Nut

About Nut

Nut is the Egyptian goddess of the sky, the daughter of the air-god Shu and the moisture-goddess Tefnut, the sister and consort of the earth-god Geb, and the mother of the four great gods Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. In Egyptian art she is the great arch of the heavens, depicted as a woman whose star-spangled body bends over the earth, touching the ground with her fingertips in the west and her toes in the east, her body forming the vault of the sky beneath which the world exists. She belongs to the third generation of the Heliopolitan cosmogony and to the group of nine gods called the Ennead, and she is attested from the Pyramid Texts (c. 2400-2300 BCE) onward as the sky-mother who receives the dead king into the heavens.

Nut's defining myth is the daily cycle of the sun. Each evening she swallows the sun-god Ra as he sets in the west, and the sun travels through her body during the night; each morning she gives birth to him again in the east, the dawn rendered as the goddess bringing forth the sun from between her thighs. The same is said of the stars, which she swallows at dawn and bears again at dusk, so that the sky-goddess perpetually devours and renews the heavenly bodies. This made Nut a goddess of cyclical rebirth, the womb of the sky from which the sun is born anew each day, and by extension a goddess of the rebirth of the dead, who hoped to be reborn from her body as the sun is reborn each dawn.

Nut's birth in close embrace with Geb, and their separation by their father Shu, is among the foundational images of Egyptian cosmology. The earth and the sky were born pressed together with no space between them, and Shu, the air, came between them and lifted Nut up from Geb, raising the sky on high to make the habitable space of the world. From this separation the cosmos took its shape: the earth below, the sky above, and the air between. Nut's funerary role grew from her identity as the sky-mother. The dead, and above all the dead king, hoped to ascend to the sky and be received into the body of Nut, to be reborn from her as the sun is reborn, and her image was painted on the inner lids of coffins and on tomb ceilings, so that the goddess of the sky stretched protectively over the dead, ready to receive and renew them. The Book of Nut, a cosmological and astronomical text inscribed in the cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos (c. 1290 BCE) and copied later in the Carlsberg I papyrus, sets out the lore of the sky-goddess and the decanal stars that mark the hours of the night upon her body, making Nut the framework of Egyptian astronomy as well as the sky-mother of the dead. In a further tale, the births of her five children were tied to the five days added at the end of the Egyptian year: the sun-god decreed that Nut could bear on no day of the year, but Thoth won five extra days from the moon, outside the regular calendar, and on these epagomenal days the great gods were born, one on each day.

Mythology

The narrative of Nut is the story of the sky-goddess in the Heliopolitan cosmogony — her birth from the air and the moisture, her separation from the earth, her daily devouring and rebirth of the sun, and her role as the sky-mother who receives and renews the dead.

In the cosmogony of Heliopolis, the creator Atum arose from the primordial waters and brought forth the first divine pair, Shu the air and Tefnut the moisture. From Shu and Tefnut were born Geb the earth and Nut the sky, the next generation of the cosmos. Geb and Nut were born locked in a close embrace, the earth and the sky pressed together with no space between them, and in this union there was no room for the world. So Shu, the air, came between his two children and lifted Nut up from Geb, raising the sky on high above the earth. Into the space between them, the realm of air and light, the world was set, and the sun could cross the sky and the gods and the living could move upon the earth. The separation was a grief as well as a creation; the texts speak of the parted lovers, the earth reaching up and the sky bending down, held apart by the air that fills the space between them, and Nut arched above, her body the vault of the heavens.

The great myth of Nut is the daily cycle of the sun through her body. The Egyptians saw the sun set in the west each evening and rise in the east each morning, and they told this as the story of the sky-goddess who swallows the sun and gives it birth. Each evening, as the sun-god Ra sinks in the west, Nut swallows him, taking the sun into her mouth; through the night the sun travels through her body, hidden within the goddess; and each morning she gives birth to the sun anew in the east, the dawn rendered as Nut bringing forth the sun-god from between her thighs. The image of the goddess swallowing the sun in the west and bearing it again in the east, painted on tomb ceilings and coffins, makes the daily passage of the sun a perpetual cycle of death and rebirth within the body of the sky.

The same was said of the stars. Nut swallows the stars at dawn, when they vanish into the brightening sky, and gives them birth again at dusk, when they reappear in the darkening heavens, so that the sky-goddess perpetually devours and renews the heavenly bodies. There is a tension in this image, for the goddess who bears the stars also swallows them, and a myth preserved in the lore of the sky-goddess tells how Geb, her husband, was angered at Nut for swallowing their children the stars, calling her a sow that eats her piglets; but the swallowing is also a birth, for the stars are reborn from her each evening, and the cycle of devouring and bearing is the turning of day and night.

There is a further tale of how the days of the year came to be. In one tradition the sun-god, learning that Nut would bear children who would threaten his rule, decreed that Nut could give birth on no day of the year. But the god Thoth, playing a game with the moon, won from it a fraction of its light, enough to make five new days that belonged to no month and so fell outside the sun-god's decree. On these five intercalary days — the epagomenal days added to the Egyptian calendar of twelve thirty-day months — Nut gave birth to her five children, Osiris, Horus the Elder, Set, Isis, and Nephthys, one on each day. Through this tale the births of the great gods were tied to the structure of the Egyptian year, and the five days outside the calendar became the birthdays of the gods.

Nut's role as the sky-mother gave her a central place in the Egyptian hope for life after death. The dead, and above all the dead king, hoped to ascend to the sky and be received into the body of Nut, to be reborn from her as the sun is reborn each dawn. The Pyramid Texts call upon Nut to spread herself over the dead king, to take him into the sky as a star, to give him birth as she gives birth to the sun. Her image was painted on the inner lids of coffins, so that the dead person lay beneath the sky-goddess, enfolded in her body and ready to be reborn from her; and on the ceilings of tombs the arched figure of Nut stretched over the dead, the heavens bending protectively over the grave. The deceased, lying in the coffin beneath the painted body of the goddess, was in the embrace of the sky-mother, awaiting rebirth.

Nut was also the framework of Egyptian astronomy. The Book of Nut, inscribed in the cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos and copied later in a papyrus of the second century CE, sets out the lore of the sky-goddess and the decanal stars, the thirty-six star-groups whose risings marked the hours of the night and the weeks of the year. These decans were imagined as moving across the body of Nut, marking time upon the sky-goddess, so that the structure of the night and the year was written on her arched form. Thus Nut was at once the cosmological vault of the heavens, the mother who bears the sun and the stars each day, the sky-mother who receives and renews the dead, and the framework on which the Egyptians mapped the movements of the heavenly bodies — the great arch of the sky in whose body the whole drama of day and night, life and death, and rebirth was played out.

Symbols & Iconography

Nut's symbolism is the symbolism of the sky, the great vault of the heavens arched over the earth, the womb from which the sun and the stars are born each day. Her defining image, the woman whose star-spangled body bends over the earth, touching the ground with fingertips and toes, is among the foundational cosmological emblems of Egyptian thought, rendering the sky as a divine body that encloses and protects the world. The stars painted on her body make her the visible heavens, the night sky personified as a goddess.

The daily swallowing and rebirth of the sun is Nut's central symbol of cyclical renewal. As the goddess who takes the sun into her body at sunset and gives it birth again at dawn, Nut embodies the perpetual cycle of death and rebirth, the daily dying and renewal of the sun within the body of the sky. This symbolism of cyclical rebirth extends from the sun to the stars, which she also swallows and bears, and to the dead, who hope to be reborn from her body as the sun is reborn each dawn. Nut is the womb of the sky, the source of perpetual renewal.

Nut's funerary symbolism grows directly from her role as the sky-mother who bears the sun. The dead person laid in the coffin beneath the painted body of Nut is enfolded in the sky-goddess, in the embrace of the mother who will give him birth again as she gives birth to the sun. The image of Nut on the inner lid of the coffin and on the ceiling of the tomb makes the goddess the protective canopy over the dead, the heavens bending over the grave, and the symbol of the hope for rebirth from the body of the sky. The coffin becomes the body of Nut, the dead enclosed in the sky-mother and awaiting renewal.

The separation of Nut from Geb, with Shu standing between them, is one of the central symbolic images of Egyptian cosmology. The sky arched above, the earth stretched below, and the air between, rendered as Nut arching, Geb reclining, and Shu standing, express the basic structure of the cosmos and the act of c

Her defining image, the woman whose star-spangled body bends over the earth, touching the ground with fingertips and toes, is among the foundational cosmological emblems of Egyptian thought, rendering the sky as a divine body that encloses and protects the world. The image of Nut on the inner lid of the coffin and on the ceiling of the tomb makes the goddess the protective canopy over the dead, the heavens bending over the grave, and the symbol of the hope for rebirth from the body of the sky. The coffin becomes the body of Nut, the dead enclosed in the sky-mother and awaiting renewal.

The separation of Nut from Geb, with Shu standing between them, is one of the central symbolic images of Egyptian cosmology. Through these images Nut is at once the vault of the heavens, the womb of cyclical rebirth, the protective sky-mother of the dead, and the framework of the celestial order. In Egyptian art she is the great arch of the heavens, depicted as a woman whose star-spangled body bends over the earth, touching the ground with her fingertips in the west and her toes in the east, her body forming the vault of the sky beneath which the world exists.

Worship Practices

The Heliopolitan system, attested from the Pyramid Texts onward, provided the framework within which Nut was understood.

Nut's funerary role gave her a central place in the culture of Egyptian death and burial. Through these associations Nut stood at the intersection of religion and astronomy in Egyptian culture.

Like the other cosmological gods of the Ennead, Nut did not have a major independent cult center of the kind enjoyed by Osiris, Isis, or Amun. Her role was chiefly cosmological and funerary rather than cultic; she appears throughout Egyptian religious texts and art as the sky-goddess and the mother of the gods, but she was not the focus of a great temple cult. This reflects her character as a fixed structure of the cosmos and a figure of the funerary sphere rather than a god whose myths and worship drove the religious life of a city. Her presence was felt above all in the tomb and the coffin, where the sky-goddess enfolded the dead.

Nut's iconography, the arched sky-goddess over the reclining earth-god, became one of the recurring cosmological images of Egyptian art, appearing on coffins, papyri, and temple walls throughout pharaonic history and into the Greco-Roman period. The Dendera temple of the Greco-Roman period preserves elaborate ceilings depicting Nut and the astronomical lore associated with her, attesting the persistence of the sky-goddess and her cosmological role across three thousand years of Egyptian religion..

Sacred Texts

Pyramid Texts (c. 2375–2181 BCE; ed. R.O. Faulkner, Oxford, 1969; James P. Allen, SBL, 2005) are the earliest and most important sources for Nut's funerary role. Utterance 222 directly addresses Nut as the mother of the king, calling upon her to spread herself over him and take him into the sky: 'O Nut, you have appeared as a Great One, you have become mighty.' Utterance 447 describes the king ascending to the sky and being born of Nut. Utterances 431 and 432 invoke Nut as the star-covered sky who receives the dead king and gives him birth as the sun, establishing the coffin-Nut identification. The Pyramid Texts contain more than a dozen utterances directly invoking Nut in her funerary and cosmological roles.

Coffin Texts (Middle Kingdom, c. 2055–1650 BCE; trans. R.O. Faulkner, Aris & Phillips, 3 vols, 1973–78; hieroglyphic ed. Adriaan de Buck, OIP, 7 vols, 1935–61) expand the Nut tradition significantly. Spell 80 narrates the separation of Nut and Geb by Shu, giving the cosmological account of the air-god lifting the sky from the earth. Spells in the later portions of the corpus address Nut as the cosmic container of the sun, the womb through which the sun-god passes each night, developing the theology of the sky-goddess as the perpetual mother of the sun. Spells 160–161 address the five epagomenal days on which Nut bore her five children, tying the births of the great gods to the structure of the calendar.

The Book of Nut (c. 1290 BCE in the cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos; a later copy survives as Carlsberg I Papyrus, Papyrus Carlsberg 1, Copenhagen; ed. and trans. A. von Lieven, Grundriss des Laufes der Sterne: Das sogenannte Nutbuch, CNI 8, 2007) is the principal astronomical and cosmological text devoted to Nut. It describes the decanal stars moving across the body of the goddess, the mechanism by which the sky-goddess marks the hours of the night and the weeks of the year, making Nut the framework of Egyptian astronomical timekeeping. The text is available in partial translation in Richard Parker, A Vienna Demotic Papyrus on Eclipse- and Lunar-Omina (Brown, 1959).

Book of the Dead (New Kingdom onward; ed. Faulkner, BM Press, 1985) Spell 59 addresses Nut as the source of breath and water for the deceased. The standard cosmological vignettes in the papyrus of Ani (BM EA 10470, c. 1275 BCE) and the papyrus of Hunefer (BM EA 9901, c. 1275 BCE) depict Nut arching over Geb with Shu between them, the foundational cosmological image rendered for the dead. Spell 162 invokes Nut in her cow-form as the protector of the deceased.

Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride (Moralia V; Loeb, trans. F.C. Babbitt, 1936), chapter 12, recounts how Ra commanded that Nut should not give birth on any day of the year, and how Thoth won five days from the moon on which Nut bore her children. This is the principal Greco-Roman transmission of the myth of the five epagomenal days.

Significance

Nut's significance lies in her place at the foundation of the Egyptian cosmos as the sky-goddess, the great arch of the heavens over the earth, and as the mother of the four great gods of the Osirian drama. In the Heliopolitan cosmogony, Nut is the sky in the third generation of creation, paired with the earth-god Geb, and her separation from Geb by their father Shu is among the foundational acts of creation, the parting of sky and earth that made the habitable world. As a fixed structure of the cosmos, Nut is one of the steady supports of the Egyptian universe, the vault of the heavens beneath which the world exists.

Nut matters above all for the myth of the daily cycle of the sun. As the goddess who swallows the sun-god Ra at sunset and gives birth to him again at dawn, Nut embodies the perpetual cycle of death and rebirth, the daily renewal of the sun within the body of the sky. This myth made Nut a goddess of cyclical rebirth and the womb of the heavens, and it underlay the Egyptian conception of the renewal of the cosmos and the hope for the rebirth of the dead.

Nut's funerary significance is central to the Egyptian hope for life after death. The dead hoped to ascend to the sky and be reborn from the body of Nut, as the sun is reborn each dawn, and the painting of the sky-goddess on coffin lids and tomb ceilings made the dead lie in the embrace of the sky-mother, ready to be renewed from her body. The coffin became the body of Nut, the dead enclosed in the sky and awaiting rebirth, and the sky-goddess was woven into the whole Egyptian system of mortuary belief and ritual.

Nut is significant for the Egyptian science of astronomy and timekeeping. The decanal stars that move across her body marked the hours of the night and the weeks of the year, and the Book of Nut set out this astronomical lore, making the sky-goddess the framework of Egyptian astronomy. The tale of the five epagomenal days, on which Nut gave birth to her children, tied the births of the great gods to the structure of the Egyptian calendar, and made the sky-goddess a figure at the intersection of religion and astronomy.

For the broader study of Egyptian religion, Nut is significant as a witness to the Heliopolitan cosmogony, to the daily renewal of the sun, to the funerary hope for rebirth, and to the personification of the heavens. Her place in the Ennead, her central myth of the sun's cycle, her role in the burial of the dead, and her image as the arched sky over the earth made her a foundational figure of the Egyptian cosmos, present throughout three thousand years of Egyptian religious thought and art. The sky-goddess who gives birth to the sun and renews the dead, the mother of the great gods, and the vault of the heavens beneath which the whole drama of Egyptian myth unfolds remains central to any understanding of the Egyptian universe.

Connections

The cosmogony of Heliopolis is the theological system in which Nut is the sky-goddess, the third generation of creation descending from Atum through Shu and Tefnut. Nut's place in this system, paired with the earth-god Geb and separated from him by the air-god Shu, fixes her identity as the sky in the Egyptian account of creation.

The Ennead is the group of nine Heliopolitan gods to which Nut belongs, the divine family descending from Atum that includes Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. Nut occupies the third generation of the Ennead, the sky-goddess and mother of the great gods of the Osirian drama.

The Ra entry addresses the sun-god whom Nut swallows each evening and bears again each dawn, the daily cycle of the sun through the body of the sky-goddess that is Nut's central myth. The passage of the sun through Nut connects the sky-goddess to the whole Egyptian conception of the solar cycle and the renewal of the sun.

The Osiris entry covers Nut's son, the god of the dead born on the first of the five epagomenal days, and the Isis, Nephthys, and Set entries cover her other children, the great gods of the Osirian drama all born of Nut on the five days outside the calendar.

The Hathor entry addresses the cow-goddess who shares with Nut the celestial cow-form and the maternal and protective aspects of the sky, the two goddesses overlapping in the image of the great cow whose belly is the starry heavens. The Book of the Heavenly Cow develops the image of the sky as a great cow, an image shared between Nut and Hathor.

The Atum entry covers the creator of Heliopolis, Nut's great-grandfather and the source of the whole Ennead from which she descends. Among the sibling deities of this batch, Geb is Nut's earth-consort, Shu her father who separated her from the earth, and Tefnut her mother. The Pyramid Texts contain the earliest calls upon Nut to receive the dead king into the sky and give him birth as she gives birth to the sun, the foundation of her funerary role. The connections of Nut thus run through the whole Heliopolitan system, from the creator Atum through the cosmological structure of air, earth, and sky to the daily cycle of the sun, the births of the great gods on the five epagomenal days, and the funerary hope for rebirth from the body of the sky-goddess.

Further Reading