mple intensity of his own virile energy. Shu, reduced
to the position of divine son, had in his turn begotten Sibu and Nuit,
the two deities which he separated. Until then he had not been supposed
to have any wife, and he also might have himself brought his own progeny
into being; but lest a power of spontaneous generation equal to that
of the demiurge should be ascribed to him, he was married, and the wife
found for him was Tafnuit, his twin sister, born in the same way as
he was born. This goddess, invented for the occasion, was never fully
alive, and remained, like Nephthys, a theological entity rather than a
real person. The texts describe her as the pale reflex of her husband.

[Illustration: 201.jpg THE TWIN LIONS, SHU AND TAFNUIT. 1]

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a vignette in the papyrus of
Ani in the British Museum, published by Lepage-Renouf in the
_Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology_, vol.
xi., 1889-90, pp. 26-28. The inscription above the lion on
the right reads _safu_, "yesterday;" the other, _duau_,
"this morning."

Together with him she upholds the sky, and every morning receives
the newborn sun as it emerges from the mountain of the east; she is a
lioness when Shu is a lion, a woman when he is a man, a lioness-headed
woman if he is a lion-headed man; she is angry when he is angry,
appeased when he is appeased; she has no sanctuary wherein he is not
worshipped. In short, the pair made one being in two bodies, or, to use
the Egyptian expression, "one soul in its two twin bodies."

Hence we see that the Heliopolitans proclaimed the creation to be the
work of the sun-god, Atumu-Ra, and of the four pairs of deities who were
descended from him. It was really a learned variant of the old doctrine
that the universe was composed of a sky-god, Horus, supported by his
four children and their four pillars: in fact, the four sons of the
Heliopolitan cosmogony, Shu and Sibu, Osiris and Sit, were occasionally
substituted for the four older gods of the "houses" of the world. This
being premised, attention must be given to the important differences
between the two systems. At the outset, instead of appearing
contemporaneously upon the scene, like the four children of Horus, the
four Heliopolitan gods were deduced one from another, and succeeded each
other in the order of their birth. They had not that uniform attribute
of supporter, associating them always with one defini