The goddess of heaven is for the most part thought of as a woman, but at times also as a cow— two forms which from the point of view of Egyptian mythology are really identical. For in the Nile valley in general the only purpose served by the goddess is to be the mother and nurse of the future god. The natural symbol for this among an essentially agricultural people was the domestic animal that was most common, the cow, which hence appears as the form of manifestation of practically all the goddesses in their maternal activity. If, for instance, the Egyptians desire to represent the king drinking from the goddess, in order to imbibe, along with her milk, the immor- tality inherent in her, they introduce him in contact sometimes with the breast of an_anthro- pomorphic form, sometimes with the udder of a cow. Even when such a Divine nurse is portrayed in human form, she is not infrequently provided with a cow’s head, in order to indicate with corre- sponding emphasis her most important function (cf. e.g. Naville, Deir el bahari, ii. pl. 58).
On the body of the goddess of heaven the celestial bodies move to and fro, the sun by day, the stars by night; hence she is often depicted with her whole body studded over with stars.
While in the above instances the deity of heaven always appears as female, there is another series of cosmological conceptions where a partition into a female and a male form takes place. We meet with these from about B.c. 1500 downwards, and it is quite possible that they originated at the date just mentioned, for during this period the whole Egyptian mythology is ruled by the effort
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to divide as far as possible all divinities into a male and a female form of manifestation. This is bound up with a phenomenon that appears even in the language. When the Egyptians wish to ex- press a totality with the utmost possible clearness, they write both the masculine and the feminine of the word, thus exhausting the genders of a language that has no neuter. Thus they say ‘every male and every female death,’ ‘every male and every female disease,’ when they mean all forms of death or of disease. In like manner they seek to exhaust the totality of the notion of any particular deity by emphasizing the male and the female form of manifestation. This partition of the divinity is in most instances the result, not of a logical development of religious processes of thought, but of an artificial formation, the female supplementary being obtained simply by adding the feminine suffix -¢ to the name of the male deity. Thus from Her was derived a Her-t, from Ra a Ra-t, ete. (see p. 184°).
In thus partitioning the deity of heaven, they usually thought of the female form as overarching the upper, inhabited, side of the earth, while the male form correspondingly arched the under side, both being thus placed at a distance, either above or below, the earth-god Seb. Starting from this conception, the rising of the sun is occasionally so depicted that the subterranean god of heaven holds up the sun at arm’s length, while the cynocephali that have to greet the rising sun offer their praises to it.
Occasionally, although rarely, the sex of the deities of heaven is reversed, the u per heaven being male and its counterpart pase Thus in texts of the 13th cent. B.c. the rise of the sun in the under world is so depicted that the male god of the heaven of day hands the bark with the sun-god to the female deity of the nightly heavens, as she stands upon the spherically conceived under world.
(6) The above described cosmogonic conception is connected with another, intended to explain the origin of the sun, but to which we have as yet only brief allusions. One of these is found in the so-called Book of the Dead, a collection of magical formulz, whose purpose is to procure, for the de- ceased, entrance into the world beyond and autho- rity there. In pronouncing these the deceased is to identify himself with certain deities, and to cn- deavour to obtain advantages by pointing to this fictitious identity. One of the chapters (54), which we can trace back to about the year B.C. 2500, begins thus: ‘Tam the double lion of the egg of the great cackler, I guard the egg which the god Seb drops from the earth’ (ef. PSBA vii. p. 152, xv. p. 288). This double lion is the horizon. Here sat, accord- ing to Egyptian notions, back to back two lions, which represented yesterday and to-day, the issue of the sun from the under world and his entrance into the upper world (cf. Tombeau de Ramses IV., ed. Lefébure, pl. 40), and whose charge was to guard the sun as he rose between them. The sun himself is often called ‘the egg of the great cackler,’ while this cackler, again, is the earth- god, who was supposed to have let fall, i.e. laid, the egg. Hence he had assigned to him as his sacred animal the goose, which he frequently bears upon his head im those pictures in which he is introduced in human form as a man. How he conceived the egg is not expressly said in the texts, but a picture on a, coffin of c. 1200 B.c. (Lanzone, Diz. di mit. pl. 159) points to the explanation. Here we see the earth-god strain himself under the male nightly heaven till his erected phallus points to his mouth. That is to say, he must have impregnated himself, and the sun portrayed behind him is the egg which he will detach from himself as the result of this act.