Hehu ḥḥw

Overview

Hehu is the god of an uncountable quantity.

Brugsch connected the name to heh, "the word which indicates an undefined and unlimited number," and noted that "when applied to time the idea suggested is 'millions of years', and Heh is equivalent to the Greek αἰών" [budge-1904].

So the third god of the Ogdoad is a number too large to state. Not eternity as a philosophical condition — eternity as an arithmetic failure, the point at which counting stops being possible.

Attestation history

Named third among the eight gods of Khemennu [budge-1904].

Budge opens honestly: "The characteristics of the second pair of gods, Hehu and Hehut, are not easy to determine" [budge-1904].

Three readings are on the table in the sources here, and they do not agree:

1. Fire. Lanzone takes Hehu and Hehut as "personifications of male and female elements of fire" [budge-1904]. 2. Boundless number and time. Brugsch's heh / αἰών reading, above. 3. Air. Brugsch also records passages naming a god Heh "who seems to be a personification of the atmosphere which exists between heaven and earth, and to be identical with Shu" [budge-1904] — and went as far as comparing his function to Aion, Eros and Pneuma in Greek philosophy.

Budge reports all three without choosing. This entry does the same.

A scene. Lanzone gives a composition in which Harpocrates sits above a small tree; Hehut kneels on the right supporting the young god's left hand on her outstretched arm, and Hehu kneels on the other side raising or supporting his feet, with the beetle and disk above his head [budge-1904].

What the texts say

A number became a god, and then a posture. If the heh reading is right, Hehu begins as a quantity word. What survives most visibly is the kneeling support pose — the same gesture as shu holding up the sky, and in the Harpocrates scene, two of them holding up a child.

That is the recurring Egyptian idea in yet another form: the thing above is held there, deliberately, by someone kneeling. Here what does the holding is duration.

The Shu overlap is unresolved. If Heh is "the atmosphere between heaven and earth" and "identical with Shu," then either the Ogdoad duplicates a Heliopolitan god or the two systems are describing one figure from different cities. Budge does not address it. See open threads.

Iconography

In one group of the eight primeval gods, Hehu is frog-headed, in one of the forms of Nu; in another group he is serpent-headed [budge-1904].

The familiar Heh of Egyptian art — a kneeling man holding a notched palm rib in each hand, the sign for "years," often with a tadpole and shen ring — is the image most people have seen, and it is not described in the archived source. See open threads before relying on it.

Cult and practice

None recorded in the sources here.