ruled long enough to weaken, whose senescence is the premise for the next stage of the world's arrangement. The episode in which the aged sun god turns on his own people is a different composition with a different purpose, and the two were never assembled into a single biography. Egyptian religion was quite comfortable with a god who was simultaneously eternal and elderly.
Where else does name-magic like this turn up?
The idea that knowing a true name confers power is very widely distributed — it is the mechanism of the Rumpelstiltskin tale type, the operating principle of the Solomonic grimoire tradition, and the explicit magical system of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea books. The Egyptian version is among the oldest fully worked-out statements of it, and it is more rigorous than most, because it does not treat the name as a key to a lock. It treats it as a body part.