The Creation of the World by Atum

At a Glance

Central figures: Atum, the self-created first god; Shu, god of air; Tefnut, goddess of moisture; Geb, god of the earth; and Nut, goddess of the sky.
Setting: The primeval waters of Nun, before the world existed; the Heliopolitan creation tradition of ancient Egypt.
The turn: Atum, alone on the first mound of earth, wills Shu and Tefnut into being - then loses them in the void and sends his Eye to find them.
The outcome: From Atum’s tears of relief, the first humans were born; Shu and Tefnut produced Geb and Nut, whose separation by Shu made space for all living things; and from Geb and Nut came Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys.
The legacy: The creation of the ordered world from chaos, with sky above, earth below, and humanity born from a god’s grief and joy.

Before anything existed, there was Nun - the primeval sea, dark and without boundary, holding nothing and everything. Out of that void, Atum rose. He stood on the Benben, the first hill, the mound that broke the surface of the waters when there was no other land anywhere. He was both male and female, self-made, requiring no other being to bring him into existence. The water lay still around him. He was alone.

The Birth of Shu and Tefnut

Atum desired life, and he made it. Without partner or instrument, he produced two children: Shu, the god of air, and Tefnut, the goddess of moisture. Some accounts say he breathed them out; others say he spat them into being. Whichever way the telling goes, they were his - the first two beings born from another, rather than born from nothing. Shu and Tefnut carried between them the two things a living world requires most. Air to fill it. Water to sustain it.

The Eye Sent into the Dark

Then Shu and Tefnut wandered into the waters of Nun and were lost.

Atum sent his Eye after them - the all-seeing Eye of Ra - into the formless dark to find what he had made. The Eye searched. Time passed in that lightless void. When Shu and Tefnut were found at last and returned to him, Atum wept. His tears fell down onto the ground of the Benben mound, and where they struck, the first humans came into being. Not shaped from clay, not spoken into existence by decree - born from a god’s relief, from water that had traveled the length of a father’s face.

The Separation of Earth and Sky

Shu and Tefnut became parents in their turn. Their children were Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky - and these two could not bear to be apart. They held each other in an embrace so close that no space remained between them. No plant could grow in that darkness. No creature could draw breath.

Atum commanded Shu to separate them.

Shu took his place between his children and pushed Nut upward. She arched above, her body becoming the vault of the sky, her fingers and toes still touching the horizon at the world’s edges. Geb lay below her, the length of him becoming the earth’s surface - its hills, its valleys, the dark soil along the river’s banks. Between them, in the space Shu held open with his own body, the world became livable.

The Gods Who Followed

Geb and Nut did not remain childless. From them came the gods who would shape everything that followed: Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. The ordered world Atum had built from the waters of Nun now had its full first generation of divine inhabitants. Ra and Atum were bound together in the cycle of the sun - Khepri rising at dawn, Ra crossing the sky at noon, Atum descending in the evening. Creation and its daily renewal were the same continuous act.

The Benben stone at Heliopolis, pointed like the first hill breaking the surface of the waters, marked the place where all of it had begun. It stood there in the sunlight, surrounded by the living world Atum had drawn out of nothing - out of his own will, his own tears, and the long patience of the void.