Shu

shoo

egyptian: Šw

Definition

Shu (Egyptian Šw) is the Egyptian god of air — the dry space, sometimes also of sunlight, between the earth and the sky. In the Heliopolitan creation story (the cosmology taught by the priests of Heliopolis, Egyptian Iunu), Shu is the first being made by the creator-god Atum, and with his consort Tefnut he fathers the earth-god Geb and the sky-goddess Nut. His central act is to stand between them and lift Nut up off Geb — the moment that opens the gap of air in which the world can exist, and so makes the star-filled sky-vault possible at all.

In Tradition

Egyptologists treat Shu as the air-god whose separating of sky from earth is one of the foundational events of Egyptian cosmology. The standard handbooks read him as the second member of the Heliopolitan Ennead — the family of nine gods descended from Atum — and as the void of dry air that holds the sky apart from the ground and keeps the primeval waters (Nu) from flooding back over the world.

In Practice

Shu matters wherever the sky-earth frame is in view, because the arched body of Nut studded with stars and decans (the star-groups that mark the hours) only stands because Shu holds her up. In the funerary texts the dead identify with him to gain command of that cosmic space: the Coffin Texts include a widely-copied "spell for becoming Shu," in which the deceased says he is the one "for whom Nut was placed above and Geb under his feet," standing between them. A Coffin Texts spell makes him the ladder of ascent, while the Pyramid Texts have the king climb to the sky "upon the bones of Shu" — the clouds. For an Egyptian-tradition reading, Shu is the air-gap that makes the celestial canopy a place at all, and his name marks a text as cosmological in subject.

Historical Origin

Shu is attested from the Old Kingdom Pyramid Texts (Dynasties 5-6, c. 2400-2300 BCE), where he is invoked in the Atum-Shu-Tefnut theogony and as the "bones of Shu" of the king's ascent. The Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts carry Spell 75, "spell for the soul of Shu," which Faulkner notes survives in twenty-one copies. He is treated in Faulkner, *The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts* (Oxford 1969); Faulkner, *The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts Vol I* (Aris & Phillips 1973); and Wilkinson, *The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt* (2003).

Further Reading

  • R. O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts
  • R. O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Coffin Texts, Volume I
  • Richard H. Wilkinson, The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt