The Book of the Heavenly Cow

The Book of the Heavenly Cow is an Egyptian mythological text, preserved in the tombs of several New Kingdom pharaohs (including Tutankhamun and Seti I), that explains how the sun god Ra came to withdraw from the earth and how humanity was first punished and then spared. It is the nearest Egyptian equivalent to a "fall" or a world-ending myth, though its subject is the end of the gods' direct rule, not of the world.

The rebellion

The text opens in a time when Ra, grown old and frail, ruled on earth as king. Humanity began to whisper rebellion against him. Ra called the other gods (Nun, Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Hathor) to council and, on their advice, sent the goddess Hathor (or Sekhmet) in the form of the "Eye of Ra" to destroy the rebels. She went forth as a lioness and slaughtered humanity; the fields ran red.

The reprieve

Ra relented and resolved to save the remnant of humanity from total destruction. He ordered the fields dyed with red ochre and beer brewed in vast quantities, so that when the goddess returned at dawn, drunk on the crimson flood (mistaking it for blood), she became placated and ceased the killing. Humanity thus survived, but diminished and under a sentence: Ra declared he would no longer judge them directly and would withdraw.

The ascent

Ra then had Nut, the sky goddess, take the form of a cow, and he ascended onto her back, rising from the earth into the sky, where he would travel as the sun. He placed the stars around him and promised the righteous dead a place among them. The text explains, in this way, why the gods are no longer physically present on earth, why humans are mortal, and why the sun crosses the sky. It is a myth of the distance of the divine, not of the end of the cosmos.

Why it is eschatological

The Book of the Heavenly Cow is included here because it contains, in miniature, the logic of an end-and-aftermath: a rebellion, a destructive flood of blood, a saved remnant, and a transformed world in which the divine has withdrawn. It is the Egyptian answer to the question other cultures answered with floods and fires: why is the world no longer as it was at the beginning? For Egypt, the answer is not a coming cataclysm but a past withdrawal, after which the cosmos runs on without its founder present.

The tomb context carries the doctrine. The text appears in the burial chambers of Seti I (KV17), Ramesses II, Ramesses III and Ramesses VI, kings who were about to make the same journey Ra made: withdrawal from the world, ascent to the sky. The king identifies with Ra, and the apocalypse doubles as his model for passage. As a theodicy it answers three questions at once: why do the gods not live among us, because humanity plotted against Ra; why do people die, because the gods withdrew; why does the world stay dangerous, because the Eye of Ra still walks it, sometimes as Hathor, sometimes as Sekhmet, sometimes as the cobra on the king's brow.