Tefnut- Egyptian GodDeity"Goddess of Moisture"
Also known as: Tfn.t and Tefenet
Description
The first goddess, sneezed or spat into existence by Atum at the beginning of time, moisture itself given form. When Tefnut quarreled with Ra and fled to Nubia, she took the rain with her, and Egypt parched to dust until Thoth went south and talked the angry lioness home.
Mythology & Lore
From the Creator's Mouth
Tefnut and her twin Shu were the first beings Atum created. He stood alone on the Benben in the primordial waters and produced them from his own body. The Pyramid Texts say he sneezed them forth. The Papyrus Bremner-Rhind says he spat. Either way, Shu and Tefnut came first: air and moisture, the two elements without which nothing else could live.
She appeared as a woman or as a lioness wearing the solar disk. From the union of the twin lions, as she and Shu were called, came Geb the earth and Nut the sky, and from them the gods who would fill the world.
The Goddess Who Left
Tefnut quarreled with Ra and fled south to Nubia in her lioness form, taking her moisture with her. Egypt dried. The air cracked. Crops failed and rivers shrank.
Ra sent Thoth to bring her back. In the Demotic Myth of the Eye of the Sun, preserved in Leiden Papyrus I 384, Thoth traveled south and found the furious lioness in the Nubian wilderness. Through flattery and animal fables he coaxed her northward. The raging lioness calmed as she traveled, her fury spent by the time she reached Egypt. The Nile rose. The fields flooded. The world breathed again.