Geb

Geb was born into the first family of creation. His father was Shu, the god of the empty air, his mother was Tefnut, the goddess of moisture, and his grandfather was Atum, the self-created one who had risen from the dark waters at the dawn of time. Geb and his sister Nut, the sky, were twins, and they filled the whole of existence between them, for there was nothing but the ground below and the vault above. His body was the land: the black soil of the valley, the hills of the desert edge, the stone beneath the pyramids. Grain sprouted from his ribs, and the Egyptians said the harvest was his body feeding its children. His sacred bird was the goose, and the flocks that darkened the marshes were his own. And when the ground shook and the houses cracked and the Nile slopped against its banks, the Egyptians did not fear a stranger: they said Geb is laughing, and they listened to the earth god's mirth roll beneath their feet.

The great wound of Geb was his separation from Nut. The earth and the sky had loved each other completely, and they lay pressed together so closely that nothing could grow or move between them. Then Shu thrust himself between his children, put his shoulder beneath his daughter, and heaved her into the heights, where she arches still. The image never left Egyptian art: Nut stretched above, Geb below, one knee raised, still reaching up toward the wife he lost, while Shu stands between them with his arms raised to hold her off forever. The groaning that men heard in the earthquakes was his longing, and the laughter was his patience. From their union, in the five days that Thoth the scribe won for Nut in a game against the moon, came the five children who would rule the Egyptian imagination: Osiris, the king who would be murdered; Horus the Elder; Set, the storm; Isis, the enchantress; and Nephthys, the mourner. Geb was the Father of the Gods, and everything that happened afterwards in heaven and on earth was the story of his family.

Before he was a father, Geb was a maker of worlds. In the oldest telling of creation at Heliopolis, the city of the sun, he was the Great Cackler, the primeval goose whose cry was the first sound ever made, echoing over the waters of the beginning. The goose laid an egg, and from that egg broke the sun. The egg of Geb became one of the holiest images in Egypt, the shell that had contained all light, and the dead prayed to be counted worthy of its protection. The goose itself was kept sacred in his name, and when the priests of later ages gave the title Great Cackler to other gods, they were borrowing the honour of the earth.

It was as a king, though, that Geb mattered most to Egypt. When Ra, the sun god, grew old and withdrew into the sky, and Shu ruled after him, it was Geb who inherited the earth as its first true earthly king, the elder of the Ennead, the council of nine gods descended from Atum. Centuries later, when his family tore itself apart in the feud between his son Set, the red god of the desert, and his grandson Horus, the falcon son of the murdered Osiris, it was Geb who judged the case. The carved stone of King Shabaka, a black slab preserved in Memphis, records his verdict: first he divided the land in two, giving the south to Set and the north to Horus, and then, repenting, he gave the whole inheritance to Horus, for the son of the elder line should not lose his father's portion. That judgment became the charter of Egyptian kingship. Every pharaoh who ever ruled styled himself the heir of Geb, the living Horus upon the throne of Geb, and the right to the crown ran through the earth god's blood. The king was not merely a ruler of the land: he was the land's own heir.

And as he received the gods, Geb receives the dead. Every Egyptian grave was a return into his body, the tomb a door into the darkness of the earth, and the texts of the pyramids begged him to welcome the dead king as his child, to open the ground gently, and to lift him up among the gods. The fields above the graves were his skin, and the grain fed the living from the same body that sheltered the dead. He raised no vast temples and gathered no armies of priests, because he needed none: no Egyptian could walk a single step without treading on him. He was the floor of the world, the first ancestor, the judge in the stone, the laughter in the ground, and the goose whose egg was the sun.