* Harmakhûîti is Horus, the sky of the two horizons; i.e. the sky of the daytime, and the night sky. When the
celestial Horus was confounded with Râ, and became the sun
(cf. p. 133), he naturally also became the sun of the two
horizons, the sun by day, and the sun by night.
** E. de Rouge, Études sur le Rituel funéraire, p. 76:
"His name may be connected with two radicals. Tem is a
negation; it may be taken to mean the Inapproachable One,
the Unknown (as in Thebes, where Aman means mystery).
Atûm is, in fact, described as 'existing alone in the
abyss,' before the appearance of light. It was in this time
of darkness that Atûm performed the first act of creation,
and this allows of our also connecting his name with the
Coptic tamio, creare. Atûm was also the prototype of man
(in Coptic tme, homo), and becomes a perfect 'tûm' after
his resurrection." Rugsch would rather explain Tûmû as
meaning the Perfect One, the Complete. E. de Rougé's
philological derivations are no longer admissible; but his
explanation of the name corresponds so well with the part
played by the god that I fail to see how that can be
challenged.
Tûmû was a man crowned and clothed with the insignia of supreme power, a true king of gods, majestic and impassive as the Pharaohs who succeeded each other upon the throne of Egypt. The conception of Khopri as a disk enclosing a scarabæus, or a man with a scarabous upon his head, or a scarabus-headed mummy, was suggested by the accidental alliteration of his name and that of Khopirrû, the scarabæus. The difference between the possible forms of the god was so slight as to be eventually lost altogether. His names were grouped by twos and threes in every conceivable way, and the scarabæus of Khopri took its place upon the head of Râ, while the hawk headpiece was transferred from the shoulders of Harmakhûîti to those of Tûmû. The complex beings resulting from these combinations, Râ-Tûmû, Atûmû-Râ, Râ-Tûmû-Khopri, Râ-Harmakhûîti-Tûmû, Tûm-Harmakhûîti-Khopri, never attained to any pronounced individuality.
They were as a rule simple duplicates of the feudal god, names rather than persons, and though hardly taken for one another indiscriminately, the distinctions between them had reference to mere details of their functions and attributes. Hence arose the idea of making these gods into embodiments of the main phases in the life of the sun during the day and throughout the year. Râ symbolized the sun of springtime and before sunrise, Harmakhûîti the summer and the morning sun, Atûmû the sun of autumn and of afternoon, Khopri that of winter and of night. The people of Heliopolis accepted the new names and the new forms presented for their worship, but always subordinated them to their beloved Râ. For them Râ never ceased to be the god of the nome; while Atûmû remained the god of the theologians, and was invoked by them, the people preferred Râ. At Thinis and at Sebennytos Anhûri incurred the same fate as befell Râ at Heliopolis. After he had been identified with the sun, the similar identification of Shû inevitably followed. Of old, Anhûri and Shû were twin gods, incarnations of sky and earth. They were soon but one god in two persons—the god Anhûri-Shû, of which the one half under the title of Auhûri represented, like Atûmû, the primordial being; and Shû, the other half, became, as his name indicates, the creative sun-god who upholds (shû) the sky.
Tûrnû then, rather than Râ, was placed by the Heliopolitan priests at the head of their cosmogony as supreme creator and governor. Several versions were current as to how he had passed from inertia into action, from the personage of Tûmû into that of Râ. 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 Râ 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 Râ himself that the office had devolved of separating Sibû from Nûît, 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; Shû was therefore borrowed for the purpose from the kindred cult of Anhûri, 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 Nûît at the hands of Shû 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. Sîbû, 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 Atûmû-Râ could have no fellow, he stood apart in the first rank, and it was decided that Shû should be his son, whom he had formed out of himself alone, on the first day of creation, by the simple intensity of his own virile energy. Shû, reduced to the position of divine son, had in his turn begotten Sibû and Nûît, the two deities which he separated. Until then he had not been supposed to have any wife, and he also might have himself brought his own progeny into being; but lest a power of spontaneous generation equal to that of the demiurge should be ascribed to him, he was married, and the wife found for him was Tafnûît, his twin sister, born in the same way as he was born. This goddess, invented for the occasion, was never fully alive, and remained, like Nephthys, a theological entity rather than a real person. The texts describe her as the pale reflex of her husband.
