iversally accepted.

In explaining the origin of this mechanism of the heavens, the Egyptian
imagination ran riot. Each separate part of Egypt had its own hierarchy
of gods, and more or less its own explanations of cosmogony. There does
not appear to have been any one central story of creation that found
universal acceptance, any more than there was one specific deity
everywhere recognized as supreme among the gods. Perhaps the most
interesting of the cosmogonic myths was that which conceived that Nuit,
the goddess of night, had been torn from the arms of her husband, Sibu
the earth-god, and elevated to the sky despite her protests and her
husband's struggles, there to remain supported by her four limbs, which
became metamorphosed into the pillars, or mountains, already mentioned.
The forcible elevation of Nuit had been effected on the day of creation
by a new god, Shu, who came forth from the primeval waters. A
painting on the mummy case of one Betuhamon, now in the Turin Museum,
illustrates, in the graphic manner so characteristic of the Egyptians,
this act of creation. As Maspero(2) points out, the struggle of Sibu
resulted in contorted attitudes to which the irregularities of the
earth's surface are to be ascribed.

In contemplating such a scheme of celestial mechanics as that just
outlined, one cannot avoid raising the question as to just the degree
of literalness which the Egyptians themselves put upon it. We know how
essentially eye-minded the Egyptian was, to use a modern psychological
phrase--that is to say, how essential to him it seemed that all his
conceptions should be visualized. The evidences of this are everywhere:
all his gods were made tangible; he believed in the immortality of
the soul, yet he could not conceive of such immortality except in
association with an immortal body; he must mummify the body of the dead,
else, as he firmly believed, the dissolution of the spirit would take
place along with the dissolution of the body itself. His world was
peopled everywhere with spirits, but they were spirits associated always
with corporeal bodies; his gods found lodgment in sun and moon and
stars; in earth and water; in the bodies of reptiles and birds and
mammals. He worshipped all of these things: the sun, the moon, water,
earth, the spirit of the Nile, the ibis, the cat, the ram, and apis the
bull; but, so far as we can judge, his imagination did not reach to the
idea of an absolutely incorporeal deity