Neith was worshipped before the first pharaohs united the Two Lands, her name appearing on artefacts from the Naqada II period around 3600 BCE, when Egypt was still a patchwork of villages and the delta was a maze of marshes and reeds. In those earliest centuries she was a goddess of hunting and war, her symbol a pair of crossed arrows lashed to a pole, though some believe the original emblem was a click beetle, an insect found near water that connected her to the primordial floods from which creation emerged. By the time of the Early Dynastic Period she was already a power to be reckoned with, her name woven into the titles of queens like Neithhotep, the wife of Narmer, the king credited with uniting Upper and Lower Egypt. She wore the Red Crown of Lower Egypt, the Deshret, and her city of Sais in the western delta became the centre of her cult, a place where her authority over war, weaving, and motherhood merged into a single formidable presence.

The defining moment of Neith's mythic career came during the Contendings of Horus and Set, the great tribunal of the gods that met to decide whether the throne of the murdered Osiris should pass to his son Horus or to his brother Set, the red-haired god of chaos who had killed him and scattered his body across Egypt. The gods debated for eighty years without reaching a verdict, and in their desperation they wrote to Neith, the eldest and wisest of the divine council, asking for her judgment. Her reply was unequivocal: Horus was the rightful heir, the son of Osiris, and Set should be compensated with foreign lands and two foreign goddesses, Anat and Astarte, as his wives. Then she added a threat that chilled the assembly: if they ignored her advice, she would become so furious that the sky would touch the ground, reversing the act of creation itself and returning the world to the formless waters of Nun. The gods accepted her ruling at once, and Horus took the throne, though Set would remain a restless force beyond Egypt's borders.

The most famous myth of Neith is the creation story carved into the walls of her temple at Esna in the Graeco-Roman period, a tale that elevated her from warrior and judge to the supreme architect of the cosmos. In the beginning there was only Nun, the dark and boundless waters of chaos, and from these waters Neith emerged in the form of Mehet-Weret, the Great Flood Cow, whose body was the very substance of creation. She transformed into a Nile perch, the sacred fish of Esna, and opened her eyes, bringing the first light into a universe that had known only darkness. Through the power of her speech she commanded the primeval mound to rise, and it broke the surface simultaneously at Esna and at Sais, creating the first dry land. She conceived the sun god Ra in her heart and spoke his name, and an egg emerged from her body that hatched to reveal the blazing god. Ra wept tears of joy that fell upon the mound and became the first human beings, and Neith, taking the form of a cow once more, carried him north upon her horns to her city of Sais, where the two were reunited in a festival of torches that the Egyptians celebrated ever after.

Neith's role as a weaver connected her to the most intimate mystery of Egyptian religion: the preservation of the dead. The Egyptians believed she wove the linen wrappings of mummies on her celestial loom, and in this capacity she became one of the four goddesses who protected the canopic jars that held the internal organs of the deceased. Neith stood guard over Duamutef, the jackal-headed son of Horus who watched over the stomach, while her sister goddesses Isis, the goddess of magic and motherhood, Nephthys, the goddess of protection and mourning, and Serket, the scorpion goddess, protected the other three jars. In the Pyramid Texts, the earliest religious writings ever carved, kings called upon her to open the ways for them in the afterlife, and she was given the epithet "Opener of the Ways," a title she shared with Wepwawet, the jackal god of Abydos. She was also the mother of Sobek, the crocodile god, and in some traditions she created the great serpent Apep by spitting into the waters of Nun, a reminder that the mother of light was also the mother of darkness.

Neith outlasted nearly every other goddess of the early pantheon. When the kings of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty made Sais their capital around 664 BCE, they restored her temple to grandeur and claimed her as their divine patron, burying their own dead beneath her precincts. The Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the fifth century BCE, described the Feast of Lamps held in her honour at Sais, when the Egyptians burned countless lights through the night in open celebration. The Greeks identified her with Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, and the philosopher Plato recorded that the people of Sais claimed Neith as their foundress. The philosopher Proclus preserved the famous inscription from her temple: "I am all that has been, and is, and will be. No mortal has ever lifted my veil." Even after Christianity closed the old temples, those words survived as a testament to the goddess who was creation itself, hidden behind a veil that no human hand has ever parted.