[Illustration: 201.jpg THE TWIN LIONS, SHÛ AND TAFNÛÎT. 1]
1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a vignette in the papyrus of Ani in the British Museum, published by Lepage-Renouf in the _Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology_, vol. xi., 1889-90, pp. 26-28. The inscription above the lion on the right reads _safu_, "yesterday;" the other, _dûaû_, "this morning."
Together with him she upholds the sky, and every morning receives the newborn sun as it emerges from the mountain of the east; she is a lioness when Shû is a lion, a woman when he is a man, a lioness-headed woman if he is a lion-headed man; she is angry when he is angry, appeased when he is appeased; she has no sanctuary wherein he is not worshipped. In short, the pair made one being in two bodies, or, to use the Egyptian expression, "one soul in its two twin bodies."
Hence we see that the Heliopolitans proclaimed the creation to be the work of the sun-god, Atûmû-Râ, and of the four pairs of deities who were descended from him. It was really a learned variant of the old doctrine that the universe was composed of a sky-god, Horus, supported by his four children and their four pillars: in fact, the four sons of the Heliopolitan cosmogony, Shû and Sibû, Osiris and Sit, were occasionally substituted for the four older gods of the "houses" of the world. This being premised, attention must be given to the important differences between the two systems. At the outset, instead of appearing contemporaneously upon the scene, like the four children of Horus, the four Heliopolitan gods were deduced one from another, and succeeded each other in the order of their birth. They had not that uniform attribute of supporter, associating them always with one definite function, but each of them felt himself endowed with faculties and armed with special powers required by his condition. Ultimately they took to themselves goddesses, and thus the total number of beings working in different ways at the organization of the universe was brought up to nine. Hence they were called by the collective name of the Ennead, the Nine gods--_paûit nûtîrû_,[*]--and the god at their head was entitled _Paûîti_, the god of the Ennead.
* The first Egyptologists confounded the sign used in writing _paûît_ with the sign _kh_, and the word _khet, other_. E. de Rougé was the first to determine its phonetic value: "it should be read Paû, and designates a body of gods." Shortly afterwards Beugsch proved that "the group of gods invoked by E. de Rougé must have consisted of nine "-- of an Ennead. This explanation was not at first admitted either by Lepsius or by Mariette, who had proposed a mystic interpretation of the word in his _Mémoire sur la mère d'Apis_, or by E. de Rougé, or by Chabas. The interpretation a _Nine_, an _Ennead_, was not frankly adopted until later, and more especially after the discovery of the Pyramid texts; to-day, it is the only meaning admitted. Of course the Egyptian Ennead has no other connection than that of name with the Enneads of the Neo-Platonists.