Egyptian Mythology
Written by Christine Breese, D.D., Ph.D. and Sean Michael Smith
Plutarch, a Greek historian, has written most of what we know about the story of Osiris. Osiris was one of the greatest gods in the Egyptian Pantheon. Most other stories from Egyptian legends and myths are lost, except for snippets and incomplete stories that managed to be remembered. Most of Egyptian myth was never set down in writing. Only the story of Osiris is the best preserved in the writings in Egyptian tombs.
Long before the first hieroglyphs, the people of the Nile valleys lived in tribes and each tribe had its own God. This god incarnated as an animal, bird or an inanimate fetish of some sort. Animal deities eventually gave way to human deities in human form, and nothing of animal worship is left except the animal’s head being worn by a man or woman. These were the gods and goddesses.
At first these were lone gods, but then Egyptians saw fit to create a family of gods and goddesses, for they could not fathom the idea of how lonely it must be for a god not to have a wife and children. So, they created goddesses and children of these deities. Egyptians became farmers instead of hunters. However, each town, no longer a nomadic tribe, still had its own god which oversaw the affairs of that particular group of people. From the second dynasty on, this was the form of divinity until the end of paganism (religions containing multiple gods in charge of different affairs).
Egyptians also worshipped the divinities of nature, the sky the earth, the sun, the moon, and of course the Nile River, believed to be the source that created Egypt. The sky was considered feminine and thus was a goddess who barely touched the earth with her fingers and toes. Sometimes they saw the sky goddess as a cow with all four feet planted firmly on the ground. Also they imagined that the night sky, with all its stars, was the belly of the goddess. Another image associated with the sky goddess is that of the head of a falcon who opened and closed its eyes alternately, thus the day and the night. This goddess was called Nut or Hathor.
The earth was considered masculine. It was portrayed as a man laying face down on the ground with vegetation growing up out of his back, supporting all of life. This god was called Geb.
The sun had a lot of names and had many varied interpretations. The sun was called Aten and was considered masculine. Depending on where the sun was in the sky, this god was called different names to denote different positions. These names were Khepre, Ra and Atum. Horus was another widespread name for the sun. Some interpretations say that the sun was a suckling child of the sky goddess, and was reborn every day. Other interpretations say that he was a golden egg laid daily by a great goose. Most often he was referred to as a giant scarab rolling the globe of the sun before him the way that a regular scarab rolls dung.
The moon also had many names. It was called Aah, Thoth, Khons and sometimes simply called the son of Nut, the sky goddess. He was thought of as the left eye of a great hawk whose right eye was the sun.
Beyond the gods, the creator of the gods themselves was believed to be Demiurge. Demiurge was supposed to have created the gods with his voice, when he spat, excreted waste, sweated, or cried. Another belief was that mankind and the animals had simply risen from the mud of the Nile. It was believed that Demiurge had created them on a potter’s wheel out of the mud.
The tomb of Thuthmosis III denotes a list of seven hundred and forty gods, most of whom we only know the names of, and nothing else. It was quite clear from studies of the hieroglyphs that there were many gods, and that many things were explained by the existence of these gods. The Egyptians were fond of inventing gods, and seemed to invent one whenever something needed explaining.
The most popular and most documented gods are the ones from the Ennead of Heliopolis, a major metropolis and large civilization in Egypt. This is a much taught cosmological system taught by the priests of this city. Other large concentrations of population might have had completely different stories or names, but these are not well documented by the scribes of old, or the records have simply not been found.