The God Who Holds Up the Sky

Shu is the Egyptian god of the air and of the empty, light-filled space between earth and heaven, the first-born child of the creator Atum together with his twin sister Tefnut, the moisture. In the cosmogony of Heliopolis the pair are the first sexually differentiated gods, and from them come Geb the earth and Nut the sky. Shu's defining act is the separation that makes the world habitable: he stands between his children Geb and Nut and lifts Nut high above the reclining Geb, holding the sky apart from the earth so that there is a space of air in which the sun can travel and living things can breathe.

Egyptian art shows him kneeling with upraised arms beneath the arched body of the sky-goddess, sometimes assisted by other gods, in one of the most fundamental images of the ordered cosmos. As the personification of the air and of the sunlit space of the day, Shu is associated with the wind, with coolness and with the breath of life itself; the name was understood in connection with dryness and emptiness. Together with Tefnut he forms the first pair of the Ennead, the nine great gods of Heliopolis, and stands at the very beginning of the created order.