Nut was the Egyptian goddess of the sky — the great goddess whose star-spangled body arched over the world as the vault of heaven, the mother of the sun and stars who swallowed the sun each evening and gave birth to it each dawn, and the mother of Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys. She is the sky itself made into a goddess, the protective heaven stretched over all the world.
The Goddess of the Sky
Nut (Egyptian Nwt) was the personification of the sky — the heavens arched over the earth. A daughter of Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture), she was the sister and wife of Geb, the earth-god. In Egyptian art she was depicted in one of the most beautiful and distinctive images of any mythology: an enormous woman, her naked body covered with stars, arched over the entire earth, her fingertips touching the eastern horizon and her toes the western, her body forming the very dome of the sky above the reclining body of her husband Geb the earth. She was held aloft in this eternal arch by her father Shu, the air, who stood between earth and sky to hold them apart.
The Separation from Geb
Nut and Geb, sky and earth, were so deeply in love that they lay pressed together in a tight embrace, leaving no space between them for the world. To create the space of the world, their father Shu forced them apart, lifting Nut high above and holding her arched body aloft, separating the sky from the earth forever. The image of Nut arched above, reaching down toward Geb reclining below, with Shu holding her up between them, is the great Egyptian picture of the structure of the cosmos: earth below, sky above, air between, and the space of the living world created in the gap.
The Swallower of the Sun
Nut had a daily cosmic role in the journey of the sun. Each evening, as the sun-god Ra reached the western horizon, Nut swallowed the sun into her mouth; the sun then passed through her body during the night (traveling through the dark hours within her), and each morning she gave birth to the sun anew at the eastern horizon, the dawn appearing from between her thighs. The stars too were her children, born and swallowed in the same daily cycle. Thus Nut was the mother of the sun and the stars, the goddess through whose body the heavenly bodies passed in their endless round of death at dusk and rebirth at dawn — the very rhythm of day and night written in the body of the sky-goddess.
The Mother of the Gods and the Dead
By Geb, Nut was the mother of the four great gods of the Osiris myth — Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys (and in some accounts Horus the Elder). As the mother who daily gave rebirth to the sun, Nut also became a goddess of resurrection and the protection of the dead: her image was painted inside the lids of coffins, arched protectively over the deceased, so that the dead might be reborn as the sun was reborn from her body each dawn, rising into a new life in the heavens. Nut endures as one of the most beautiful and beloved goddesses of ancient Egypt — the star-covered sky arched over the world, the mother of the sun and stars and gods, the swallower and rebirther of the sun, the protective heaven who promised the dead rebirth among the stars.
Her star-spangled body arches over all the world as the vault of heaven — each night she swallows the sun, and each dawn she gives it birth again, the sky-mother of the sun and the stars and the resurrected dead.