But the Ennead had other results besides the Egyptian doctrine of the trinity. Generation in the case of a god could not be the same as in the case of a man. The very fact that Tum was wifeless proved this. It was inevitable, therefore, that it should come to be conceived of as symbolical like the generation of thought, all the more since the deities who had proceeded from Tum were all of them symbols representing the phenomena of the visible world. Hence the idea of generation passed naturally into that of emanation, one divine being emanating from another as thought emanates from thought. And to the Egyptian, with his love of symbolism and disinclination for abstract thought, the expression of an idea meant a concrete form. Seb and Nut were the divine ideas which underlay the earth and the firmament and kept them in existence, but they were at the same time the earth and the firmament themselves. They represented thought in a concrete form, if we may borrow a phrase from the Hegelian philosophy.
The principle of emanation was eagerly seized upon by Greek thinkers in the days when Alexandria was the meeting-place of the old world and the new. It afforded an explanation not only of creation, but also of the origin of evil, and had, moreover, behind it the venerable shadow of Egyptian antiquity. It became the basis and sheet-anchor of most of the Gnostic systems, and through them made its way into Christian thought. From another point of view it may be regarded as an anticipation of the doctrine of evolution.
The work of the priestly college of Heliopolis was accomplished long before the Pyramid texts were written under the kings of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties. The Ennead appears in them as a long established doctrine, with all its consequences. The solar faith had laid firm hold of Egyptian religion, and gained a position from which it was never to be dislodged. Henceforward Egyptian religion was permeated by the ideas and beliefs which flowed from it, and the gods and goddesses of the land assumed a solar dress. Under the Nineteenth Dynasty, if not before, a new view of the future life obtained official sanction, which substituted the sun-god for Osiris and the solar bark for the Osirian paradise. But I must leave an account of it to another occasion, and confine myself at present to the last and most noteworthy development of solar worship in Egypt.