Shu

Shu is the firstborn of Atum in the Heliopolitan cosmogony, and he is born together with Tefnut, his sister and wife. The Pyramid Texts tell that birth through a play on words that Egyptian makes and English loses: Atum sneezed Shu out and spat Tefnut out, because the verbs for those two acts sound like their names. Shu is dry, luminous air; Tefnut is moisture. From them come Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky, and from these the four who close the Ennead: Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys. Shu and Tefnut also appear as a pair of lions seated back to back, facing opposite ways, on whose backs the sun rises each morning: yesterday's horizon and tomorrow's. He is the second step of creation, the first that has shape and number, and everything else descends from him.

The act that defines him is not a battle but a posture. Geb and Nut, earth and sky, lay embraced, and while they did there was no gap in which anything could happen. Shu got between them, knelt down and raised his arms, and into that space everything else fits: the air that is breathed, the light, the road the sun travels from morning to night. The scene was drawn thousands of times on coffins and funerary papyri, and always the same way: Nut arched like a vault, Geb stretched out below, Shu in the middle with his hands open upward. The four corners of the sky rest on supports the texts call the pillars of Shu. A whole group of spells in the Coffin Texts is placed in his own mouth, speaking in the first person of what it is to be the luminous void between two bodies. And in the Book of the Heavenly Cow, when Ra grows weary of humankind and withdraws onto Nut's back, it is Shu he orders to get underneath and hold her up.

Late mythological papyri give him something rarely told: a reign. Once Ra had withdrawn to the sky, Shu ruled the earth as king, and against him rose the children of Apophis, the serpent of chaos. After a long war and an illness, he too ascended to the firmament and left the throne to his son Geb. His emblem is the ostrich feather, which is also the sign his name is written with. And here it is worth saying what almost every popular account confuses: the feather set on the scales against the dead man's heart is Maat's, truth's, not Shu's. They share the hieroglyph, not the function. What the funerary texts do ask of Shu is air: that he open the dead man's nose and give back his breath. It is a request that holds together to the end, because breathing is exactly what he made possible the day he separated sky from earth.