(West Asian mythology)
Heliopolis was the cult centre for Re, or Ra, the sun god. Such was his authority that he appears in the myths of many cults and even in his dotage the Egyptians thought of him as retaining immense power. In the third millennium BC the Pharaoh Chephren first styled himself ‘son of Re’, but it was the reforming zeal of Amenophis IV (1387–1366 BC) that raised the worship of the sun god to unprecedented heights. As Akhenaton, ‘the devotee of Aton’, this unusual pharaoh sought to concentrate devotion on the purely material character of the sun god as a solar disc, Aton. He rejected the deities invoked by previous rulers and persecuted the priests of Amun, the ram-headed god of Thebes, whose influence in religious affairs had been unchallenged since the expulsion of the Hyksos. He decided to build a new residence for Re and himself: this city, called Akhetaton, ‘the horizon of Aton’, was situated about half-way between Thebes and Memphis. There Aton was worshipped as the creative principle of all life, the father of all men, who gave them different coloured skins, different languages, and different lands. To the Egyptians he gave the Nile, to others rain. Preoccupied with religious doctrine, Akhenaton remained in Akhetaton, isolated from the rest of the country and apparently unperturbed by the loss of Egypt's possessions in Canaan. Yet he did not succeed in establishing a faith which dispensed with Egyptian mythology, for after his death Tutankhamen brought the court back to Thebes, and under the last pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, Haremheb (1353–1319 BC), all trace of Aton-worship disappeared.
In Heliopolitan myth, Re as Atum was the creator of the universe. Self-existent and alone, Atum brought forth–either through an act of masturbation or by means of spittle–the divine pair of Shu, air, and Tefnut, moisture. From their union sprang the earth god Geb and the sky goddess Nut. The arch-enemy of Atum was the serpent Apophis, the equivalent of the Babylonian she-dragon Tiamat, slain by the sun god Marduk. Shu, Atum's son, vanquished the host of Apophis or, according to another version, the conqueror of chaotic forces was Seth. However, Apophis never assumed the same importance in Egypt as the evil spirit did in other West Asian traditions. The Nile inundation was a regular event, not the incalculable floods of the Tigris-Euphrates valley. We find nothing akin to the conflict of hostile powers evident in Babylonian mythology, where the archetypal dragon of chaos and its engulfing element, the primeval waters, required the heroic intervention of the sun god.
At a temple in Thebes there occurred a ritual to aid Re in his daily struggle with Apophis. It was believed that after sunset the forces of the serpent assailed Re and the ensuing battle lasted throughout the night. Even after sunrise Apophis would sometimes dare to raise storm clouds in the sky in order to obscure the light and power of the sun. The Theban ceremony involved the destruction of a magical image. A figure of Apophis, represented as a crocodile or a serpent, was made of wax, and on it his name was inscribed in green ink. Along with effigies of his followers, also wrapped in papyrus, Apophis was insulted, hacked with a knife, and thrown to the ground. Meanwhile the priest recited a spell. The practice of the magic arts was interwoven inextricably with religious ritual in Egypt, where even the gods themselves could be said to have used spells. The deities created by Atum were manifestations of his hike, or ‘magical power’.
The dotage of Re is the subject of several popular myths. To Isis the terrified old man of the heavens revealed his ineffable name. To the cow goddess Hathor a short-tempered, quarrelsome greybeard entrusted the slaughter of mankind. Another example of the intermingling of legend concerns the eye of Re and the eye lost by Horus in his combat with Seth. Originally separate myths, they were often linked together in late versions of divine events. The eye of Re, the morning star, was connected with Osiris after he had been brought back to life by his son Horus. In the form of Tefnut, the eye of the sun god actually vanished for a period of time and only returned after long entreaty and propitiation.
Re played as conspicuous a role in the care of the dead as he did in the shaping of human destiny. With Horus he set up in the royal tomb the ladder of escape for the dead pharaoh. Re, too, led his spirit into the palace of the gods. Worship of Re finally succumbed to competition from the Osiris cult, whose prime interest in death and resurrection satisfied a need unmet by the cosmological speculation of the solar myths.
