r and governor. Several
versions were current as to how he had passed from inertia into action,
from the personage of Tumu into that of Ra. According to the version
most widely received, he had suddenly cried across the waters, "Come
unto me!"[*] and immediately the mysterious lotus had unfolded its
petals, and Ra had appeared at the edge of its open cup as a disk,
a newborn child, or a disk-crowned sparrow-hawk; this was probably a
refined form of a ruder and earlier tradition, according to which it
was upon Ra himself that the office had devolved of separating Sibu from
Nuit, for the purpose of constructing the heavens and the earth.

* It was on this account that the Egyptians named the first
day of the year the _Day of Come-unto-me!_

But it was doubtless felt that so unseemly an act of intervention was
beneath the dignity even of an inferior form of the suzerain god; Shu
was therefore borrowed for the purpose from the kindred cult of Anhuri,
and at Heliopolis, as at Sebennytos, the office was entrusted to him
of seizing the sky-goddess and raising her with outstretched arms. The
violence suffered by Nuit at the hands of Shu led to a connexion of the
Osirian dogma of Mendes with the solar dogma of Sebennytos, and thus the
tradition describing the creation of the world was completed by another,
explaining its division into deserts and fertile lands. Sibu, hitherto
concealed beneath the body of his wife, was now exposed to the sun;
Osiris and Sit, Isis and Nephthys, were born, and, falling from the sky,
their mother, on to the earth, their father, they shared the surface of
the latter among themselves. Thus the Heliopolitan doctrine recognized
three principal events in the creation of the universe: the dualization
of the supreme god and the breaking forth of light, the raising of the
sky and the laying bare of the earth, the birth of the Nile and the
allotment of the soil of Egypt, all expressed as the manifestations
of successive deities. Of these deities, the latter ones already
constituted a family of father, mother, and children, like human
families. Learned theologians availed themselves of this example to
effect analogous relationships between the rest of the gods, combining
them all into one line of descent. As Atumu-Ra could have no fellow, he
stood apart in the first rank, and it was decided that Shu should be
his son, whom he had formed out of himself alone, on the first day of
creation, by the si