In the beginning, according to the priests of Heliopolis — the city of the sun, the most ancient and authoritative theological center of all of Egypt — there was only Atum, the self-created god who rose from the primordial waters of Nun and stood on the first mound of earth that emerged from the endless ocean of chaos. Atum was complete in himself, male and female simultaneously, the totality of existence condensed into a single divine being standing on the first solid ground in a universe that had not yet decided what it was going to be. From this completeness he produced the first two beings in the world that were separate from himself: Shu, the god of air and light, and Tefnut, the goddess of moisture and the rain that falls at the edge of the desert where the dry world and the wet world negotiate their boundary. He breathed them into existence — some texts say he sneezed Shu and spat Tefnut, which tells you something about the Egyptian theological tradition's willingness to be precise about creation even when precision requires a certain undignified honesty about the mechanics involved. They were the first pair. The first relationship. The first moment in which existence was shared rather than solitary.
Shu and Tefnut were inseparable from the moment of their creation, and this inseparability was not merely a family bond but a cosmological necessity — the two of them together constituted the atmosphere, the layer of existence between the earth and the sky that makes life on the earth possible. Shu was the dry air, the invisible structural element, the space in which things could exist without touching each other. Tefnut was the moisture in that air, the capacity of the atmosphere to hold water and release it as rain, the element that made the difference between a desert and a coast. Without Shu, Tefnut had no medium to inhabit. Without Tefnut, Shu was an empty and uninhabitable dryness. Together they were the world's breath — the first thing that made the gap between the ocean below and the sky above into a place where something could live.
The two figures in this piece are Shu and Tefnut as the sea found them — made of the sand and coral of the Egyptian coast, the material of the world at the boundary between the desert and the Mediterranean where their myth was first told and their temples first built. The tall spiral figure is Shu — the upward reach of air, the column that holds the sky at its necessary distance from the earth, the structure that makes breathing possible. He is twisted because air is always in motion, always finding the path between the things that would otherwise press together and crush the space between them. The shorter rounded figure beside him is Tefnut — lower to the ground, closer to the water, her body formed around the large spiral shell that is her voice: the sound of moisture moving through air, the sound the coast makes when the wind comes off the sea and carries the water inland and the desert receives it and becomes, for a brief season, something that can sustain life.
The rectangular resin base engraved with the medusa and the octopus is the floor of the temple at Heliopolis — the original sanctuary where the priests of Ra maintained the theological tradition that produced Shu and Tefnut and all the gods that came after them. But it is also the floor of the sea, because the temple at Heliopolis sat at the edge of the world that the Egyptians knew, and beyond that edge was the Mediterranean, and in the Mediterranean the same air and moisture that Shu and Tefnut embodied moved across the water and made the sailing possible and the fishing possible and the coastal life possible that connected Egypt to every other civilization of the ancient world. The medusa and the octopus in the resin are the creatures of that coastal boundary — the animals that live in the space between the known and the unknown, the boundary creatures that Tefnut, goddess of the coast's moisture, would have recognized as her own.
There is a myth within the Tefnut cycle that is less told but more revealing than the creation story: at one point, Tefnut left Egypt. She was offended — by Atum, by Ra, by the arrangement of divine power that had been established after her creation — and she departed to Nubia in the form of a lioness and stayed there, refusing to return, and while she was gone the moisture left Egypt with her. The Nile's floods diminished. The crops failed. The air became so dry that breathing itself became difficult, and the land that depended on the balance between Shu's dry air and Tefnut's moisture discovered, in her absence, that it had never understood how necessary she was until she was gone. It took Thoth himself, the god of wisdom, disguised as a baboon, to travel to Nubia and persuade her to return — telling her stories, making her laugh, reminding her of what her presence meant to the world she had left behind. She returned. The floods came back. The two figures stand together again on the coastal sand, as they have always stood, because the world is only habitable when both of them are present.
"Atum created by his own power, spitting out Shu and Tefnut. They were reared by the Eye of Nun which followed after them, and after a long time they brought Ra-Atum his Eye."
— Pyramid Texts, Utterance 600, c. 2400 B.C.
Artist's Note
I placed these two figures on the beach sand with the rectangular base between them and understood immediately that I had built a pair — that the tall spiral and the shorter rounded form were in conversation with each other in the way that air and moisture are always in conversation, each one defining what the other is by being what the other is not. The shell at Tefnut's base is the sound of the coast — the specific frequency of moisture moving through air that you hear when you hold a shell to your ear, which is not the sound of the ocean but the sound of your own breath amplified by the chamber that the sea built. I built the chamber. The breath was already there.
At CuepoxyGift, the most complete pieces are the ones that come in pairs. "The Children of Tefnut" is for those who understand that the world is held together not by a single force but by two forces in balance — and that when one of them leaves, the other must go find it and tell it stories until it agrees to come home.
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A Private Collection Artwork
If this story has moved you and the beauty of this piece has stirred something deep within, you should know that "The Children of Tefnut" is part of the artist's private collection and is not currently available for sale.
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— ICuesta, Artist | CuepoxyGift