Bes looked like no other god in Egypt. Where the great deities were shown in perfect profile, tall and serene, Bes faced the viewer head-on, a bandy-legged dwarf with a huge head, a lion's mane and ears, a tail swinging behind him, a tall crown of feathers, and his tongue stuck out in a mocking grimace. His ugliness was his weapon. Everything about his appearance was designed to terrify the invisible things that terrified people: the demons, snakes, scorpions, and nightmares that slipped into houses in the dark. His roots ran back to an older god called Aha, the Fighter, a lion-slaying protector of the Middle Kingdom, and some said he came to Egypt from the far south, from Nubia or the land of Punt, though his face was soon as Egyptian as the Nile itself.

The most important work of Bes was the protection of childbirth, the most dangerous hour in any Egyptian life. When a woman went into labour, the house became a battlefield, and Bes was its soldier. His face was carved on the curved ivory magic wands that priests and parents used to draw protective circles around mother and child, wands covered with snarling demons and the words of defence. At his side stood Taweret, the pregnant hippopotamus goddess who guarded expectant mothers, and together they formed the first line of defence around the birth chamber. When the child was a royal one, Bes danced attendance at the birth itself: on the walls of the temple of Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the ugly little god capers through the scenes of her divine birth, knives in his fists, slashing down the spirits that dared approach the infant queen. He danced, he banged his tambourine, he screeched and pulled faces, and the demons fled howling.

Bes belonged to ordinary people as no great god ever could. He had no temple staffed with priests, no costly festivals, no golden barque carried through the streets. His shrine was the home itself. Egyptians slept on headrests carved with his grinning face so that he would guard them through the night, when nightmares and fever demons prowled. They gazed into mirrors handled with his image, drank from jugs shaped like his body, and shook tambourines bearing his grimace at weddings and celebrations. Women tattooed his dancing figure on their thighs. Dancers and musicians wore painted masks of his face when they performed at festivals, becoming the god for a night, and the clay masks they left behind have been dug up by archaeologists at sites across Egypt. In every cradle, every cosmetic pot, every cheap clay lamp, Bes was there, the people's god, too busy working to stand on ceremony.

Yet the little god who lived in houses also drew pilgrims. At Saqqara, the great cemetery of Memphis, stood the Bes chambers, a suite of mud-brick rooms where couples came from far away to spend the night in the god's presence, seeking his blessing for fertility, for conception, for a child. Centuries later, when Egypt lay under Roman rule, the god had grown so famous that an oracle of Bes operated at Abydos, the sacred city of Osiris, and strangers from across the Mediterranean sent questions to the grinning dwarf, asking his counsel on their futures. His image travelled on amulets and seal stones through the whole ancient world: Phoenician sailors carried him to Spain, Persian nobles wore his face on their rings, and Roman legionaries stationed on the Nile took his likeness home to Europe. No pharaoh's god ever went so far with so little ceremony.

Bes outlasted the religion that made him. When the temples of Ra and Osiris fell silent, the little dancing god survived in the folk art of Coptic Egypt, his face still pulled into its ancient grimace above doorways and on the walls of houses, still frightening away the dark. In the modern world his image fills museum cases on every continent, thousands of amulets, figurines, and jugs, each one proof of some household's ancient hope. Of all the gods of Egypt, none was loved so widely or worshipped so informally. The Egyptians believed that joy itself was a weapon against evil, and Bes was joy in its ugliest, bravest form, dancing forever between the demons and the cradle.