Part three of our ongoing series on the anatomy of the ancient Egyptian soul. Previously: the Ba and the Ka. Next up: the Akh, the Ib, the Shut, and the Khat.
In turbulent times, let Egyptology be your resistance. That’s the spirit in which we (Kara and Amber) sat down for this episode — and if that sounds like an unusual rallying cry, well, you’ve come to the right place.
Today’s topic is the Ren: the name. And before you go, I know what a name is, you don’t. Because the ancient Egyptians understood something about names that we’ve spent the last several thousand years forgetting (and that the modern American government is actively exploiting right now; yes, I know, we make everything political and history is now and all that…).
What Is the Ren?
In Faulkner’s Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian, the entry for rn (ren as we would say it in an Egyptian reading class) is almost insultingly short. Two phonetic characters, the mouth hieroglyph (r) and a single water sign (n). No dramatic determinative. No elaborate sign to illustrate it. Compare this to the Ba — the human-headed bird that flutters, moves and exists visually in the world — or the Ka, with its famous outstretched arms, intimate and embodied, ready to embrace. The Ren just sits there with no explanatory symbolism whatsoever. The writing of the word betrays the secrecy surrounding the name itself.
But that spareness is the point. The Ren’s power is its abstraction. It is not a thing you can see or touch. It is a sound, an utterance, a vibration shaped by lips and tongue and the specific quality of a human mind. And this is where things get interesting: the hieroglyphic word rn begins with the mouth sign, because of course it does. The name lives in speech. It is born from the human body in the most literal sense possible. The name is utterance incarnate, which takes us to the Egyptian understanding of creation.
In the Beginning Was the Name
The Memphite Theology is an inscription said to be copied from an ancient, worm-eaten papyrus, even though this particular version comes to us as the so-called Shabaka Stone of the 25th Dynasty Kushite kings, and it describes the god Ptah creating the world through utterance. Ptah conceives (sia, abstract thought) of things with his heart (ib) and then brings them into material existence through his mouth (r) using the force of heka (magic). He speaks the name of something, and it becomes real by passing through the lips, tongue, and teeth.
In the beginning was the word, as we know from the Bible. The idea that spoken language is a creative force, that naming something is a form of making it, runs through ancient Egyptian creation theology, including the Memphite Theology, through the Hebrew Bible, through Neoplatonic philosophy, and straight into the digital age, where the naming of things (brands, identities) still confers power. The ancient Egyptians were not doing something primitive or naive when they enshrined this idea. They were identifying something true. A name captures the essence of something.
And crucially, in this theology, the name is not just descriptive. It doesn’t label something that already exists. It creates the thing. Which means that whoever speaks the name first, whoever utters it properly, with the right cadence and pronunciation, has a claim on the essence of the thing named. They hold a piece of it. And this is where the Ren gets genuinely dangerous.
Isis and the Secret Name of the Sun God
The most famous story about the power of the Ren comes from Papyrus Turin 1993, a 20th Dynasty text currently in the Egyptian Museum in Turin. It tells the story of Isis and Re.
Re, the sun god, is old. He is aging and drooling—both poignant and humanizing for the head of the Egyptian pantheon—and Isis, the Mistress of Magic, decides to use the moment to her advantage. She collects his spittle and uses it to fashion a clay snake, which she places in his path. Re is bitten by this snake made from his own essence. He cannot heal himself: you cannot cure a wound that comes from within your own body, apparently. And so he has to call upon Isis.
She shows up, calm and helpful, and says: I can heal you. But first, I need to know your secret name. She doesn’t want the name that priests chant in temples, or the name carved onto obelisks. She wants his other name, the real name, the one that encapsulates his true essence, the name that, if you knew it, would give you power over the sun god himself.
Re, who is dying, tells it to her. She heals him. And the text informs us he passes the name to her with the stipulation that she share it only with her son Horus, who can use it only for healing.
There is so much to unpack here. Isis is conniving—she engineers the crisis herself, lest we forget—and yet she is also the indispensable linchpin of the entire solar cycle, the one who heals the sun and ensures that he can rise again. She is the mother of god. She has to be duplicitous to get what she needs, because that’s what women in patriarchal systems have to do: they work around the system, not through it. And her workaround gives her—and by extension Horus—genuine, permanent power over the most important force in the cosmos. (Just note that she has to use her son as the formal mechanism to take that power. She can’t wield that power herself within patriarchy.)
It’s also worth noting that this story has a very familiar ring. Isis creates a crisis so that a god can be healed and reborn, and that power is then passed to her son. The pattern is ancient. Judas. Jesus. Mary knowing her son was doomed to die for the sins of all humankind. It did not begin in Galilee.
The Name Is a Tool of Power (And Someone Else Usually Wields It)
Here’s what the ancient Egyptians knew, and what we mostly pretend not to know: we do not name ourselves.
We are named by others. By parents, by institutions, by the state. And when someone in society decides to choose their own name—through transition, through divorce, through reclaiming ancestry—it is, as I put it, “rather an F you to society at large, and people don’t take it well.”
Enslaved people in America were stripped of their names and given the names of their enslavers. This is not a metaphor. It was a deliberate act of erasure—an understanding, conscious or not, that to take someone’s name is to take their identity, their lineage, their claim on their own essence, to make them legible in the system of power. Formerly enslaved people who took new names after emancipation were not just making an administrative change. They were performing an act of profound self-creation.
Women who change their names at marriage, and then change them back, sometimes can’t produce the right documents to satisfy a bureaucracy. This is also not a metaphor. The SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act), just recently killed by Congress, would have required voters to produce documentary proof of citizenship that matches their current legal name. Since approximately 69 million American women have changed their surnames at marriage—with their birth certificates unchanged, of course—this provision creates an enormous paperwork burden that falls almost entirely on women. The name you were given, the name you choose, the name on your passport, the name on your birth certificate: suddenly, these mismatches become mechanisms of legal disenfranchisement.
The ancient Egyptians would have recognized this—the name as a tool of ownership—immediately. My own name is a good illustration of the principle: my formal given name is Kathlyn Mary Cooney. That’s on my passport and driver’s license. My mother preemptively nicknamed me Kara to prevent anyone from calling me Kathy (!), and it’s been Kara ever since — appearing on no official document anywhere. When someone calls and asks for Kathleen (because who knows how to pronounce the Anglican Irish Kathlyn?), I know immediately: they don’t know me. They don’t have my secret name.
(My publisher, American University Press, later asked me to use Kara Cooney on my Recycling for Death book cover — which crossed the streams rather dramatically and left my actual secret name thoroughly scrambled. Very Isis. Very Re.)
Names in the Pyramid Texts: 45 Ways to Protect, Weaponize, and Transform
For this podcast, I did a search of the Pyramid Texts of Unas—the oldest religious corpus in the world, inscribed on the walls of his burial chamber at Saqqara—and found 45 mentions of rn, for “name.” And, of course, a quick glance at the text shows Unas’ name in cartouche visible everywhere on the walls. The magical spells had to name him repeatedly to have any effect.
In Utterance 137, there is a curse against anyone who “shall speak evil against the name of Unas.” Slander. Gossip. Misusing a name in speech. The ancient Egyptians understood that once a name is out in the world—written on a wall, spoken aloud—it can be turned against you. You can be libeled. You can be slandered. You can have your reputation destroyed through the same medium that keeps you alive. The name is vulnerability as much as it is power.
Utterance 143 is wild. Unas takes on the name of Horus: “You are born, O Horus, as the one whose name is he before whom the earth quakes,“ and then we read Seth’s epithet: he before whom the sky shakes. These are primeval names, Ur-names, that predate even the physical world. By speaking them, by claiming them, Unas is not just identifying himself as divine. He is reshaping the form of that divinity. The name does that: it transforms. It is not merely descriptive. It is constitutive.
Utterance 147 goes further still: lift yourself up, so said they, in your name: God. The king is given a new name in the afterlife. He is addressed as God—netjer—and this address is not flattery. It is installation. The name confers the identity it declares.
A Brief Taxonomy: Name vs. Title vs. Epithet
Before we go further, it’s worth distinguishing between three things that are often lumped together:
The name (rn) is your personal, individual designation. It belongs to you alone; or rather, it is you alone. Other people share your title. No one else has your specific name in full, with the monikers of your parents.
The titulary is a rank. It tells you where someone sits in the social and cosmic hierarchy. Scribe of the mat is different from king’s scribe. Every woman could be a nebet per (Mistress of the House) in theory — but no two people had the same personal name attached to it. The titulary situates you. The name individualizes you.
The epithet is affiliation and protection. Beloved of Amun. Daughter of Thutmose. Epithets connect you to your tribe, your protectors, your people. They are the shields that surround a name. When Nefertiti receives the epithet meret Nefer-kheperu-Re—beloved of Akhenaten—it does not describe her. It marks her as his protected wife.
Put them all together on a coffin, as Egyptians regularly did: Osiris-Scribe-Amenemhat-beloved of his father, and you become ranked. You are loved. You are protected. You can even be divinized. Your name sits at the center of all of it.
Akhenaten and the Obsessive Naming of God
No discussion of names in ancient Egypt can avoid Akhenaten’s relationship with the name of the Aten. It is, in many ways, the theological center of his entire religious experiment.
The early name of the Aten—Ra-Horakhty who rejoices in the horizon, in his name Shu who is Aten—is complex, syncretic, a nest of allusions and connections to older solar traditions. Akhenaten, characteristically, found this unsatisfying. He revised the name later in his reign. He excised the Horakhty element because it was connected to an actual god. He created something cleaner, more abstract, more fully intellectualized.
For Akhenaten, the name was his theology, and he was the one who formulated the name. The way you named the god determined what kind of god you had. And a sun that is pure light, pure warmth, pure creative energy, without the old hawk-headed body, without the accumulated mythology, required a name that held none of those ancillary things. The Aten’s name was Akhenaten’s project. It was also, as scholar James Hoffmeier has argued, the most concise expression of Atenist philosophy available to us.
What’s equally interesting is what Akhenaten withheld. KV35’s so-called Younger Lady mummy has been genetically confirmed as a sister of Akhenaten, but in the texts of his reign, no woman is ever called king’s sister. That title disappears during his reign. Daughters were named because that title controlled, keeping them hierarchically below the king, their father. A sister implies a peer. A peer implies a claim. So the title was simply removed from the monumental record. Royal women were present. Their bodies were needed for procreation and succession. But their names and titles were selectively granted, withheld, or redefined according to what was politically useful.
Book of the Dead: The Name as Passport, Password, and Prayer
The Book of the Dead is, in many ways, was a manual for navigating the afterlife using names.
Chapter 43 is a spell to retain your head—a real concern, apparently, for the recently deceased. The declarant announces: I am the great one, son of the great one, the fiery one, son of the fiery one, to whom his head was given after having been cut off. I am Osiris. No one is calling themselves by their birth name here. They are claiming divine names as armor, as transformation, as protection. If your name is now Osiris, your head cannot be taken. The name is not a label; it is a force field.
The Litany of Ra, a New Kingdom royal funerary text, lists 75 names of the sun god, 75 attempts by initiated priests to map the full complexity of solar divinity, some of the names masculine, some feminine, all of them strange, many of them untranslatable. It is one of the most extraordinary intellectual exercises in the ancient world: an effort to comprehend infinity by cataloguing its identities.
And then there is the Declaration to the 42 Gods, the negative confession of Chapter 125, which we’ve discussed in a previous episode. What I point out this time around is something slightly different: it’s not just that you declare your innocence before these gods. You name them first. Oh, Wide-of-Stride, who comes from Iunu, I have not done evil. Oh Flame-Grasper, who comes from Kheraha, I have not robbed. You have to know who you’re talking to first. And knowing their names gives you a form of power over them; you can face them without flinching. The anxiety of ancient Egyptians about this moment was so real that they wrote the whole thing down and put it into papyrus form, so the dead could, essentially, cheat by reading off their notes. The magic still works. The name spoken is the name spoken, regardless of whether you memorized it or looked it up.
There is also a wonderful interrogation sequence in the Book of the Dead in which the deceased is asked: Who are you? What is your name? And the answer is not a name as we’d recognize it. It is something like: I am the stock of the papyrus. He who is in the moringa tree is my name. A mythological riddle. Your secret name in the afterlife is not Amenhotep or Nefertari, but rather a description of your place in the universe, something that encodes your essence in a way that only the initiated can decode.
The Dead Can Forget Their Own Names
At the Getty Villa, there is a mummy from the late Roman period—Heraclides, son of Thermuthis—wrapped in a red shroud and dated to around the 2nd century CE. His name is written on his linen wrappings, near his feet, in Greek. If you imagine Heraclides standing upright, the inscription is oriented correctly for him to read. It is written so that the dead man can look down and see his own name, because the dead might forget.
Death scrambles the circuits, apparently, and the Egyptians, even in the Roman period, even with Greek names on their mummies, retained this deep anxiety: what if you get to the other side and can’t remember who you are? The name written on the body is a reminder, a tether to identity across the most disorienting transition imaginable. It is, as Amber put it, like a phone number to yourself.
And if the name is written on the linen, and you bring it with you through death, and the coffin text spells reunite you with your family members whose names you’ve memorized and included with your burial goods, then the name is how you find the people you love in whatever comes next.
That’s not primitive belief but profound human connection.
What We Know, What We Don’t
The Ren is the most human of the soul’s components. A bull has a Ka. A sacred bull has a Ba. But only a named being—named by language, by society, by the specific human act of utterance—truly has a Ren. It is what separates us from the rest of the created world: not consciousness, not feeling, but the ability to speak names and be spoken of. To be called into existence by a word, and to persist in existence as long as that word is uttered.
Which is why erasing a name is so devastating and why the damnatio memoriae of the ancient world—chiseling out names, defacing inscriptions, removing someone from every monument—was understood as a kind of killing. This is why enslaved people were renamed. This is why women are still expected to give up their surnames in patriarchy, why their children carry their father’s name only. This is why transgender people choosing their own names are met with such hostility.
The Ren, the ancient Egyptians believed, lives as long as it is spoken. Causing his name to live — sankh rn.f — was the highest act of memorial, the deepest form of love. It shows us to whom we belong.
Next time on the Anatomy of the Ancient Egyptian Soul: the Akh — the transfigured, luminous dead, the superhero ancestor spirit, and how the living called on them for help.
Show Notes & Further Reading
Primary Texts & Online Resources
* Pyramid Texts Online — searchable translations of the Pyramid Texts of Unas and others. Highly recommended for the curious.
* The Isis and Re story: Papyrus Turin 1993 (Museo Egizio, Turin), 20th Dynasty.
* The Great Hymn to the Aten: Tomb of Ay, Amarna. Translation discussed in this episode from Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. II: The New Kingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 93.
* Book of the Dead Chapter 43 (retaining one’s head), Chapter 125 (Declaration to the 42 Gods) — standard translations in R.O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, revised edition (British Museum Press).
* The Litany of Ra — see Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, trans. David Lorton (Cornell University Press, 1999).
The Shabaka Stone / Memphite Theology
* British Museum, EA 498. 25th Dynasty copy of a text claiming to derive from an Old Kingdom original. The standard scholarly discussion is in Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. I: The Old and Middle Kingdoms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).
On the Egyptian Soul and the Concept of the Person
* Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, trans. David Lorton (Cornell University Press, 2005). Essential reading on the Ba, Ka, Ren, and Akh.
The Herakleides Mummy
* Getty Villa, Malibu, California. Accession no. 83.AP.42. Roman period, Egypt, c. 100–150 CE.
The SAVE Act
* The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (H.R. 22), currently being debated in the U.S. Senate. For a nonpartisan overview of its provisions and their impact on women who have changed their names, see the Brennan Center for Justice and Vote.org’s SAVE Act explainer.
Kara’s Work
* For more on sex, economics, and social organization in ancient Egypt, see Kara Cooney, Ancient Egyptian Society: Challenging Assumptions, Exploring Approaches (Routledge, 2021).
* The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt (Crown, 2014).
* When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt (National Geographic, 2018).
* The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World (National Geographic, 2021).
* Nefertiti — forthcoming, National Geographic.
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