>>510849822The Egyptian god Atum bore a specific and strange characteristic.
He was honored as a sun of night.
>>510850485no
>>510850498>every god is saturnThere has never been any doubt that, as far as the Egyptians themselves were concerned, Atum was held to be one of the forms of the great Sun god Ra.
if Atum was honored as a sun of night, should we not expect that so, also, had been Ra?
This is exactly what we find. In a hymn, Ra is lauded as
>"the one alone ... lying awake while all men lie asleep."And if some find that somewhat ambiguous, it is made clearer in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where the god in question is unambiguously made to state:
>"I am that god Ra who shineth in the night."Besides Atum and Ra, this sun of night was also anthropomorphosed by the Egyptians as the god Osiris.
Originally, Osiris is the nocturnal sun so are we now to assume that Osiris was also a personification of the planet Saturn?
Or how many Egyptian deities are we going to identify with this planet?
it was indicated that Atum should be considered the alter ego of a special aspect of Osiris.
Atum and Osiris are also sometimes amalgamated into one god, more frequently they are portrayed sitting back to back.
So that if Atum, as also Ra, is identifiable as the planet in question, then logic dictates that so must Osiris.
Here, perhaps, I could add that Ra was also worshipped by the same name in Mesopotamia, although his Semitic equivalent, EL, was more popular.
This should not surprise us. Far away in Tahiti, the sun god was also known by the name of Ra.
Thus, in Semitic, Babylon was rendered Bab-EL, which translates as "Gate of EL" The non-Semitic
Kassites, however, seem to have referred to the city as Ka-RA, in which "ra" stood for the
Semitic EL.
I mention this here because even in ancient times, EL (and, by extension, the Chaldean Ra) was known as a representative of the planet Saturn.