The Gods of Egypt

Author: Traditional

Time Period: 5000 BCE–2500 BCE

Country or Culture: Egypt

Genre: Myth

PLOT SUMMARY

The world is nothing but chaos, existence nothing but the swirling waters of disorder. From these waters comes Atum (or Tem), a god who contains within him all the gods and goddesses to come. Atum begins to give order to the universe by creating these deities, each one encompassing a different aspect of existence that had once been held within him. The gods include the Ennead, nine deities who represent nine of the most fundamental aspects of the cosmos. Among the Ennead are Geb, the god of the earth; Shu, who is the air; and Nut, who is the sky. As Geb and Nut are so close to one another, joined by the horizon, they quickly produce four children: Isis, Osiris, Nephthys, and Set (Seth).

In some Egyptian lands, particularly in Heliopolis, the people know Atum by the name of Ra (Re). Ra is the sun and the giver of life, and as such, he is the ruler of gods and men alike. While Ra is always a deity of great power, over time, his descendents come to rule, and so after many years, Osiris sits as the leader of Egypt, with the goddess Isis at his side as his wife and queen. Osiris is a force of maat, the necessary order and logic that governs the Egyptian world and keeps it safe from the chaos that preceded and surrounds civilization. Osiris happily protects maat and the Egyptian people until he is one day attacked by his brother, Set, who slays him. Set is a force of chaos and resents the leadership and order that Osiris represents.

After Osiris’s murder, Isis enlists the aid of Thoth, god of magic, and Anubis, god of funerals and death, and resurrects her brother-husband. Isis can keep Osiris alive for only a brief period of time, during which she takes the form of a giant bird and conceives a child by him. That child is Horus, who bears the head of a bird and serves as a god of the sun.

With the birth of Horus, Osiris is sent to the Duat, the land of the dead. There, he governs as a powerful force, reigning in a land apart from the order of life and maat. In the land of the living, Horus begins a long battle with Set, with Horus defending the logic of the universe and Set constantly trying to bring back the chaos that preceded Egypt. While they battle, the god Ra continues his daily journey through the sky as the sun, entering the Duat every evening and clashing with Apep (Apophis), a serpent god who also champions chaos. Many other gods thrive and do battle in Egypt, and the struggles for power both in the realm of the living and in the Duat continue for ages. The gods associated with the Ennead, however, hold the strongest influence over the pharaohs, temples, and mortals of the land, and their ongoing struggles define the nature of the universe itself.

SIGNIFICANCE

Egyptian mythology was subject to constant change, the particulars of myths shifting significantly depending on the city and time period in which they were told. What survives to the modern day is a pantheon in constant evolution, with different deities being combined into one and with gods and goddesses as likely to turn against one another in combat as they are to join forces. Greatly influenced by the political change and historical struggles for power that defined ancient Egypt, Egyptian mythology can be understood as carefully reflecting the complex and nuanced worldview that permeated that culture and religion.

The mythology of ancient Egypt focuses on the tensions between order and chaos that define the universe. It also relies on metaphors of nonlinear time, the cycles of the seasons, and the types of changes that come about through repetition. The gods of Egypt, then, do not represent a consistent idea, such as Ra standing in for the sun and supreme leadership, but rather show core concepts of the culture magnified and made prismatic across a variety of stories: Ra is but one god of the sun, and his leadership extends to his heirs and to the pharaohs in such a way that he remains the ultimate king while allowing other figures to assume power. It is by this logic that Atum and Ra can be both independent deities and a single figure, Atum-Ra, while at the same time Ra can exist as Amen-Ra (Amun-Ra or Amon-Ra), another supreme ruler and composite of several mythological traditions.

For the ancient Egyptians, the stories of the gods seem to have fulfilled a distinct function. The Egyptian world was conceived of as a rare and tenuous order located within the swirling chaos of the cosmos and characterized by the annual flooding of the Nile River and the constant rise and fall of the sun. The gods, in their ongoing dramas, give life to that order. Chaos tries to intrude through the actions of Set and Apep; magic brightens and complicates the mundane world through the presence of Isis; and the core force of life, the sun, dies and is born again through the journey of Ra and his nightly meeting with Osiris. The complexity of Egyptian mythology is fitting. The greatest mysteries of the universe are not for humans to understand but for them to observe, always inventing new vocabularies and new stories in order to create some sense of order in a world perpetually on the edge of chaos.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hart, George. Egyptian Myths. Austin: U of Texas P, 2004. Print.

Meeks, Dimitri, and Christine Favard-Meeks. Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996. Print.

Pinch, Geraldine. Handbook of Egyptian Mythology. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2002. Print.

Troche, Julia. “Why Osiris?” Calliope 22.1 (2011): 18+. Print.

Tyldesley, Joyce. “Atum: Creating The World.” Ancient Egypt Magazine Dec. 2011: 25–27. Print.