Mother of Life, Goddess of Death

The Smithsonian Natural History Museum has long been one of my favorite places in the world. From a young age I remember happily spending hours there, wandering the halls and contemplating facts from displays.

It was there that I saw my first Egyptian mummy, and it was there that started a lifelong fascination with the history and archaeology of ancient Egypt. I love the complex and intricate ideas about gods, death, and the afterlife. Ancient religions influenced modern ones in ways that many people don’t realize; for example, much of the grotesque imagery of hell that medieval Christianity popularized took direct influence from depictions of the Egyptian underworld.

The section for Egyptian history at the Smithsonian is relatively small, but to a young me, it was a world of fascination. I couldn’t believe that the wrapped artifact in front of me was once a living, breathing person. Did they have hopes? Dreams? Did they laugh at jokes? What happened to them? Did they really believe this burial would ensure them eternity?

It was also there that I first learned of the winged sky goddess, Nut. There was a picture of her painted at the bottom of a beautiful sarcophagus - wings demurely folded, lovely and regal. The description of the sarcophagus read, “The winged sky goddess of the west holds the mummy in her embrace, receiving her into the land of the dead.”

Nut is a fascinating figure in the ancient Egyptian lore. In the broadest terms, she is the goddess of the sky and heavens. This in and of itself is unique. “She (Nut) is an anomaly in the world of mythology, for, as is well known, sky deities are almost universally male.”** From there, Nut holds many more detailed and nuanced positions of importance. By extension she was also the goddess of all the heavenly bodies, stars and planets, to whom she gave birth from her passionate relationship with the earth god Geb. She is often pictured hovering above the earth, with the air god Shu supporting her, creating the space humans inhabit between earth and sky.

But it is her role with the most revered heavenly body, the sun, that is perhaps the most interesting of all. Nut was thought to swallow the sun, personified by the god Ra, each night and give birth to him each morning. This made her the mother of Ra. To understand how fundamentally important this was to Egyptians, it is crucial to understand their view of the sun, the universe, and the cosmic order.

Egyptians believed that the sun, (who takes on many god forms, including Ra, depending on the time of day), actually died each evening in the west and journeyed through the underworld, called the duat, at night. He battled the demon snake Apep, merged with the underworld god Osiris, and solved riddles. If he was ultimately victorious in this harrowing journey, he would emerge reborn in the east the next morning, thus giving humanity another day of life on earth. Life would literally cease to exist if Ra did not succeed in his nightly journey. Nut, therefore, being the vessel of this journey, herself the duat, is the goddess of death, and the mother of all life. The duality of Nut, being symbolic of both life and death and representing the cyclical connection between them, is a common theme in Egyptian cosmogony (origin stories of the universe) and mythos. She is the truly mother of all: bringer of life, vessel of death.

It makes sense then, why she adorns so many coffins. Her role for humanity parallels her role for the gods, and thereby, the whole universe. She receives the dead, all the dead, and protects them until they can be reborn in the afterlife.

Many years after I saw Nut in the Smithsonian for the first time, I was in another Egyptian history exhibit, and happened upon another sarcophagus with her image lovingly painted on the inside. The description of it harkened back to the first I had seen, years ago, in the Smithsonian: “Nut, the winged sky goddess, lovingly takes the deceased in her arms to transport him to the afterlife.”

Maybe it was me getting older, or maybe I was already emotional that day, but for whatever reason, reading that description suddenly brought tears to my eyes. Thinking about the people in the ancient world, laying their dead down in Nut’s arms in the hopes of her carrying them away, made me emotional. Just as she took the gods into her being and sent them on their afterlife journey, so too was she ready to receive the common people. She was all hope, all cosmic order.

Egyptian history and the ideas of pyramids, mummies, and buried archaeological treasures are not particularly niche. Many others have been fascinated by them in the same way I was and am. But I think fewer people take the time to learn and understand some of the more poetic nuances regarding ancient Egyptian mythos and religion. To this day, the imagery of Nut and her role with the dead has stayed with me. And that is the piece of (un)common knowledge that I want to share. Regardless of who we are and what we believe, we can all recognize beautiful things and lovely ideas and poetic symbolism. And we also recognize the need of so many to have comforting ideas in the face of death.

The past year has brought death to so many, and it continues to swirl around us every day in the world and in the news. It is overwhelming. So for that I offer this little-known fact, perhaps a tiny remedy. Like the Egyptians did so many years ago, may you find comfort imagining the winged sky goddess Nut taking all whom you have loved and lost into her loving embrace and into the next world.

* "Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Nut". Encyclopedia Britannica, 6 Feb. 2020"

**Hollis, Susan Tower. “Women of Ancient Egypt and the Sky Goddess Nut.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 100, no. 398, 1987, pp. 496–503. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/540908. Accessed 23 Mar. 2021.

For more reads and images of Nut -

The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo:

https://egymonuments.gov.eg/en/subportals-group/the-egyptian-museum/

"Women of Ancient Egypt and the Sky Goddess Nut":

https://www.jstor.org/stable/540908?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents