Taweret

At the beginning there was only Nun, the dark and endless water, and then the first mound rose from it, the hill that the priests of Heliopolis, the city of the sun, called the ben-ben. Upon it stood Atum, the Complete One, who had made himself. He was alone, and from his own body he brought forth the first pair: Shu, the dry air, and Tefnut, the moisture. The priests told it with a pun, for Atum sneezed out Shu, and the word for sneeze was ishesh, and he spat out Tefnut, and the word for spit was tef. Brother and sister, air and water, they became husband and wife, and from their union came Geb, the green earth, and Nut, the starry sky, and from Geb and Nut came the gods of the great family: Osiris, who would rule the dead; Isis, the queen of magic; Set, the red god of chaos; and Nephthys, the dark sister of mourning. Nine in all, the Ennead of Heliopolis, and Tefnut was the first mother of them all.

Tefnut's element was everything wet: the dew on the fields, the rain that so rarely fell in Egypt and so was doubly holy, the moist air that made breath possible. She was pictured as a lioness, or as a woman with the head of a lioness crowned by the solar disk and the rearing cobra, for the lioness was the fiercest creature the Egyptians knew, and the sun's daughter shared her father's fire. In the Book of the Dead, the great collection of afterlife spells, she and Shu sit back to back as the two lions of the horizon, the guardians of yesterday and tomorrow, the pair through whom the sun is reborn each dawn. She had few temples of her own, for she was less a personality than a power, the wetness without which the cosmos would seize and die, but at Leontopolis, the City of Lions in the Delta, she and Shu were worshipped together in their lion forms.

Her one great story begins with a quarrel. Tefnut was the Eye of Ra, the blazing energy of the sun god, her father, and something, some insult, some slight that the old tellings leave in shadow, set her fury alight. She blazed out of Egypt and south into Nubia, the wild land beyond the cataracts, and there she raged as a lioness through the hills, devouring every living thing that crossed her path, her eyes like flames, her roar rolling off the rocks. Behind her, Egypt withered. Without the goddess of moisture the air dried, the dew failed, the land cracked, and the people grew afraid, for they understood what her absence meant: the world was drying to death.

So Ra sent for her. He dispatched Shu, her own twin and husband, and Thoth, the god of wisdom, who went south in the shape of a small baboon, humble and unthreatening. Thoth found the raging lioness and did what no spear could do: he talked. He told her fables, stories of animals outwitting one another, each with a gentle lesson about anger and home, until the fire in her eyes cooled and she began to remember Egypt. Calmed at last, she turned north, and as she came the land rejoiced: musicians and dancers went out to meet her, the air grew soft and damp, the dew returned, and the inundation, the yearly flood that fed the fields, rose as she entered Egypt. Ra embraced his daughter, and the story gave her rescuer a title that became a god of its own: Onuris, He Who Brings Back the Distant One, the hunter whom the Egyptians identified with Shu.

Her story became the pattern for every blazing daughter of the sun: for Sekhmet, the lioness of war; for Bastet, the cat of the hearth; for Hathor, the golden cow-horned goddess of love, when she raged; and for Wadjet, the cobra of the Delta crown, when she struck. At Philae and Edfu, the great late temples of the south, priests still celebrated the festival of the returning goddess when Egypt was ruled by Greek kings, and the tale was copied long after that, one of the last myths of Egypt ever written down. The temples closed, the old language was forgotten, and Tefnut, the first moisture, faded into the silence of the texts, known again only when the hieroglyphs were read once more. But she was never a god of temples. She was the dew on the grain and the breath of the morning, and in that sense she never left.