The Gods of Egypt, From Creation to Judgment

Begin before there were gods to have a family: alone on the first mound in the waters of chaos, Atum makes the first pair, Shu and Tefnut, from his own body. Everyone else on this trail descends from that act.

The line Atum starts becomes the sun itself. Ra sails the sky by day and fights the chaos serpent by night to be reborn every dawn, and later theology simply merges the two gods as Atum-Ra.

A king, murdered and dismembered by his own brother, becomes the ruler of the dead and the standard every dead Egyptian will eventually be judged before. His death mirrors the Nile's flood and the grain's sprouting.

Osiris does not become judge of the dead without her. She gathers every scattered piece of him, revives him by magic long enough to conceive Horus, then raises their son in hiding. Watch what she does next carry forward.

Someone has to write down the verdict. The scribe of the gods records it when a heart is weighed, mediates the gods' disputes, and later ages fuse him with Hermes as the patron of the whole hidden tradition.

The standard the heart is weighed against is not a rule but a goddess: truth, order and balance in a single feather. A heart light with a life of maat is the only kind that passes.

Not a book at all but a repertoire of roughly two hundred spells, chosen and afforded piece by piece, meant to get the dead safely past exactly the judgment the last four stops have been building toward.

End where the sun and the dead both travel: the underworld of trials and gates, culminating in the hall where the heart is weighed. Everyone and everything on this trail meets here.