Nut
From ArchaeoWiki
The ancient Egyptian goddess Nut represented the personification of the sky or the heavens arching over the earth, separating the earth from the encircling waters of chaos from which the cosmos was formed.
A member of the Great Ennead of Heliopolis, Nut was the daughter of Shu and Tefnut, the gods of air and moisture respectively, themselves the first children of the creator deity Atum.
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Origins and Development
Although historically a generalised sky goddess, the suggestion of several scholars is that Nut may originally have specifically represented the Milky Way of the night sky: Spell 176 of the Book of the Dead makes reference to the broad and dense band of stars that cross the sky, the spell immediately following starting with an invocation of the goddess Nut.
Archaeoastronomical evidence exists to support this reconstruction of Nut's origins: Ronald Wells [1992] argues that in the Predynastic Period, the Egyptian winter solstice sky would have uncanningly resembled a stretched-out human figure, arms and legs reaching the horizon in the hours just before dawn. Moreover, at this time the sun would have risen in the general area of the divine figure's pudendum (representing his / its birth), just as—nine months' earlier, at the spring equinox—the sun would have set in the position of the figure's head (reflecting his / its being swallowed).
Function
Iconography
Cult
The cosmic deities of Egypt rarely possessed temples or organised cultic observances. In this—despite her frequent depictions in temples, tombs and on funerary equipment in her role as a cosmic deity—the goddess Nut formed no exception.
The role of Nut in popular religion observances, apparently extremely limited in scope and number, is most commonly detected by scholars in amulets of the sow (a female pig, occasionally with her piglets), that are found in burials from the Third Intermediate Period onwards. This amulet type, if worn in life and not merely a funerary offering, may well invoke the potency of Nut in (human) fertility and / or the phenomenon of rebirth.
Bibliography
- Hollis, S.T. [1987], "Women of Ancient Egypt and the Sky Goddess Nut", JAF 100 (1987), pp.496-503 [revised in Hollis, S.J., Pershing, L. & Young, M.J. (eds), Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, Urbana, 1993, pp.200-212.
- Lesko, Leonard H., "Nut", OEAE Volume II, pp.558-559.
- Wells, Ronald A. [1992], "The Mythology of Nut and the Birth of Re", SAK 19 (1992), pp.305-321.
