Circling about the southern side of the, world was a great river suspended in mid-air on something comparable to mountain cliffs; on which river the sun-god made his daily course in a boat, fighting day by day his ever-recurring battle against Set, the demon of darkness. The wide channel of this river enabled the sun-god to alter his course from time to time, as he is observed to do; in winter directing his bark towards the farther bank of the channel; in summer gliding close to the nearer bank. As to the stars, they were similar lights, suspended from the vault of the heaven; but just how their observed motion of translation
across the heavens was explained is not apparent. It is more than probable that no one explanation was, universally 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. Similarly his conception of the mechanism of the heavens must be a tangibly mechanical one. He must think of the starry firmament as a substantial entity which could not defy the law of gravitation, and which, therefore, must have the same manner of support as is required by the roof of a house or temple. We know that this idea of the materiality of the firmament found elaborate expression in those later cosmological guesses which were to dominate the thought of Europe until the time of Newton. We need not doubt, therefore, that for the Egyptian this solid vault of the heavens had a very real existence. If now and then some dreamer conceived the great bodies of the firmament as floating in a less material plenum–and such iconoclastic dreamers there are in all ages–no record of his musings has come down to us, and we must freely
admit that if such thoughts existed they were alien to the character of the Egyptian mind as a whole.