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Nut

AlsoNut

Sky Goddess Arched Into the Heavens, Who Swallows the Sun Each Night and Bears It Again at Dawn

The Beginning of Chaos and Order · Primordial Creators

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Who they are

Nut is the sky goddess, the most moving figure in the Egyptian image of the cosmos: her naked body arched into a vault, hands and feet touching the ground, her star-strewn form covering the whole earth, held up from below by the air god Shu. She is the mother of four gods — Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys — the source of the entire Osiris myth. Each dusk she swallows the sun; through the night the sun passes through her body; at dawn it is born anew from between her legs: sunrise and sunset imagined as a mother swallowing and delivering the sun each day. And so she is also the protector of the dead, and the inside of coffin lids often shows her body with arms outspread, a sign that the departed will be reborn in her embrace like the sun.

Key stories

The Five Cursed Days

Learning that Nut would bear a child to seize the throne, the sun god Ra cursed her to give birth on none of the three hundred and sixty days of the year. The wisdom god Thoth gambled with the moon and won five extra days of light — days that belonged to no former year. In these "days outside the year" Nut bore, one after another, Osiris, Horus the Elder, Set, Isis, and Nephthys. The structure of the Egyptian calendar — a year of 360 days plus 5 "epagomenal days" — was thus written into the myth: the birth of the gods was stolen from a seam in time.

Swallowing the Sun Each Night

At dusk, Nut opens her mouth and swallows the setting sun; all night the sun travels through the darkness within her; at dawn she bears it again from between her legs, and the sky blazes with light. The inside of coffins depicts again and again her body bent and arms outspread — to place the dead in the coffin was to return them to the sky mother, in the hope that they, like the sun, would pass through the darkness in her embrace and rise to rebirth. Death was therefore no ending, but a passage into the mother's body to await new birth.