At the corners of the canopic shrine that held a mummy's embalmed organs, Egyptian funerary art places four goddesses, each paired with one of the four sons of Horus who protected a single jar. Selket stands beside Qebehsenuef, the falcon headed son who guarded the intestines, and her outstretched arms appear on gilded shrines such as the one found intact in the tomb of Tutankhamun, where her scorpion crown and human face frame the sealed doors. Isis guards Imsety, Nephthys guards Hapy, and Neith guards Duamutef, so the four together closed a square of protection around the most vulnerable part of the burial, the viscera removed during mummification and stored apart from the body.
Selket's presence here draws on the same power that made her feared and needed among the living, command over venom. A goddess who could send a scorpion's sting could also withhold it, and Egyptian magical texts invoke her specifically to seal danger away from what she guards, whether a sleeping body or a sealed coffin. The Pyramid Texts already name her among the goddesses who assist the king's ascent to the sky, tying her funerary role to some of the oldest layers of Egyptian religious writing, long before the New Kingdom shrines that make her scorpion crown so recognizable today.
Her iconography is deliberately restrained. The scorpion on her head is shown with its sting curved but not extended toward the viewer, which Egyptologists read as a visual promise rather than an oversight, a goddess who carries the danger but has set it aside for the one she protects.