Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [38]
MYTHIC VOICES
The glorious god came,
Amun himself, the lord of the two lands,
in the guise of her husband.
They found her resting in the beautiful palace.
She awoke when she breathed the perfume of the god,
And she laughed at the sight of his majesty.
Inflamed with desire, he hastened toward her.
He had lost his heart to the queen.
When he came near to her, she saw his form as a very god.
She rejoiced in the splendor of his beauty.
His love went inside all her limbs.
The god’s sweet perfume
suffused through the palace,
the perfume of Punt, the land of incense.
The greatness of this god
did to the woman what he pleased.
She kissed him
and delighted him with her body.
—Egyptian Hymn on the Birth of Hatshepsut
(1490–1468 BCE)
Who was the first family of Egyptian myth?
Most people have to cope with annoying family members and brotherly spats. Egypt’s Great Ennead—the first family of the gods—took those fraternal quarrels to cosmic heights and created the core myths of ancient Egypt. All of the most significant deities in the Egyptian world grew out of the Heliopolis Creation story, which continued as the twin brother and sister, Shu and Tefnut, became the first divine couple. They next produced another pair of twins, Geb and his sister, Nut, the grandchildren of the sun god Atum. Geb was the male earth god and his sister-consort, the female Nut, represented the sky and heavens.
There are two Egyptian versions of how earth and sky were separated. In one, they were locked together in an embrace at birth, and Atum, their grandfather, told Shu to separate the twins. In a second account of their separation, Geb and Nut married, but Atum, the sun god, was angry, since he was not informed of the match and had not approved it. He ordered their father, Shu, to push Nut away from Geb into the sky. Standing on Geb, Shu forced Nut upward to form the great arch of the sky, with her hands and feet resting on the four points of the compass. Nut is usually depicted in Egyptian art in this position—hands and feet straddling the earth, with her back arched to form the heavens. As the sky goddess, Nut was traditionally shown as covered with starlike speckles—and stars were later explained in Egyptian religion as the spirits of the dead who had gone to join the gods in the heavens. Nut’s laughter became the thunder, and her tears were the rain.
Apart from Nut’s role as mother of other gods, she played a central role in the most essential aspect of Egyptian religious belief—the daily passage of the sun. Every day, the sun god made his journey from dawn to dusk in a boat across the underside of Nut’s arched body. At the end of the day, Nut swallowed the sun god and his boat (a symbolic daily death) which then traveled the inside length of her body—equivalent to traveling through the Egyptian underworld, known as the Duat. Each morning, she gave birth, and the sun god emerged from her womb. According to this myth, the redness of the sky at dawn was explained as the bloody afterbirth that accompanied the sun god’s birth each day.
This myth was the great beating heart, focal point of all Egyptian belief. The sun’s daily birth and death symbolized the eternal cycle of life and death. For Egyptians, life and death and the role of the sun as life-giver were all tied together in the regular cycle of the flooding of the Nile, which brought the fertility to the soil and the harvest that sustained Egypt. It carried over into the Egyptians’ core belief that humans could also live, die, and be reborn. In that fundamental idea of death and resurrection lay the basic foundation for all of Egypt society and worship.
In the continuation of the Creation story, when Nut became the sky and heavens, her brother-husband, Geb, was forced to lie down and become the earth. As god of the earth, Geb was thought to be the cause of earthquakes, which were attributed either to his laughter or his wailing for his sister-bride. Geb was especially significant, because as earth god, he was