Nefertem nfr-tm

Some theology you have to be told. This one you can go and watch.

A blue lotus opens in the morning and closes at dusk. It does this on a pond, in front of anybody, every day. And on the first morning of the world — before there was a world to have mornings — a lotus opened on the surface of the water and the sun came out of it.

That flower is Nefertem.

The Egyptians used him as a way of saying "get up"

The line I like best about him is not a myth. It is an instruction, carved inside a pyramid, addressed to a dead king:

Rise like Nefer-Tmu from the lotus to the nostrils of Ra, and come forth on the horizon every day.

That is Old Kingdom — one of the oldest religious texts that exists — and it contains the whole idea in one sentence. The flower opens. The sun comes out. The dead king does the same thing, on the same schedule, forever.

Note to the nostrils of Ra. The lotus is not just where the sun appeared; it is what the sun smelled. The blue lotus is strongly scented, and Egyptian art is full of people holding one to their nose. So the god is a flower held up to the face of the sun, and the dead man is being told to be that flower.

Third in the family at Memphis

He is the third member of the Memphite triad, and it is a strange group.

Ptah is the craftsman — the one who makes things, patron of sculptors and metalworkers, a god of workshops.

Sekhmet is the lioness — plague, fury, the burning heat of the sun, the goddess who nearly destroyed humanity and had to be tricked into stopping with beer dyed red.

And Nefertem is a flower.

A craftsman, a lioness and a lotus. It does not resolve into a scheme, and I suspect that is because it was not designed as one — it is three cults that happened to be in the same city, assembled into a family because that is how Egyptian cities organised their gods.

Which lioness is his mother

Even the family has a loose end.

He is called the son of Sekhet — Sekhmet — or of Bast, and the source does not choose. What it does do is distinguish the two by the kind of heat they are: Bast is the gentle and fructifying warmth of the sun, as opposed to the heat that Sekhmet personifies.

Two cat-goddesses, two kinds of sunlight, and a child who personifies "some form of the sun's heat" himself. Whichever mother you pick, he is the mild end of something dangerous.

A god you meet in a drawer

Here is a fact about him that I think is more revealing than the theology.

He is usually shown as a man with a cluster of lotus flowers on his head — sometimes lion-headed, which keeps the family resemblance — and in the little glazed faience figures of him, which are so common, he stands on the back of a lion.

So common. Like the scarab, he is a god most people encountered not as a temple statue but as a small blue object you could hold in your hand. Museums have drawers of them. They were amulets, worn and carried and buried with people, and they are the mass-market end of Egyptian religion.

The state cult of a triad at Memphis is one thing. A cheap glazed charm of the sun coming out of a flower, in somebody's pocket, is a different and probably better index of what a god actually meant.

He was nearly lost to his own footnote

One last thing, in the interest of showing the workings.

Nefertem also sits in the hall of judgment as the thirty-fourth of the forty-two assessors — the gods the dead address one at a time, denying a specific sin to each. His line names his city: Hail, Nefer-Tmu, coming forth from Memphis, I have not harmed, I have not done evil.

For eleven rounds of work on this reference, that was the only thing recorded about him. The page said "the 34th assessor," graded him as a name in a list, and pointed the main entry at it.

Which was accurate, and left out the lotus, the pyramid, the triad, the two mothers and the drawer full of amulets. It is a good reminder of how a cataloguing system can be entirely correct and still lose the god.