Ra

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At Heliopolis the priests held that before there was anything there were the dark, shoreless waters called Nun, and that out of them rose a single mound of dry earth. On that first hill the creator came into being of himself, neither begotten nor made, and his first act was to open his eyes. Light was not something he ruled over. Light was what he was. From that point the gods, the land, the river, and the order of the days all unfolded — and the sun that crossed the sky each morning was understood, in the oldest theology of dynastic Egypt, not as the work of a god but as the visible body of one.

That god was Ra, written also as Re, the sun god whose name the Egyptians spoke for more than three thousand years and whose cult outlasted nearly every dynasty that honored it.

Wooden stela (Twenty-second Dynasty, c. 950–700 BCE): Lady Djedkhonsuiwesankh makes offerings to the falcon-headed solar god Ra-Horakhty, crowned with the sun disk. — Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Heliopolitan sun and its city

Ra’s home was Iunu, the city the Greeks would later call Heliopolis, “city of the sun,” and which the Hebrew scriptures name On. It lay at the apex of the Delta, near modern Cairo, and from at least the Old Kingdom it housed the most influential priestly college in Egypt. The theology worked out there became the framework for the rest of the tradition. In it the creator-sun brought forth, by his own substance, the first divine pair — Shu, the air, and Tefnut, moisture — and from them descended Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky, and from that pair the gods of the Osiris cycle. This is the Ennead, the company of nine, the genealogical spine onto which the Pyramid Texts hang. Within that scheme the solar god and the self-created first principle were often the same being seen from two angles, and the Heliopolitan priests wrote the equation directly: Ra and Atum were one.

The obelisk of Senusret I (Twelfth Dynasty, c. 1950 BCE) at Heliopolis (ancient Iunu), the sole standing monument of the city of the sun. — David Schmid (Didia), via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Ra rarely appears in a single fixed shape. He is figured as a falcon-headed man crowned with the solar disk, and in this aspect he merges with the sky-falcon to become Ra-Horakhty, “Ra-Horus of the two horizons,” the sun read as the falcon that crosses from the eastern to the western edge of the world. He appears as a ram-headed god in the underworld hours, and as the disk itself, and as the scarab pushing the morning sun before it. The proliferation is not confusion; it is the working out of a god whose nature is movement and transformation, and who is therefore most himself in a sequence of forms rather than in one.

The doctrine that gave Ra his peculiar grandeur was the reading of a single day as a complete life. The sun is born at dawn, rises to its strength at noon, ages toward the horizon, dies in the west, and is reborn. Rather than treat this as metaphor, the theologians personified each phase and let the phases be named gods in their own right. At sunrise the disk is Khepri, the scarab, whose name puns on the verb kheper, “to come into being” — the dung beetle that rolls its ball before it was taken as the image of the sun pushed up over the rim of the world, and of a creature that seemed to generate itself out of matter. At the height of the day the god is Ra, full in his power. At evening he is Atum, “the complete one” and “the one who finishes,” the aged sun sinking into the earth. One body, three names, read across the arc of a single rotation. The same logic let the sun be addressed under dozens of further names, but the dawn-noon-dusk triad remained the canonical compression of the whole.

The fierce daughter: the Eye of Ra

If the disk was the god’s body, his most dangerous extension was his Eye. The Eye of Ra is the sun’s heat and brightness conceived as a goddess — a being sent out from the god to act on his behalf, fierce, mobile, and not always controllable. She is identified across the tradition with several goddesses: with Hathor, with the lioness Sekhmet, with Bastet, Wadjet, Mut, and others, the particular name shifting with the temple and the story.

Granite statue of the lioness-headed Sekhmet (New Kingdom, c. 1360 BCE) from the temple of Mut at Karnak — one of the fierce forms of the Eye of Ra, crowned with the solar disk and uraeus. — ArchaiOptix, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The defining narrative survives in the New Kingdom composition usually called the Book of the Heavenly Cow, copied into several royal tombs of the period that runs from roughly the sixteenth to the eleventh century before the common era. In it Ra has grown old; humankind plots against him; and the god dispatches his Eye against the rebels in her most savage form, the lioness Sekhmet, “the powerful.” She falls on humanity and slaughters until the fields run with blood, and the god, recoiling from the prospect of a world emptied of people, contrives to stop her. He has beer dyed red and flooded across the land in the night. The goddess, taking it for blood, drinks until she is too drunk to kill, and wakes pacified. In the same text the weary god then withdraws from the earth onto the back of the sky-cow Nut, ruling thereafter from the heavens rather than among men — an Egyptian account of why the creator no longer walks the world he made.

The Eye also wanders. In the related cycle of the Distant Goddess she leaves Egypt in a rage and retreats to the southern deserts, and the order of things suffers in her absence until she is coaxed home and her wildness turned back to benevolence — appeased, in the festival enactments, with music and dance and wine, the red of the wine echoing the red of the beer and the red of the inundation silt. The doctrine underneath the stories is consistent. The same solar power that gives life will, unmediated, destroy it; kingship and cult exist in part to keep the Eye turned toward protection rather than annihilation.

The king who is Son of Ra

Ra’s relation to the living king is among the most consequential ideas the Heliopolitan theology produced. From the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom — the line of kings, conventionally dated to the twenty-fifth and twenty-fourth centuries before the common era, that opened with Userkaf — the solar cult rose to something close to a state religion. Userkaf and his successors built sun temples in addition to their pyramids, open courts centered on a squat obelisk, the benben, the stone that recalled the first mound at Heliopolis and the form on which the rising sun was thought to alight. It is from this dynasty that the royal title sa-Ra, “Son of Ra,” became a fixed and systematic part of the pharaonic name, and it endured as a standard royal epithet for the rest of pharaonic history. The king was not merely the god’s appointee; he was, in the language of the title, the sun’s own child, the one through whom the solar order was maintained on earth.

Relief of the falcon-headed solar god Ra-Horakhty above the entrance of the Great Temple at Abu Simbel, built under Ramesses II — a pharaoh styled “Son of Ra.” — Olaf Tausch, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

The benben connects to one of the loveliest of the Heliopolitan emblems, the Bennu — a heron-like bird that, in the theology of the city, alighted on the primeval mound and whose cry was held to have set the terms of creation. Identified as a manifestation, the ba or animating force, of the sun god, the Bennu became the prototype that later Greek writers would recognize and reshape as the phoenix, the bird reborn from its own ending — a transmission in which an Egyptian image of solar renewal passed, considerably altered, into the wider Mediterranean imagination.

The night voyage

The day was only half of Ra’s circuit. The Egyptians pictured the sun crossing the sky in a boat, and they distinguished two of them: the Mandjet, the barque of the day, in which the god sails from east to west, and the Mesektet, the barque of the night, into which he transfers at evening to make the far harder passage through the Duat, the underworld, returning to the eastern horizon by dawn.

That nocturnal journey is the subject of the great royal-tomb compositions of the New Kingdom — the Amduat, “that which is in the underworld,” the Book of Gates, the Book of Caverns. They map the night as twelve hours, each a region of the Duat with its own gates, its guardians, and its dangers, through which the solar barque is towed by a crew of accompanying gods. The supreme danger is Apophis, written also Apep, the vast serpent of chaos who lies in wait in the depths to swallow the boat and end the cycle for good. Each night the god and his crew must repel him; each dawn that they succeed, the sun is reborn and the world continues. The contest is never won permanently, only renewed — a daily re-securing of order against a disorder that is never destroyed, only driven back. In one striking image preserved in the funerary tradition, the sun-god in the form of a great cat severs the serpent’s head, a scene set beside the sacred tree at Heliopolis.

The sun god as the Great Cat of Heliopolis severs the head of the chaos serpent Apophis beside the sacred ished tree — detail from the Papyrus of Hunefer (c. 1275 BCE), British Museum. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The funerary stakes of all this are spelled out in the hymns the dead carry with them. The Book of the Dead — the Egyptians’ Book of Going Forth by Day — opens its sequence with hymns of adoration to Ra at his rising and his setting, by which the deceased seeks to join the god’s company in the barque and to “go forth by day” with the reborn sun rather than remain inert in the dark. To travel with Ra through the night and emerge with him at dawn is, in the logic of the texts, what it means for the dead to live. In the version translated in the Papyrus of Ani, the worshipper hails the god as he who “rollest up into the horizon” and crosses the sky in peace, every enemy overthrown — the same victory over Apophis transposed into a prayer for the individual soul.

The seventy-five forms and the Litany of Re

The conviction that the sun was a single power wearing many names received its most systematic statement in a composition known as the Litany of Re, which first appears in the tomb of Thutmose III in the fifteenth century before the common era and recurs in the tombs of later kings, among them Seti I and several of the Ramesside line. Its opening section invokes the sun god in seventy-five distinct forms, each named and, in the illustrated copies, each given an image — the god seen as ram-headed, as cat, as child, as corpse, as serpent, as disk, the full repertory of solar manifestation laid out in series. The second part is a sequence of prayers in which the dead king identifies himself with the sun and with the gods who travel in his train.

Two ideas converge in the text. One is that the multiplicity of the gods is, at the solar level, a multiplicity of a single thing; the seventy-five forms are not seventy-five gods but seventy-five faces of Ra. The other is the deep New Kingdom fusion of the sun god with Osiris: at the midnight of the night journey, in the doctrine the Litany expresses, Ra and Osiris meet and unite, the living sun joining the lord of the dead so that each renews the other — the sun finding in the underworld the regenerative power to be reborn, the dead finding in the passing sun the life that lets them rise. The deceased, identified with both, is carried through.

Amun-Ra, the Aten, and the afterlife of the sun

The most far-reaching reception of Ra happened within Egyptian religion itself. When the kings of Thebes drove out foreign rulers and founded the New Kingdom in the sixteenth century before the common era, their local god was Amun, “the hidden one.” As Thebes became the seat of empire, Amun was fused with the old sun god of Heliopolis to produce Amun-Ra — the hidden god and the visible sun in one, a deity who combined the mystery of the unseen with the universality of the light that falls on everything. For much of the New Kingdom Amun-Ra was the supreme god of the Egyptian state, and his priesthood at Thebes grew into one of the great powers of the realm. The syncretism is itself a theological claim: that the inward, concealed ground of things and the radiant, manifest sun are not two gods but one read from two sides.

Against the wealth and reach of that priesthood came the sharpest break in Egyptian religious history. The king who took the name Akhenaten, in the fourteenth century before the common era, elevated a different solar form — the Aten, the visible disk of the sun itself, depicted not as a god with a body but as a circle whose rays end in small hands. In the fifth year of his reign he moved the court to a new and virgin city, suppressed the cult of Amun, and made the Aten the focus of worship. It is essential not to collapse the Aten into Ra. The Aten is a distinct development of the Amarna period, the disk worshipped as such, deliberately stripped of the older solar mythology — no night barque, no Eye, no Ennead, in many readings no other gods at all. Akhenaten’s experiment did not outlive him by long; his successors restored Amun, dismantled his city, and struck his name from the king-lists. The older sun, with all its forms and stories, returned.

Ra’s longer afterlife runs through the Hellenistic and Roman reading of Egypt, where the sun-centered theology of the temples fed the broader late-antique fascination with the solar as the highest visible image of the divine. The Hermetic writings that took shape in Greco-Roman Egypt give the sun a governing place in the cosmos — a luminous intermediary between the intelligible source and the created world — and later esoteric traditions would read the Egyptian solar god as an emblem of the divine intellect or the inner light, an inheritance more imaginative than philological. The documentary recovery of the actual Egyptian sun god came later still, after the decipherment of the hieroglyphs in the eighteen-twenties opened the temple and tomb texts to reading; the great translations and compilations of E. A. Wallis Budge made the hymns to Ra available to a wide readership at the turn of the twentieth century, even as the philology they rested on was, in time, superseded. What the texts themselves keep saying, under every later use made of them, is a single insistence: that the order of the world is something achieved each morning, against an enemy that is never finally beaten, by a god who dies at dusk so that he can be born again.

→ In the library: The Egyptian Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani), tr. Budge

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