Ra

The sun

Three forms, two boats, one journey

Ra is the sun, and the Egyptians watched it closely enough to give him three names. In the morning he is Khepri, the scarab that rolls the disc up the sky as the beetle rolls its ball; at noon he is Ra, the disc with the cobra round it; in the evening he is Atum, the old man sinking in the west.

He travels in two boats. The day boat, Mandjet, carries him across the sky; at dusk he steps into the night boat, Mesektet, and enters the Duat, the world beneath the earth. The royal tombs of the Valley of the Kings are painted with this journey hour by hour: in the sixth hour his soul rests in the corpse of Osiris and the two are one god; in the seventh the serpent Apophis waits to stop the boat, and is bound and stabbed with knives; at dawn the scarab lifts the disc through the eastern mountains. The sun's return each day was Egypt's picture of eternity: not stillness, but a cycle that does not fail.

Because he could be seen, other gods were joined to him. Amun of Thebes became Amun-Ra, king of the gods; Horus of the horizon, Ra-Horakhty; even the crocodile Sobek shone as Sobek-Ra. The Litany of Ra, carved in the kings' tombs, names seventy-five forms of him.

The creator of Heliopolis

Nun, the mound and the Ennead

The priests of Heliopolis told the creation as the sun's first rising. In the beginning there was only Nun, the dark water. Out of it the god came into being by himself, as Atum, “the complete one”, and found a place to stand: a mound of earth like those the Nile leaves when the flood withdraws. Its memory was the benben stone in his temple, whose shape became the tip of every obelisk and pyramid. Alone, he brought out of his own body Shu, the air, and Tefnut, the moisture; they bore Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky, whose children were Osiris, Isis, Seth and Nephthys: the Ennead, the family from which the kings of Egypt claimed descent.

His rise to the head of the state can be dated. Djedefre, son of Khufu, was the first king to call himself “son of Ra”, about 2560 BC, and the title stayed in the royal names to the end. The kings of the Fifth Dynasty, whom a later tale made his own sons, built him open-air sun temples at Abusir, each with a great obelisk, and the texts in the pyramid of the last of them, Unas, send the dead king up to join his father in the boat.

The Eye and the disc

The old god, his daughter and Akhenaten

The sun has an Eye, and the Eye is a goddess: the burning heat of the disc, drawn as the cobra on his brow and called Hathor, Sekhmet, Wadjet or Tefnut according to the temple, but always his daughter. He sends her against his enemies, and she can go too far. In the Book of the Heavenly Cow mankind plots against the aged Ra; the Eye, as Sekhmet, slaughters them until the god stops her with beer dyed red, and then, tired of the world, he leaves it on the back of the sky-cow. In the Ptolemaic temples the Eye has gone off to Nubia in a rage and must be coaxed home before the new year.

These stories admit what the hymns do not: the sun-god can grow old, be bitten, be tricked by Isis out of his name, and withdraw. That is Egypt's account of the distance between gods and men, and of the king, who rules the earth in Ra's place. Akhenaten, about 1350 BC, took the argument to its end: he stripped the sun of its falcon head and its stories and worshipped the disc alone, the Aten, whose first formal name was still “Ra-Horakhty who rejoices in the horizon”. His successors restored the old gods, but as forms of the sun: for the priests of Thebes after Amarna, Amun was the hidden one whose visible body was Ra.