Sublime

As the daughter of the Sun god Ra, she was said to ride with him each day as he pulled the Sun across the sky, but she became even more crucial at night while her father slept, standing guard against his enemy, the serpent Apep.

She is also a protector of children, as she had to guard Horus against his evil uncle Set from the moment Horus was born, as well as a protector of the dead. She represented love and faithfulness, spirituality and dreams, and inner wisdom and destiny.

She gives birth to Horus, who grows up and defeats Set, becoming the new Pharaoh. Osiris, meanwhile, has become the ruler of the underworld, while Isis has forged her reputation as a goddess of motherhood and magic, among other things.

Mother Nut is traditionally pictured holding up the starry firmament, her great back arching over the midnight blue night sky, scintillating with points of starlight (see plate 7). As is typical of the primeval feminine Creatrix, she was associated not just with birth, but with death: her image was traditionally painted on the inside lid of coffins

as a shapeshifter, she hovers overhead in the guise of a raven, a crow, and sometimes a vulture.

Nut was the goddess of the primeval darkness: Mother Night, she who birthed the world from the abyss of her dark womb, and the Creator of the cosmic egg. She represented the undifferentiated dark sea of potential energy that existed before all manifest creation, and from which sprang all of existence.

O Goddess of the Moon, Goddess of the night sky, of brilliance and of darkness, please bless this seeker of the ways!

“The ba is written sometimes as a winged human head, which is the older form, and sometimes as a human-faced bird. For the ka-ibis is the highest part of the body and it is in the head, and the ba is the first part of us that is conscious of leaving Earth and of being ‘winged’.