Renenet rnnt

Ask an English speaker what good fortune means and you will get something about luck — a run of things going your way, a windfall, an escape.

Ask the question in Egyptian and the answer is more specific and much more physical. Renenet is fortune, and what she actually governs is plenty: harvest, provision, nursing, a full granary, a fed child.

Budge, drawing on the Pyramid Texts, calls her "the goddess of plenty, good fortune, and the like." Elsewhere he narrows it to "the goddess of nursing."

Those are not two jobs. They are the same job at two scales. A country's good fortune is a grain store that does not run out; a person's is a mother who does not run dry.

She comes as a pair

Renenet is almost never alone in the texts. She travels with Shai, destiny — and Budge notes the two names "are usually found coupled."

The pairing is neat once you see what each covers. Shai is what was decreed for you: the allotment, fixed, not negotiable. Renenet is what actually arrives: the harvest, the milk, the year turning out well.

Between them they cover the two ways a life can go right or wrong — the terms you were issued, and the supply that shows up.

And both of them, the texts say, are in the hands of Thoth.

That detail keeps striking me. Thoth is the god of writing, counting and measurement — the one who stands at the scales with a pen. So destiny and fortune are not wild forces operating outside the system. They are held by the accountant.

A king says he made her

There is a line of Rameses II's, which Budge takes at second hand and which I would like to see at first: he calls himself "lord of Shai and creator of Renenet."

Not favoured by fortune. Its creator.

For a goddess of harvest and plenty that is a very specific brag, and in a Nile economy it is not entirely empty. A pharaoh who kept the irrigation working, the granaries stocked and the redistribution running genuinely did manufacture the thing Renenet stands for. The claim is theological and it is also an infrastructure boast.

At the weighing of the heart

She turns up somewhere unexpected: standing beside the scales while a dead person's conduct is measured.

Not alone — she is accompanied by Meskhenet, the goddess of the birthing brick. Shai stands separately, near the pillar.

So the judgment scene contains destiny, fortune and the circumstances of a person's birth, all three, watching. Nobody explains it. They do not testify and they are not addressed.

I keep coming back to the composition rather than any text, because the composition is all there is: a life is being assessed in the presence of everything about it that was not chosen.

A caution about her name

I have to be straight about something, because it affects how you should read all of the above.

Budge calls her Renenet, and sometimes Rennut. Modern Egyptology has a goddess called Renenutet — a cobra, goddess of harvest and suckling and the swaddling bands, with a real temple at Medinet Madi and a festival at the start of harvest.

The domains line up almost perfectly. Fortune, plenty, nursing. It would be strange if they were not the same goddess.

But nothing in the sources this reference has read mentions a cobra, or a temple, or a harvest festival. Budge gives a name, a function, a place at the Balance, and an epithet — "Rennut, lady of Aat" — and stops.

So the page here is filed under the modern name on the strength of a resemblance, and says so. If the identification is wrong, the entry is two goddesses stapled together. That is the sort of thing worth flagging loudly rather than smoothing over, and it is the first open thread on her page.

What she is, minimally

Strip out everything unverified and what remains is this.

A goddess of enough. Attested from the Pyramid Texts. Paired with destiny, and held with destiny in the hands of the god of measurement. Claimed as a personal creation by the most self-assured pharaoh who ever lived. Present, without comment, at the judgment of the dead.

That is not a small figure. It is just a poorly lit one.