[1][2][3] The Egyptians believed that in the netherworld, the Duat, there were various gates, doors and pylons crossed every night by the solar boat (Atet) of the sun-god Ra and by the souls directed to the world of the dead.

[2] Other funerary texts mention 21 "Secret Portals Of The Mansion Of Osiris In The Field Of Reeds" with their own names and epithets and protected by zoo-anthropomorfic deities often depicted crouched on the ground and holding large, threatening knives.

The guardian-gods too were given names that inspired terror and, above all, evoked their fearful powers: for example "Swallower Of Sinners" and "Existing On Maggots" — even if some texts avoided directly indicating their names, adding these largely unnamed gate deities of the underworld to the group of Egyptian divinities known to scholars, but impossible to inventory.

3rd gate: its guardian snake is "Stinger" while the portal itself is the goddess "Mistress Of Food"; some jackals watch over the "Lake of Life" interdicted to the dead because it is the place where Ra draws his breath.4th gate: some deities carry ropes to measure the extension of the netherworld fields — as well as, in the daily life of the Egyptians, the measurement of the fields was carried out for tax purposes; this is also where the four human ethnic groups (according to the Egyptians) were depicted: the "cattle of Ra", i.e. Egyptians themselves, Levantines, Libyans, and Nubians.

12th gate: here stand the goddesses Isis and Nephthys in the form of snakes: the journey through the gates of the afterlife is finished and the sun rises on the world in the form of a sacred scarab (Khepri, deification of the morning sun[7]).The British Egyptologist George Hart thus outlined, in his Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses (1986), the evocative names of these deities and their positions in the netherworld as described in the funeral papyri known to scholars:[8] Possessor Of The Writings of Thoth"