Mut mwt

Her name is not a name. It is the Egyptian word for mother — the ordinary one, the one you would use about your own.

Not a mother-goddess who happens to be called something that means mother. The word itself, standing up and being a person. Imagine a goddess in English called Mother, spelled and pronounced exactly like the noun, and you have the effect.

And she was never born

Budge records one thing about her that stops you.

She is, he says, "one of the very few goddesses of whom it is declared that she was never born" — that is, self-produced.

So: a deity called Mother who does not have one.

I do not think that is a joke, and I do not think it is carelessness. Egyptian theology keeps walking straight into the problem of regress — where did the first thing come from — and it keeps answering the same way, by having something make itself. Atum does it. Khepri does it and says so out loud. Here the move is applied to the word mother, which is precisely the word that starts the regress in the first place. Every mother had a mother. Except one.

Three different marriages

Follow her across the sources and she keeps being paired with whoever the important god of the moment is.

First, Budge says, she "was originally the female counterpart of Nu" — the primeval water. That places her, in her oldest layer, before the world.

Then, in a papyrus written under Seti I around 1370 BCE, she is identified with Nut, the sky, and made the counterpart of Geb, the earth.

Finally, at Thebes, she is the wife of Amun, the greatest god in Egypt.

Three pairings across two thousand years, and no sign of anybody minding.

Again, I think this follows from the name rather than from confusion. Mother is a role. Roles get reassigned. A goddess whose name is a common noun can be attached wherever a mother is required, and Egypt required one in several places.

There is a tidy demonstration of this. Budge says the attributes of Naunet — the female counterpart of Nu in the Hermopolitan eight — were taken over in later times by Hathor, Mut and Neith. So Mut is on the receiving end of that transfer. And Mut is also the goddess who was originally the counterpart of Nu. She is on both sides of her own inheritance.

The silence in the Book of the Dead

Here is a genuinely strange fact, and it is the kind that only turns up if you go looking.

Mut is the consort of the state god of the New Kingdom. Her precinct at Karnak is one of the largest temple enclosures ever built. Queens are shown wearing her headdress. Her name is on everything.

And in the entire Theban recension of the Book of the Dead she is mentioned once.

One passage, in a hymn to Osiris, where the deceased says: the goddess Mut, thy mother, who gave birth to the gods, brought thee forth as the first-born of five gods, and created thy beauties and fashioned thy members.

That is all.

Which tells you what kind of goddess she actually was. Egyptian religion had two enormous domains — the state cult, with its temples and processions and royal patronage, and the funerary literature, which is where most people's actual hopes went. Mut is overwhelmingly in the first and almost absent from the second. She belonged to Egypt's public life, not to its dying.

You can stand in her enclosure today and it is vast. You could read the whole Book of the Dead and barely notice her.

The bird on her head

Her standard image is a woman wearing a vulture headdress — the whole bird worn as a cap, wings folded down the sides of the hair — usually with the Double Crown of Upper and Lower Egypt on top of that.

Both are borrowed. The vulture cap is Nekhbet's emblem, the southern goddess of the Two Ladies; it became the general shorthand for royal womanhood, and Mut wears it because she is the queen of the gods, not because she is a bird.

The Double Crown is the pharaoh's. On a goddess it reads as a claim: this is the one who rules alongside.

The result is that she does not look like a nature deity at all. Sekhmet is unmistakably a lioness, Hathor is unmistakably a cow. Mut looks like a queen — and queens are exactly what she was the model for.

The lake shaped like a moon

One last thing, and it complicates the picture in a way I like.

Her precinct at Karnak has a crescent-shaped sacred lake, wrapped around the temple. Lakes of that shape belong to a particular class of goddess: the lioness ones, the dangerous ones, the ones who have to be cooled down. And archaeologists digging there found hundreds of statues of Sekhmet — the lioness of plague and fury.

She is also shown lioness-headed herself.

So the goddess called Mother, wearing a queen's crown, sitting in the most respectable position in Egyptian religion, keeps a lion somewhere in the building. Which is, on reflection, not an unfamiliar arrangement.