Hey everyone, welcome to Mythology Explained.
In today’s video, we’re going to dive into some Egyptian mythology, specifically,
the twin serpents of creation and destruction, Atum and Apophis - one to create the world,
raising it out of the waters of chaos, the other to destroy it, returning it to the waters
of chaos.
To begin with, we’re going to discuss the state of existence before creation; then,
we’re going to look at the creation of the world; and finally, we’re going to look
at the end of the universe and at the cyclical view of eternity held by ancient Egyptians.
Let’s get into it.
Looked at linearly, the timeline of ancient Egyptian mythology can be segmented into seven
stages: the oneness of pure chaos, the self-engenderment of the creator, the creation of the world
and its denizens (gods, humans, animals), the rule of Ra, the sun god, the rule of other
deities, the time of mortal Egyptian kings, and lastly, the inevitable return to chaos.
In the beginning there was only chaos, and for the ancient Egyptians chaos wasn’t conceptualized
as a great void but by the primordial waters of Nun, which were dark, boundless, and infinite.
In them was contained limitless potential, for the latent power of creation existed in
them; yet alone nothing could come of them, for they were perfectly homogenous; in this
uniform state, the elements of creation were unseparated, making them inert.
It wasn’t until opposites came to be, existing as a series of binaries - life and death,
light and dark, male and female, and so on - that creation became possible, as is said
in this passage from Egyptian Mythology: A guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions
of Ancient Egypt:
“The origin of the universe was an intellectual problem that came to fascinate the Egyptians.
Texts that allude to the unknowable era before creation define it as the time “before two
things had developed”.
The cosmos was not yet divided into pairs of opposites.”
What comes next is more than a bit confusing - at least, to me it is - for unlike Norse
and Greek mythology, or any of the three Abrahamic religions, Egyptian mythology doesn’t have
one predominant creation myth.
What we know as Egyptian mythology happened over thousands of years over a large geographic
area, so as you can imagine, different places at different times favored different gods,
often adjusting myths, the creation myth in particular, to revolve around these different
gods.
To keep this video on track, avoiding a vortex of creation myths and syncretic gods, we’re
going to keep things simple, narrowing the scope of our discussion to the Ennead of Heliopolis,
a group of nine gods, the first of which is Atum, a self-engendered creator deity who
came into being at the beginning of time.
He was called ‘The One Who Made Himself Into Millions’ because everything was of
him, as he independently produced the first gods, personifications of the world from whom
everything else stemmed: other material manifestations, forces, gods, people, and creatures.
Before separating the constituent elements of the waters of Nun into pairs of opposites,
allowing these binaries to be harnessed, Atum was thought of as a great serpent swimming
the endless waters of chaos.
His first act was to create the primordial mound, itself an extension of Atum, which
allowed creation to begin.
This is described in The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt; here’s the passage:
“Atum was not only viewed as the creator but also the original creation itself.
He was thus the primeval mound which rose from the waters of creation and was represented
in this aspect by the sacred ben-ben stone, which was worshiped at Heliopolis from the
earliest dynasties and which may have originally been a meteorite or some other sacred stone.”
Though the primeval mound itself was an aspect of Atum, the creation of this mound allowed
Atum in his creator form to rise up from the waters of Nun, at which point he manifested
another aspect of himself in Ra, the creator’s solar form, creating Atum-Ra.
Initially, Atum embodied both halves of the male-female dichotomy, but after independently
creating his two children, Shu and Tefnut, the second and third gods to exist, he shed
his androgyny and crystallized into an exclusively male deity.
Shu was the god of air, and Tefnut was the goddess of moisture.
From their union came the fourth and fifth gods of the Ennead, a son, Geb, the personification
of the earth, and a daughter, Nut, the personification of the sky.
Like Gaia and Uranus were in Greek mythology, Geb and Nut were conjoined and needed to be
separated so that life could exist between them.
Their father, Shu, split them apart, and the image of him pressing Nut above his head,
Geb underfoot, was one of the most commonly depicted scenes by ancient Egyptians.
The separation of Geb and Nut, earth and sky, allowed the sun to rise for the first time,
which is why Shu himself is sometimes regarded as a creator deity.
The final four deities of the Ennead were produced by Geb and Nut; they were: Osiris,
Set, Isis, and Nephthys.
Being boundless and infinite, the waters of Nun, which were thought to be the ultimate
source of the Nile, continued to exist after the world was created, enveloping the earth
as we know the void of space to envelope earth, or as the crushing depths of the ocean would
envelope a stone suspended in an air bubble deep underwater.
The cyclical conceptualization of death and rebirth, especially as it applied to the creation
and destruction of the world, was very much predicated on and influenced by the ebb and
flow of the Nile river.
The Nile’s waters receding, exposing its fertile banks, parallels the beginning of
creation when the primeval mound emerges, and the flooding of the Nile, reclaiming the
surrounding land with its flow, parallels the end of the world when everything returns
back to the primordial waters of Nun, the chaotic state of oneness that existed before
creation.
In Atum’s creator form, especially when thought of in the primordial waters of Nun
before the advent of creation, he was conceived of as a great serpent, an animal that symbolizes
completeness through the undividedness of its body, as well as renewal through the process
of shedding and regenerating its skin.
When thought of in serpent form, Atum incarnates the positive, creative power of chaos, and
as there is a positive creative, so must there be a negative destructive, which begs the
question: what is the antithetical entity making up the other half of this duality,
that incarnates the countervailing power of destructive chaos?
Well, here’s another passage from Egyptian Mythology: A guide to the God, Goddesses,
and the Traditions of Ancient Egypt to explain:
“When creator gods such as Atum or Amun are spoken of as serpents, they usually represent
the positive aspect of chaos, as an energy force, but they had a negative counterpart
in the great serpent Apophis.
Apophis represented the destructive aspect of chaos that constantly tried to overwhelm
all individual beings and reduce everything back to its primeval state of “oneness.”
With epithets like “Evil One” and ``the Great Rebel”, it's unsurprising that Apophis,
a colossal cosmic snake, is the most powerful monster in Egyptian mythology.
After all, he is a serpentine manifestation of the destructive power of chaos.
And unlike Typhon, the most powerful monster in Greek mythology, whose dastardly desire
was to rule the cosmos, Apophis’ own ambition wasn’t so provincial, as he wanted to unravel
the very fabric of reality, like a high tide coming in that washes over a sandcastle and
consigns it to oblivion.
His existence was an unending threat to the divine order and the continuation of creation.
He lurked in the duat, the underworld, where every night when Ra sailed through, he sent
his strangling coils against the sun god.
Though, to the great relief of all sentient creatures that wish to go on living, Ra, with
the help of the other gods who accompanied him on his boat, was always victorious.
Atum-Ra, a syncretic synthesis of Atum, the ultimate creator, and Ra, the personification
of the sun, was the supreme life-sustaining force.
Because of this, the nightly battle between Ra and Apophis was really a clash between
the two opposing forces of chaos, and since Ra always won, creation continued; however,
if the opposite were to have happened, if Apophis won, then the sun wouldn't rise the
next morning, the world would stay dark, and life would end.
It was said that, like Atum, Apophis existed in the waters of Nun before the inexorable
flow of time, before the primeval mound rose up, meaning the dichotomy of absolute creation
and absolute destruction, the two entities that, respectively, embodied those forces,
one to make the world, the other to unmake it, existed before creation, each of them
in the form of a cosmic serpent.
According to the story of the shipwrecked sailor, a Middle Kingdom story, nearly every
serpent deity perishes by fire.
Of them, none survives save the great serpent, one of the forms of the creator, and the Eye
goddess, also called Maat, the creator’s daughter.
The sailor is warned that when the great serpent departs, the sea will consume the “island
of spirit”, an image that conjures to mind the primeval mound slipping back into the
waters of Nun.
This sentiment is echoed in Coffin Texts spell 1130, in which the creator recounts the gifts
he bestowed on humanity, then going on to explain that after ages and ages, after millions
of years have come and gone like the rising and setting of the sun, he and Osiris, the
lord of the underworld, will become one.
With this union, these two gods coalesced into one, the barrier separating life and
death will cease to be, bringing about a cataclysm, possibly because Apophis would no longer be
confined to the underworld, among other reasons.
And continuing in this vein, in spell 175 from the Book of the Dead, Atum states that,
after millions of years have passed, he will put an end to everything he built, returning
creation itself back to the watery abyss, to the deep dark of the fathomless and ineffable.
Though the world - creation itself, even - is doomed to destruction, a grim fate prophesied
by the creator, made incontrovertible and inevitable by his utterance, this will not
be a final end, but rather the most recent end before the next beginning; for the ancient
Egyptian view of time was cyclical: as the world was destined to end, so was it destined
to begin anew, an eternal process of birth and death on cosmic scale, unconstrained by
space or time - Apophis and Atum continuing to navigate the primeval waters of Nun before
and after each cycle of creation and destruction
As a final thought, I’d like to say a quick word on the Ouroboros, which is a snake with
a tail in its mouth in the shape of a circle.
It symbolizes eternity, how the universe is constantly changing, signifying that every
end is just a moment before the next beginning.
And that’s it for this video!
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