Atum

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In the oldest religious writing humans have left in any quantity — the columns of hieroglyphs cut into the inner chambers of the late Old Kingdom pyramids at Saqqara — there is a moment before the world. No sky, no earth, no light, no death. Only Nun, the dark and shoreless water, which is not empty but undivided: every possible thing held inert in a single medium that cannot tell one part of itself from another. And then, in that water, something happens that nothing caused. A being comes to be by its own act. It is alone, the only one, and it stands on a first dry place above the flood. Its name is Atum.

The name itself carries the whole problem. Written Tem or Atem in many of the old spellings, it is built from a root that means to complete and to be finished — so Atum is the All, the totality, the one in whom everything is gathered and brought to completion. But the same root carries a darker sense, to be at an end, not to be, so that the name also touches the not-yet and the no-longer. Egyptian theology did not resolve this; it kept both. The god whose name says the completed one is also the god whose name says the one who is not, and the priests of Heliopolis built their account of the world on exactly that doubled meaning.

Atum in his most common human form, crowned with the pschent — the double crown that marks him as lord of the whole land. — Jeff Dahl, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The one who made himself

Heliopolis — Iunu to the Egyptians, the city of the pillar, On to the writers of the Hebrew scriptures — sat at the apex of the Delta, where the Nile fans toward the sea. From the Old Kingdom onward it was the principal home of the sun-god and the seat of a priesthood that had worked out one of Egypt’s foundational accounts of how everything began. That account starts not with a maker shaping raw material but with a maker who has no material and no maker of his own. Atum is kheper djesef, the one who came into being by himself. There was nothing outside him to act on him, and nothing inside the inert deep to push him into existence. He simply is, and then he is differentiated — and with that single move the cosmos has a first event.

The Pyramid Texts fix the scene with a precise image. In the utterance conventionally numbered 600, Atum is hailed as the one who came into being as a high ground, who rose up as the benben in the temple of the Phoenix at Heliopolis. The benben is the first mound, the original hillock of dry land that breaks the surface of Nun — and it is no accident that the word echoes the verb weben, to rise and to shine. The same root names the morning sun climbing the sky and the first land climbing out of the water. Every flood season, when the Nile receded and left mounds of dark fertile silt standing above the sheet of water, Egypt watched the first day happen again in miniature. The benben stone itself, the squat pyramidal block kept in the Heliopolitan sanctuary, was the relic of that first emergence, and the capstones of pyramids and the tips of obelisks took their pointed shape and their name from it.

The surviving obelisk of Senusret I at al-Matariya, the last upright monument of ancient Heliopolis. Its pyramidal tip recalls the benben, the first mound on which Atum stood. — Photo by Didia, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What stood on the mound was a god entirely alone. This is the part the texts return to with something close to wonder. Atum has no consort, no parent, no neighbor; the cosmos at this instant contains exactly one thing. Creation, therefore, cannot be the union of two principles, because there is only one. It has to come out of the single being himself, drawn from his own substance — and the way the texts describe that drawing-out is deliberately, almost insistently, bodily.

How the All becomes many

Atum produces the first divine pair from his own body. He brings forth Shu, the dry air and the principle of space and light, and Tefnut, moisture and the principle of order — the first second and the first third, the beginning of number itself. The Egyptian sources tell this in several registers at once, and they do not treat the variants as rivals. In one telling Atum sneezes out Shu and spits out Tefnut, a wordplay the priests clearly relished, since the verbs ishesh and tefen chime with the gods’ names: Shu the sneezed-out one, Tefnut the spat-out one. The Pyramid Texts put it almost exactly so — that Atum spewed forth Shu and spat out Tefnut. In another telling the act is frankly generative: Atum, alone, takes himself in hand and from his own seed begets the pair, the hand functioning as the missing female counterpart, so that the solitary god is both father and mother of the gods. A third version has him couple with his own shadow. The variants are not confusions to be corrected. They are several true images of a single difficult idea — that the many came out of the One without any second thing to help — and Egyptian thought was content to hold an idea by surrounding it with images rather than reducing it to one.

From Shu and Tefnut the rest unfolds in pairs. They engender Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky; Geb and Nut, prised apart by Shu so that the air stands forever between ground and heaven, produce the four who carry the human drama — Osiris and Isis, Set and Nephthys. Atum at the head, then Shu and Tefnut, Geb and Nut, and the four below: nine gods in all. This is the Ennead, the Pesedjet, the company of nine that Heliopolis offered as the skeleton of the world. It is genealogy used as cosmology. Air and moisture, earth and sky, life and death and kingship and mourning — the whole furniture of existence is laid out as a single family descending from one self-made ancestor, and the order of the generations is the order of creation.

The dead brought before the gods in the Hall of the Two Truths, from the Papyrus of Hunefer (Nineteenth Dynasty). The descendants of Atum preside over the fate of every soul. — British Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Lord to the Limit

If the benben fixes Atum’s beginning, his great epithet fixes his reach. He is neb-er-djer, which the older translators rendered, with a fine archaic weight, as the Lord to the uttermost Limit. The limit in question is the limit of everything: of space, to its farthest edge, and of time, to its last instant. Atum is lord as far as there is anything to be lord of — which is to say, lord of the totality, because he is the totality. The epithet is not flattery. It follows from the name. If Atum is the All gathered into one, then there is nothing beyond him to bound him; he is his own horizon.

This is where Atum’s character grows strange and deep, and where he parts company with a simple creator-god. Because he is the totality, he is also the un-differentiated — the condition before division as much as the sum after it. He is what the cosmos came out of and, the texts say plainly, what it will go back into. He holds both ends of time. Heliopolis expressed this through the sun. The solar god runs a single circuit each day in three persons: at dawn he is Khepri, the scarab who rolls himself up out of the eastern ground, self-renewing as Atum is self-made; at the height of the day he is Ra in full strength, the falcon-headed blaze at the top of the sky; and at evening, as the light reddens and sinks, he is Atum — pictured now as an old man leaning on a staff, the day completed, going down into the west and the Duat below. Morning self-creation, noon power, evening completion: the whole of being compressed into the arc of one day, with Atum at the closing end of it. Through fusion with the sun he became Atum-Ra, so that the first emergence of the world and the daily emergence of the sun were read as one recurring event. To watch the sun set at Heliopolis was to watch the All gathering itself back in.

The serpent at the end of the world

The most extraordinary statement of Atum’s reach survives in a single, rarely copied passage of the Book of the Dead (in Budge’s hosted translation), the long composition the Egyptians called the spells for coming forth by day. In the chapter numbered 175 there is a dialogue between Atum and Osiris that almost nothing else in Egyptian literature dares to speak. Osiris, lord of the dead, complains of the darkness and silence of the underworld and asks how long he must endure it. Atum answers that the span allotted is millions upon millions of years — and then, that when those are done, he will undo the world he made. He will dissolve everything back into the inert flood of Nun out of which it rose. All the gods, all the order, all the differentiated being that streamed out of him will be gathered in again, and what was many will become one. Atum tells Osiris that the two of them alone will survive the dissolution, and that they will survive it in the form of serpents, coiled in the formless water with no human or divine eye left to see them.

It is a vision without parallel in the ancient world for its calm. There is no catastrophe in it, no judgment, no war among the gods. The completed one simply finishes — the name was right all along — and the cosmos returns to the undivided state it was drawn from. Creation, on this account, is not a permanent break with chaos but an interval inside it. The benben that rose will sink. The nine that descended from Atum will fold back into him. The reader of the spell, who hoped by knowing it to pass safely through the afterlife, was being told the largest fact there is: that even the world has a horizon, and that the god who is the limit is also the limit of the god.

Afterlives of the self-made One

Atum’s specific cult never rivaled the great popular devotions to Osiris or Isis; he is a god more present in theology than in private prayer, the deity of the priests who thought hardest about beginnings. But the structure he anchored — a single self-generating source out of which a graded order of being unfolds — proved to have an extraordinarily long life, and it is in the history of ideas, rather than in any temple, that Atum’s deepest afterlife lies. The Heliopolitan Ennead remained the classic Egyptian creation account for three thousand years, the template against which the rival cosmogonies of Hermopolis and Memphis defined themselves. When the priests of Memphis advanced their own creator, Ptah, they did not discard Atum; they folded him in, declaring that Ptah was prior, the heart and tongue that conceived and spoke the world, with Atum as the All that Ptah’s word brought forth. The self-made One was too central to be removed; it could only be reframed.

The longest reach of the idea runs into the Greek and late-antique thought that grew up on Egyptian soil. Here the registers must be kept apart, because the ancient claim and the modern judgment do not always agree. Late writers themselves — the Greek-speaking sages who composed the Hermetic literature under the name of Hermes Trismegistos, and the Platonist philosophers who admired Egyptian wisdom — held, from inside their own frame, that they were heirs to a primordial Egyptian theology, and that the One from which all things flow had been known at Heliopolis before any Greek named it. Modern scholarship is more cautious about lines of direct descent, and treats much of the claimed transmission as the self-understanding of a later tradition rather than a documented chain. What is not in dispute is the resonance of the shapes. The Hermetic divine mind, the Nous that is autogenes — self-generated — and brings forth the cosmos out of itself, stands in the same posture as Atum on the mound: a source that is its own origin, producing a world by an act that needs nothing outside it. The Egyptologist Jan Assmann has traced how an Egyptian formula of “the One and the millions” surfaces in Greek as “the One and the All” and in Latin as una quae es omnia, a monism of all-oneness running as a countercurrent beneath later Western thought. And the Neoplatonic One — the source beyond being from which all things emanate in descending order and to which all things long to return — keeps the doubled character of Atum’s name with uncanny fidelity: it is the fullness that is also, because it precedes every distinction, a kind of nothing.

None of this requires the philosophers to have copied a Heliopolitan creed. The priests who first cut Atum’s name into the pyramid walls were not metaphysicians in the Greek sense, and the disciplines are genuinely different. What recurs is a problem and a way of holding it: that if the many came from a One, that One cannot itself be one thing among the many, but must be both the source of all distinctions and the state in which no distinction yet holds. Atum was Egypt’s name for that position, worked out in the language of a body that sneezes and spits and stands alone on the first dry land above the dark. He completes the world by beginning it, and he completes it again by taking it back — the finished one, in whose keeping the totality opens and closes like a single day.

→ In the library: Budge — The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani, 1913)

→ Related: Heliopolis · Nun · Ra · Ptah · Ancient Egypt · Duat · Book Of The Dead · Osiris · Isis · Maat · Weighing Of The Heart · Ba Egyptian Soul · Ka Egyptian Soul · Heka Egyptian Magic · Opening Of The Mouth · Pyramid Texts · Amun · Horus · Thoth · Corpus Hermeticum · Neoplatonism · The One · Emanation · Hermes Trismegistus