Nut belonged to the first family of the gods. Her father was Shu, the god of the empty air, and her mother was Tefnut, the goddess of moisture, and they had been brought forth alone by Atum, the self-created one who rose from the primeval waters at the beginning of time. From Shu and Tefnut came two children, Nut the sky and Geb the earth, and the two of them filled the world between them. Her body was the vault of heaven, a woman's form dusted with stars, and her fingers and toes rested on the four corners of the earth. Her hair was the darkness between the stars, and the Egyptians called her She of the Thousand Souls, for every star was a spirit shining in her body. She had no temple of her own, because she did not need one: every open sky was her shrine, and no Egyptian ever lived a single day outside her sight.

The great sorrow of Nut was her separation from Geb. The earth and the sky had loved each other, and they lay locked together so closely that no room was left for anything to live between them. Then Shu, their father, forced them apart, thrusting himself between his children and lifting Nut high above his head, where she remains, held up by the air. The image was painted for three thousand years: Nut arched above, silver with stars, Geb green below, still reaching upward toward her, and Shu between them with his arms raised. The Egyptians said the earthquakes were Geb groaning for his wife. Worse was to come. Ra, the high sun god, saw that Nut was with child and laid a curse upon her: she would give birth on no day of the year, and the year then had only three hundred and sixty days. Nut was saved by Thoth, the clever god of writing, who played the moon at draughts and won a sliver of its light from every day, enough to piece together five whole new days that belonged to no year and stood outside the curse. On those five days Nut bore five children: Osiris, the future king; Horus the Elder; Set, the future storm; Isis, the future enchantress; and Nephthys, the lady of mourning. The Egyptians kept those five days as the unluckiest and holiest of the year.

Every evening, Nut eats the sun. When the sun god has sailed his boat across her body from dawn to dusk, he comes to her mouth in the west, and she swallows him, and the world goes dark. All night the dead sun journeys down the inside of her body, past the stars that are her children, and in the hour before morning he comes to her womb and she gives him birth again, red and new, from between her thighs in the east. This was not a once-told tale but a machine that ran every night of the world, and the Egyptians painted it in gold on the ceiling of the tomb of Ramesses VI, a king of the Twentieth Dynasty: the goddess doubled, swallowing the sun at one end of the sky and bearing it at the other. The stars she swallowed each morning and bore again each night, and in some grim tellings she was a great sow who devoured her own piglets, so that men feared the mother who ate what she bore. She was the sky, and the sky is generous and pitiless at once.

When humanity rebelled against the old sun god, Ra resolved to leave the earth, and it was Nut who carried him away. She took the shape of a cow, the heavenly cow, and Ra mounted her back and commanded her to rise. Up she went, higher and higher, until the earth fell away below and she grew dizzy in the heights, trembling on her legs. Then Ra called for Shu, and Shu came and stood beneath her belly, and the eight Heh gods, the spirits of infinity, took her legs upon their shoulders, and so the sky was lifted into place and stayed there. The story was carved in the gold shrines of Tutankhamun, the boy-king of the Eighteenth Dynasty, and in the tombs of kings after him, as the explanation of why heaven and earth are separate: once they were one flesh, and the gods tore them apart to make room for the world.

It was as the mother of the dead that Nut was loved the most. From the days of the pyramid builders, the texts painted on tomb walls begged her to spread herself over the dead king, to draw him up among the stars, to bear him a second time as an imperishable light of heaven. Coffins were carved and painted with her image on their inner floors and lids, so that the dead lay beneath her and within her at once, and she stretched her arms around them and promised to receive them. In the vignettes of the collection of afterlife spells she appears as a sycamore tree growing from the edge of the world, pouring water and bread for the souls who pass beneath her leaves. At Dendera, in the Greek and Roman age, her body was carved in a great circle across a temple ceiling, ringed with the signs of the zodiac, until a French expedition sawed the stone free in 1821 and carried it to Paris, where it hangs today. She who had no temple ended up in a museum, still spread out over the heads of everyone below, still holding up her stars.