Shezmu
Egyptian · deity · mythic · Recorded classification
Shezmu is the best argument in the Egyptian pantheon against sorting gods into good and evil. He makes perfume. He also presses human heads in the wine press and hands the blood to the gods to drink, in a Pyramid Text passage that has bothered readers for a century. Both are the same god doing the same thing: applying a press. The Egyptians saw a machine that crushes something to get its essence out and thought it obvious that the god of it would work at both ends of the moral range — the temple workshop and the place of execution.
Domains
- perfumery
- slaughter
Relations
- subordinate to: OsirisAttached to the machinery of the underworld judgement, where the punishment of the condemned is carried out in the same vocabulary as the pressing of grapes.Reference treatment of Shezmu's place among the executioners of the underworld. (secondary)
Sources
- Shezmu is the Egyptian god of the oil and wine press, a maker of perfumes, and simultaneously the lion-headed executioner of the underworld known as Lord of Blood and Great Slaughter.: Reference treatments of Shezmu, his press, his perfumes and his slaughter epithets. (secondary)