Nefertem

Egyptian cosmogony begins in water. Before there was land there was Nun, the inert ocean, and the first thing to break its surface was a blue lotus that opened at dawn and closed again at dusk. Out of that flower came the sun. Nefertem is the god of the flower and, in the oldest surviving Egyptian religious texts, of the moment itself: the Pyramid Texts call him the lotus blossom at the nose of Ra, an image that makes the newborn sun a scent as much as a light.

That one line does a great deal of work. It ties Nefertem to the daily sunrise and not only to the first one, so every morning repeats the creation, and it makes fragrance a theological category rather than a luxury. A god of perfume in Egypt is not a god of vanity. He is the god of what the world smelled like on its first day.

The flower itself is Nymphaea caerulea, the blue Egyptian water lily, which is not a true lotus at all. It appears on tomb walls, on banquet furniture, in the hands of guests at feasts and heaped across coffins, and its habit of opening in the morning and sinking at night made it an obvious emblem of a sun that dies and returns. Nefertem wears it: he is a young man crowned with an open blue lotus, and the crown is how you identify him when nothing else in the scene will tell you.

The best known object in this key is not a temple statue. A painted wooden head from the tomb of Tutankhamun shows the boy king rising out of an open lotus, and it is read as the king taking Nefertem's role, coming up with the sun on the first morning of his own afterlife.

At Memphis the three great gods of the city were counted as a family. Ptah, the craftsman who made the world by speaking it, was the father. Sekhmet, the lioness of plague and of the anger of the pharaoh, was the mother. Nefertem was their son. It is an unlikely household, and the strangeness is the point: the Memphite triad puts making, destroying and beauty in a single line of descent.

His mother marks him. Sekhmet's arrows were disease, and the priests who served her were also the physicians, so healing and plague were dispensed from the same temple. Nefertem inherits the double edge. He is a gentle god of scent and of the open flower, he is occasionally shown lion headed, and Egyptian texts can turn him into a protector who takes his mother's part. Where a local tradition names a different mother, usually Bastet or Wadjet, it is still a lioness or a cobra, and the inheritance holds.

Perfume was an industry as well as an offering. Temple workshops compounded unguents from resin, fat and flowers, and a set of seven sacred oils is listed on offering slabs from the Old Kingdom onward, long before anyone wrote down a recipe. Nefertem presided over that work. The lotus is also one of the forms a spirit may take in the Book of the Dead, and small blue glazed amulets of a figure crowned with a lotus were worn in very large numbers in the Late Period.

What he did not have was an estate. He is worshipped inside the precinct of Ptah at Memphis rather than from a great house of his own, which is a fair description of his whole career: less a landowner among gods than something you could smell, carry, and lay on a coffin.