William Durand-Poole

So yes, my favourite god of all, of all the pantheons in antiquity, is a goddess called Crypole.

And she's the goddess of hangovers for the Greeks.

I love that.

I really do.

Goddess of Hangover.

Well, bring her back.

When he is depicted, he is depicted usually in the form of a man.

His skin tends to be blue, a kind of cosmic blue, a universal blue, as it were.

He wears a crown with two huge falcon feathers that come from it and a false beard on his chin.

Sometimes he's depicted as a ram.

So kind of all the power of the kind of the male ram.

But interestingly, within the theology itself of the New Kingdom, he is called the Invisible One.

So although he is represented in iconography, people think of him, in fact, as an abstract, the great hidden one.

And that's very important because I think lots of people assume that Egyptians are going around worshipping gods who appear before them, very often with animal heads and so forth.

But the idea of invisibility is also there as well.

It's also part of it.

I think there was an element of that, but we don't know much about it.

But I think that certainly during...

embalming ceremonies, for instance, when the body was prepared for the tomb, I think it's highly likely that a priest would don the mask of the jackal god Anubis, for instance.

But I don't think, as we get in kind of Hollywood films, that these priests were kind of, you know, cavorting around with the heads of cows and bulls.