Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 12 (Egyptian and Indo-Chinese).djvu/76

50 who begat" or "formed himself"; and that he then created the space of air between heaven and earth (Shu and Tefênet), after whom heaven and earth (Qêb and Nut) themselves were brought into being. From these gods came the rest of the creation, including the new sun as Osiris, or the sun-god continued to create gods and finally produced men from his eyes, etc. This is the old Heliopolitan doctrine of creation as reflected in the arrangement of the ennead of Heliopolis (see pp. 215-16). We may thus infer that the doctrine of the ogdoad rested on the different belief that air preceded the sun and separated the sky (Nut) and the abyss (Nuu), from whom the sun was born at the creation, as it is born anew every day (cf. pp. 47, 49). The double occurrence of the sun as Atum-Rê‘ and as Osiris in the Heliopolitan doctrine, and the very ancient rôle of Shu as the separator of the two principal parts of the world, again lead us to suppose that variants existed according to which the sun-god took a later place in the creation. In similar fashion we read in some texts that after growing in the ocean, or in the blue lotus which symbolizes it, the sun-god climbed directly on the back of the heavenly cow (see Fig. 27), thus implying the pre-existence of heaven, air, and other elements, and of the earth as well.

An old variant of this creation of the world from the abyss seems to be preserved in the tradition which makes the ram-headed god Khnûm(u) of Elephantine and his wife, the frog-headed Ḥeqet, "the first gods who were at the beginning, who built men and made the gods." The underlying idea simply seeks the origin of all waters, including the ocean, in the mythological source of the Nile between the rocks of the First Cataract; so that Khnûm as "the source-god" is treated as a mere localized variant of Nuu. Even in the Ancient Empire Khnûm and Ḥeqet were transferred to Abydos for the sake of fusion with the Osiris-myth, which found there not only the