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.
Last updated .
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.
The Oldest Voice Calling Her Name
Inside the pyramid of King Unas at Saqqara, carved into limestone around 2350 BCE, the burial chamber walls carry the Pyramid Texts — among the oldest substantial bodies of religious writing to survive anywhere in the world. Nut runs all through them, because much of what those spells set out to do was move the dead king out of the tomb and into her sky. One utterance asks her to spread herself over her son; another asks that she establish the king within her as an imperishable star. The imperishable stars were the circumpolar ones, which never dip below the horizon and so never appear to die — and it was into that changeless company, folded inside the body of the sky itself, that a king asked to be received. The same walls show how early the two great Egyptian hopes were already braided together: the dead king is addressed as Osiris and asked to rise as a star, in the same breath, in the same chamber.
The Five Days Outside the Year
According to the story the Greek writer Plutarch recorded from Egyptian informants, the sun-god learned that Nut had lain with Geb and cursed her: she would not give birth in any month of any year. Thoth, god of writing and reckoning, came to her aid. He played a board game against the moon for stakes of light and won from her, throw by throw, a seventieth part of each of her illuminations; out of those small winnings he assembled five whole days, which belonged to no month and so fell outside the reach of the curse, and fastened them to the end of the 360-day year. Nut gave birth on each in turn — Osiris on the first, Horus the Elder on the second, Set on the third, Isis on the fourth, Nephthys on the fifth. This was not only a story. Those five extra, or epagomenal, days were a real feature of the Egyptian civil calendar, sitting outside its twelve thirty-day months for millennia, and Egyptians kept them as the actual birthdays of the gods. The dry business of squaring a calendar with the year and the tale of a mother who outwitted a curse to give birth anyway were, for Egypt, the same fact told twice.
Lady of the Sycamore
Not every image of Nut is a naked woman scattered with stars. In tomb paintings and in vignettes to the Book of the Dead she also appears growing out of a tree, her head and arms emerging from the trunk of a sycamore fig, pouring water and holding out bread and fruit to the deceased kneeling below, while the ba — the soul, drawn as a bird with a human head — waits in the branches or at the drinker’s shoulder. The epithet “Lady of the Sycamore” was not hers alone: Hathor and Isis carry it too, and the three goddesses blur into one another at the boundary between sky and orchard. The logic is the one that runs through everything else told about her. Nut is the goddess who takes the dead in and feeds them, whether by arching over a coffin as the vault of heaven or by leaning down out of a garden tree to put water into a thirsty mouth. Both pictures answer the same fear — that the dead might go hungry, thirsty and forgotten — with the same goddess.
The Sky Written on Stone
By the New Kingdom her arched body had become an instrument for reading the night sky. Egyptologists call the composition the Book of Nut; its ancient title was closer to The Fundamentals of the Course of the Stars. Nut is drawn stretched corner to corner across a ceiling, the sun travelling the length of her, rows of decan stars marching beneath her, and columns of text setting out how long each star stays hidden inside her — seventy days of invisibility, the same seventy days Egyptian embalmers took over a body — before it is born again at dawn. The oldest and fullest surviving copy is on the ceiling of Seti I’s cenotaph at Abydos, the Osireion; it appears again in the tomb of Ramesses IV, and later in the tomb of a noblewoman, Mutirdis, which is a quiet measure of how far down from the throne the sky-goddess’s protection had travelled by the 26th Dynasty. Nut could be drawn as an animal, too: one of her titles names her the sow who eats her piglets, the stars vanishing into her at daybreak and back at her belly by nightfall. None of this was decoration for its own sake. A ceiling painted with Nut turned a burial chamber into a working diagram of the sky the dead person now had to cross.
Rhea of the Nile
When Plutarch set out to explain Egyptian religion to Greek readers, he reached for the nearest equivalents his own mythology offered and renamed the cast: Geb becomes Cronus, Nut becomes Rhea. The fit is rough, and the roughest part is the instructive part. In Hesiod it is Ouranos, the sky, who lies upon Gaia, the earth, and crushes their children back inside her until Cronus forces the pair apart — the same cosmic act as Shu prising Nut and Geb asunder, but with the sexes swapped. Greece put a father in the sky and a mother underfoot. Egypt did the reverse. What survives the translation intact is the mother herself: Rhea smuggling her children past a devouring king, Nut bearing hers in five days stolen from the calendar. Both mythologies had arrived at the same conclusion — that a new order of gods comes into the world only when a mother outmanoeuvres the god trying to prevent it.
Why the Sky Had to Be a Woman
Egypt’s arrangement was the unusual one. Mesopotamia’s An was a sky father; so was Greece’s Ouranos; so was the old Indo-European Dyaus Pitar, sky-father, whose name is buried inside both Zeus and Jupiter. A vault, a roof, a ruler looking down. Egypt instead made its sky a woman caught permanently in the act of giving birth, and that choice paid a specific debt. Egyptians watched the sun die at the western horizon and come back at the eastern one every day of their lives, and they wanted human death to work the same way. A sky father can preside over such a thing; only a mother can perform it. Making the heavens female turned the most reliable observation available to anyone — that the light always returns — into a mechanism a dead person could be fed into. It also explains where Egyptians chose to put her: not high on a temple wall, but on the underside of a coffin lid, inches above the face. The comfort Nut offered was not distant or moral. It was anatomical, and it had to be close enough to touch.
