Nun

Nun is the primordial ocean of Egyptian cosmology, the boundless, dark, motionless deep that existed before anything else, out of which all creation arose. He is less a personal god with myths of his own than the personification of the uncreated state itself: limitless water without light, form or motion, the condition prior to the first act of making. In the creation accounts, it is out of Nun that the first mound of dry land, the benben, rises, and on it the creator god brings the ordered world into being. Crucially, Nun does not disappear once creation has happened.

The Egyptians imagined the flat, ordered world as a bubble of order surrounded on every side, above the sky, below the earth, and at the edges of the world, by the persisting waters of Nun, which the sun must pass through each night and which are always there, pressing against the boundaries of the cosmos. The annual flooding of the Nile was understood as a renewed touch of these fertile primeval waters. In the Hermopolitan tradition Nun and his female counterpart Naunet head the Ogdoad, the eight primordial deities who embody the chaos before creation. Nun is thus both the beginning of things and the ever-present deep that surrounds and could one day reclaim them.

Although Nun is chiefly known as an abstract precondition of the universe rather than an actor within it, one striking New Kingdom composition, generally called the Book of the Heavenly Cow, gives him a speaking role and treats him as the eldest and most authoritative of the gods, one addressed in council rather than merely present at the world's beginning.

In the story, the sun god Ra, grown old, learns that humankind has begun plotting rebellion against him, and he summons the great gods, including Nun, Shu and Geb, in secret council to decide what should be done, deliberately consulting Nun first as the primordial father of the gods whose judgment carries special weight precisely because he predates creation itself.

Nun advises Ra to send his fierce Eye, the goddess who becomes the lioness Sekhmet, down to punish the rebellious humans, setting in motion the myth's famous near-annihilation of the human race and the beer trick by which Ra finally restrains the goddess's bloodlust and spares what remains of humanity. The episode is theologically significant precisely because it interrupts Nun's usual passivity: for one myth, the shapeless waters that exist before and beneath creation are given a voice and asked for guidance, a reminder that the Egyptians could treat their most abstract cosmological principles as personal enough to advise, when the narrative required it, even a principle as vast and formless as the primeval ocean itself.